Half of north-west Surrey belongs to the soldiers. Chobham Common, Bagshot Heath, Chobham Ridges, Bisley, Pirbright, York Town, and Camberley contain among them pretty nearly all the camps, colleges, training grounds, and rifle-ranges that do not belong to Aldershot over the Hampshire border. The whole aspect of the country is military; rural outlandishness has been drilled into rigidity and pattern. The roads run as straight as if the Romans had driven them—and, indeed, some of them in the neighbourhood are Roman roads; the face of the hills and heather commons is scored with roads like figures of Euclid, triangles, oblongs, radii, rhomboids, every kind of road which enables you to go from one place to another in the shortest space of time possible; which, for that matter, is a thing you frequently wish to do. Nobody wants to linger on a road as straight as a gunshot.
Camberley, perhaps, is as good a centre as any for exploring this part of Surrey; but the border of the county is intersected with such a network of railways that it is easy to get to Bagshot or Camberley or Frimley from almost anywhere and to join the railway again where you please. One of the best walks is from Chertsey over Chobham Common to Windlesham and Bagshot, and then over Chobham Ridges down into Frimley. Bisley is most easily visited from the railway, as thousands visit it—or rather the rifle range—every July.
Chobham Common is at its best in July, when the heather is out. But it has a day in May, under a hot sun, which is, in some ways, more distinct. The scent and the glow of the heather belong to other Surrey hills; but Chobham Common has its own features of sandy hillocks topped by clumps of pines, which set an austere gauntness on the place unlike the rolling flanks and ridges by Frensham and Hindhead. In May the heather is dark and dry; there are sparse patches of gorse scattered about the slopes, and looking across at a group of pines edging the horizon you sometimes get a setting of black, yellow, and blue, which belongs peculiarly to this corner of Surrey. Chobham Common and its heather have often been compared to Scotland, and I can never catch the likeness. The heather is there, and the scattered pines like some of the Lowlands; but the wind is a southern wind, and never blows like Stevenson's wind on the moors "as it blows in a ship's rigging, hard and cold and pure." Beyond all, there is nowhere the Scottish horizon of hills.
Windlesham lies on the western edge of the Common, and straggles over a dozen short, crooked roads—an oasis among parallelograms. Once it had a reputation for growing bog-myrtle, as you may learn from Aubrey:—
"In this Parish, at Light-Water-Moor, grows great store of a plant, about a foot and a half high, called by the inhabitants Gole, but the true Name is Gale; it has a very grateful smell, like a Mixture of Bays and Myrtle, and in Latin it is called Myrtus Brabantica; it grows also in several places of this healthy Country, and is used to be put in their Chests among their Linnen."
Perhaps it may still be put there. Such a plant must have been a favourite with an excellent housewife buried in the churchyard, whose epitaph attracts wandering readers:—
She was, but words are wanting to say "What,"
Think what a wife should be, and she was "That."
If Aubrey were making another perambulation of Surrey to-day, he would forget the Windlesham bog-myrtle when he had seen the Bagshot rhododendrons. To imagine Bagshot without rhododendrons is to think of Mitcham without lavender, Epsom without salts, Farnham without hops. The other name that goes naturally with rhododendrons is Waterer, and the Waterer nurseries have the magic of gardens of fairy tales. Even in winter, on a sunny day, an Italian air blows through those tall thuias and cypresses, down those dark aisles of shining green. But in May and June, when the rhododendrons glow from pearl to crimson, and the azaleas light long stretches of flaming chrome and orange, the gardens take a glory that belongs to no other flowers.
In the days of the stage-coach Bagshot was a thriving village with an inn, perhaps the King's Arms of to-day, where thirty coaches a day changed horses. That rich traffic drew the vultures of the road, and Bagshot Heath was one of the most dreaded stretches of highway in England. Dick Turpin is said to have used the King's Arms and the Golden Farmer further down the road; it was the Golden Farmer in his day, and an unimaginative age has turned the farmer from Golden into Jolly. It is a pity, for "Jolly Farmer" means no more than White Lion or a dozen other names, but to "Golden Farmer" there belongs a story. There was a highwayman of Bagshot Heath who never would rob a purse of banknotes; he would touch nothing but gold. At Frimley at the same time lived a farmer, who never paid his debts in anything but gold. The golden farmer one day was recognised as the golden highwayman, and the inn stands close by the spot where they hanged him in chains.
Bagshot has had dealings with Stuart and other princes hunting the deer and putting up at the inns. Both the Charleses used to hunt in Bagshot Park. Once there was a pretty princes' quarrel. It was at one of the Bagshot inns that the Duke of Buckingham, at the height of his wild career, had the coolness to turn Prince Rupert's horses out of the stables and put in his own. Rupert complained to the King, and the Duke of York backed him; but Charles decided for Buckingham. Twenty years or so later, John Evelyn was at a Bagshot inn with Pepys, and went to call on a Mrs. Graham at her house in Bagshot Park. It was "very commodious and well-furnished, as she was an excellent housewife, a prudent and virtuous lady." She begged him to stay to dinner and sleep the night; she told him all about her children—how the eldest was ill with the small-pox but going on pretty well, and the others running about among infected people so as to catch the disease and get it over while they were young. Evelyn quite approved; he had had small-pox in his own family, and knew something about it.