There is no better way of roaming through north-west Surrey than to take the train to Virginia Water station, which is as near as you can get to the county boundary by the railway, and then to set out almost along the boundary northwards till the Thames turns the road south again at Runemede. Virginia Water itself lies more than a mile from the station, and is not at its best on Saturdays and Sundays. On quieter week days there is no lovelier stretch of woodland lake-water. It is, of course, not a natural sheet, but its designer had skill enough to know what would not look unnatural. He was Thomas Sandby, Royal Academician and Deputy-Ranger of Windsor Park, and one of the great landscape gardeners of Georgian days. He planned the lake for the Duke of Cumberland, Ranger of Windsor Park after Culloden, and he made it by choking back a number of small streams that trickled through a reedy marsh, and so spreading a single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December or June, when the green leaf is high on the beeches or the copper leaf strewn below them, and in any month of the year the thick, deep moss of the open glades is a carpet to delight to walk upon. But not all Sandby's landscape gardening has an equal charm. The cascade which drains the outflow of the water is a pretentious pile which no doubt filled the eye of the royal Ranger, and perhaps would have pleased John Evelyn, but it suits a simpler taste very little. But "the ruins"—it is their vague and proper name—are worse. Once, on the southern shore, stood a classical temple. It was the genuine article; the pillars were brought direct from Tripoli; the Ranger of the day (for they were added after the Cumberland era) liked to have them there, and thought that the beauty of English woodlands was enhanced by a pagan altar and Greek porticoes. Northern rains and northern ivy have done their work, and "the ruins" remain—capitals, columns, and pedestals shouting a thousand Cockney scribbles, tumbled headlong under laurel and yew.
Like other large stretches of Surrey water, the lake has become the home of wildfowl once passing from the stage of rarity to extinction, but now increasing and more often seen. The reeds that line parts of the shore are the happy homes of coots and water hens, but mallards and ducks are common on the water, and I have watched more than one pair of great grebes, conspicuous on the level lake with their gleaming necks and chestnut ruffs, swimming and diving close in the shore.
Padlocked gates prevent you from walking precisely as you please from the north-east of the lake through Windsor Park, and it is not impossible to miss the right path through the trees. But if you are walking north from the lake it is worth while to make your way to the Cumberland obelisk—a gaunt column which the clustering ivy and shrubs at its base will some day topple down among the grass and heather—and to reach the Bishop's Gate through the single narrow stretch of Windsor Great Park that lies in Surrey. In winter, pheasants crouch under the brushwood or splutter through the trees; in summer the rhododendrons scent and empurple the woodland rides.
Below Bishop's Gate, which is a yard or two over the Berkshire border, lies the little hamlet of the same name where Shelley, the year before his marriage to Mary Godwin, spent a happy summer and wrote "Alastor." He was supposed to be dying of consumption, and was to live as much as he could in the open air; and from Bishop's Gate he began an expedition up the Thames, which took a fortnight of the warm July of 1815. He began "Alastor" in the glades of Windsor Park in the summer, and that strange and brooding poem is full of the splendour of the Windsor forest. The poet, "led by love, or dream, or God," sought the "dearest haunt" of Nature:—
"More dark
And dark the shades accumulate. The oak,
Expanding its immense and knotty arms,
Embraces the light beech. The pyramids
Of the tall cedar overarching frame
Most solemn domes within, and far below,
Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
The ash and the acacia floating hang
Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed
In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,
Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around
The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes,
With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,
These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs
Uniting their close union; the woven leaves
Make net-work of the dark blue light of day,
And the night's noontide clearness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns
Beneath these canopies extend their swells,
Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms
Minute yet beautiful."
This is a corner of Surrey, indeed, which is full of links with writers and poets. Hardly a mile to the east of Bishop's Gate is Englefield Green, a high and breezy common surrounded by delightful old houses. Poor "Perdita," Mrs. Robinson, died in one of them, deserted and forgotten by the Prince for whom she had thought her name well lost.
To a later generation Englefield became familiar, if unvisited, through Mrs. Oliphant's Neighbours on the Green. Two of her friends in real life who lived there were Richard Holt Hutton, essayist and theologian, and one of the greatest of English journalists; and Sir George Chesney, author of The Battle of Dorking, whom we are to meet on the scene of one of his hitherto bloodless battlefields. Other neighbours, perhaps even better known, survive in the half-fiction of Mrs. Oliphant's pages.
But the most enthusiastic admirer of the neighbourhood was a poet, Sir John Denham. What would the author of the poem in praise of Cooper's Hill say to some of the buildings which crown that "airy mountain" to-day? For Englefield Green stands on Cooper's Hill as Sir John saw it, and to him the common must have been part of the hill itself. To us Cooper's Hill has become less a hill than a college, and will become a hill again. The buildings of the College, started with the brightest hopes to provide a special education for the Indian Civil Service in 1870, and closed as a failure in 1905, stand untenanted and unhappy, fenced about with placards. There is no building quite so depressing as an empty school.
On a day of light mists one may see the view from the hill as Denham knew it, and as it was seen and known by Surrey nobles long before his day. For below the hill lies Runemede, and it needs the filmy gauze of mist to spread the meadows and trees of the Thames banks into a green carpet, untouched with the mark of the builder and the roadmaker. But Runemede is not seen best from the hill. Best, I think, you can measure that broad green floor by coming on it as King John might have come had he ridden or rowed from Windsor. Then it stretches suddenly before you, a level plain of springing grass, a single rich hayfield in June, as perhaps John looked out over it on the day he sealed the Charter. The meadow and the river can have changed little in seven hundred years, and perhaps the farming of the meadow is not wholly different. But I shall always remember the shock with which once I came upon Runemede on an open day in March, when the farmers' men were out over all the fields with the horses and the farm machinery. Runemede was being rolled.
South of that great meadow, Egham stands opposite Staines, separated by the river and a mile of dull road. Egham may have once had attractions, but they have nearly all disappeared. Nothing old or quiet could live near the Holloway College. A building of such appalling pretensions sears its neighbourhood like a hot iron. The town takes colour from its flamboyant arrogance; the local builder studs his rough-cast with glass, red and green and blue. Two old almshouses stand by the main street of the town; one, a lowly set of cottage rooms, built by Sir John Denham in 1624, crouches quietly apart; the other, two hundred years younger, but still good Georgian brick, stands behind a gateway in grounds which, when I saw them last, were a miracle of untidiness. The almshouses, were rebuilt in 1828, when perhaps the grass round them was mown also.