A glance at the accompanying chart might give the impression of this
being a somewhat complicated route; but as a matter of fact, although
the outward journey is almost wholly off the high roads, there should
be no difficulty in finding the way to Burnham Beeches along this
itinerary. The distance to be covered between Egham and Hounslow is,
allowing for all possible deviations for exploring, thirty-five miles.
Egham is selected solely as a convenient starting-point whence to reach
the riverside road to Old Windsor, and by no means for its own sake;
for the half-mile or so of high road between the railway station and
the point where we turn sharply to the left for Old Windsor is probably
the vilest piece of macadam in the Home Counties; if, indeed, the
mile-long continuation of it on to Staines is not even worse. The river
road is fortunately altogether different, being a long sandy stretch
passing through the level of Runnymede, and after the first half-mile
affording delightful views of the Thames. To the left hand rises the
wooded height of Cooper’s Hill from the water meadows, and over to
the right is Magna Charta Island. Where the sandy road dips down to
the water just before reaching the village of Old Windsor, notice
that old-world inn, the “Bells of Ouseley,” with its sign, displaying
five bells, picturesquely swinging from an ancient elm. This sign is a
puzzle to the wayfarer. It derives from the once-famous bells in the
tower of the long-vanished Osney Abbey at Oxford, celebrated for their
sweet tones.
[Illustration: Map—EGHAM to HOUNSLOW]
A choice of roads here confronts the tourist. The pleasantest way to
Old Windsor is by the easily rideable towing-path for three-quarters
of a mile, bringing one to a narrow lane, looking like a private road,
leading to past the little church of that village. Old Windsor Church
is a prettily situated building, itself of little interest, although
there may be those who will find food for reflection in a sight of the
last resting-place of “Perdita” Robinson, the discarded early favourite
of the “First Gentleman in Europe.” Her career can at least serve to
point a moral, if it cannot adorn a tale. “Perdita” died December 26th,
1800; Florizel lived and flourished for close upon thirty years longer.
Grown old, wheezy, and corpulent, drawn about Windsor Great Park in a
pony-carriage in his last days, and morosely shunning the sight of his
fellow-creatures, the once gay Florizel died in 1830, as George the
Fourth. _He_ lies in the Royal Vault, but his pretty wanton’s bones
moulder, all but forgotten, near the Thames-side towing-path.
Leaving Old Windsor Church behind, the second turning to the right
leads into Windsor town. But instead of making for the Royal Borough,
we will take the right-hand fork, duly sign-posted, and crossing the
Thames by the Albert Bridge, enter Buckinghamshire. In half a mile’s
run by the river bank, Datchet is reached by turning to the right
and so over the level crossing by Datchet railway station. This is a
very much rebuilt village, which in another hundred years (when its
modern Elizabethan villas have weathered a little) will begin to be
picturesque.
We now take the left-hand road for the old-fashioned hamlet of
Upton, the mother parish of Slough, that modern suburban town, the
“Sloughforwindsor,” familiar to travellers on the Great Western
Railway. It may, perhaps, be remembered that the Slough people, anxious
at one and the same time to show their loyalty and to suppress the
unlovely name of their town, proposed a few years since to change its
title to “Upton Royal,” but nothing came of the project.
Upton, so near that populous place, is singularly retired. It has an
ancient and highly interesting Norman and Early English village church,
which shares with that of Stoke Poges the honour of being the scene of
Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”; but the tourist who follows
the wheelmarks of the present writer will doubtless, like him and the
vast majority of visitors to both places, prefer to think Stoke Poges
churchyard the original. In any case, and however well its “ivied
tower” answers to the description in the poem, it would be impossible
nowadays to deprive Stoke of its fame.
Let not the cyclist by any means omit to look for a singularly puzzling
epitaph on a broken flat stone on the north side of the church, whose
meaning has been utterly obscured by lapse of time. It runs thus:—
Here Lies the Body of
SARAH BRAMSTONE,
of Eton, Spinster; a person who dared
to be just in the Reign of
George the Second.
* * * * *
Obijt Jan. ye 30th, 1765. Ætat 77.
This is, indeed, strange, for it is impossible to believe that law
and order were so hard to preserve in the days of the second George
that for a person to “dare to be just” should be so notable a thing. A
popular hymn urges us to “dare to be a Daniel,” but what lions lurked
in the narrow path that Sarah Bramstone trod? It must be confessed that
this sorely piques the curiosity. We know what befell Solomon, Julius
Cæsar, William the Conqueror, and hundreds of other highly important
historical characters, and know also that even they did not always dare
so much; but we shall never know the secret of this tombstone.
Notice, also, on the north side of the church the white marble tomb of
George Fordham, the jockey, who died, aged fifty, in 1887, with the
odd and significant quotation, “’Tis the pace that kills.” Those who
did not know the amiable George might well take that as an aspersion
upon his character; but Fordham was the gentlest of jocks and a model
husband and father, and this is but a singularly unhappy phrase in such
a connection.
Leaving Upton Church, we take a road that leads from opposite it to
George Green, crossing the old Bath road, and over the Great Western
Railway. A direct road runs thence to Langley Park, through whose
recesses there is an entirely unhindered right of way for self and
cycle. Black Park is alone worth the ride; a vast stretch of solemn
pine-woods, where the breezes die away in hollow murmurs, or sink to
absolute silences amid the clustered giant trunks. The sunlight filters
down in scanty patches to the carpeting of pine needles, on whose
yielding bed you walk with silent footsteps, save for the occasional
breaking of a dry twig, whose destruction sounds with startling
distinctness in this solitude. Few ever come to these woodlands, and it
is likely enough that you will have them all to yourself, excepting,
indeed, the wood-pigeons, breaking now and again into a weird chorus of
cooing.
But its great lake of about thirty acres is, perhaps, the chief
feature of Black Park. Seated by its shore, with the close ranks of
the great solemn pines overhanging the sullen water, you see with what
appropriateness the park is named. It is a kind of place where you
can readily imagine yourself a Robinson Crusoe. Little sandy beaches
run out into the water; the inky recesses of the woods look as though
they awaited the explorer to come and discover the savages and the big
game that doubtless lie hidden there; and, in fact, all you want, to
be completely happy, is a raft, a rifle, a suit of goat-skins, a Man
Friday, and some enemies to shoot at. It is certainly a spot R. L.
Stevenson would have revelled in.
If it were not that Burnham Beeches have to be reached, nothing could
be more delightful than to stay here the afternoon, taking tea,
perhaps, at the “Plough” at Wexham Street (which must not be confounded
with Wexham village). Leaving the lake at the end where it borders the
road, turn to the right. In half a mile you reach the pretty hamlet
and turn left, then right, then left again. This brings one into the
broad road leading from Wexham village to Farnham Royal and Burnham. On
reaching this road (which runs right and left), instead of crossing it,
turn to the right, and then to the left once more. This brings us into
a tree-shaded lane, which dips downwards. On the right, on the edge
of the meadow overlooking this lane, a momentary glimpse of a solemn,
mausoleum-like monument is caught. This sufficiently notifies the fact
that we are at Stoke Poges, for it is the memorial erected to the poet
Gray by a descendant of William Penn, who once resided at Stoke Park.
The park, of which the great, odd-looking mansion may be seen from
Stoke Poges churchyard, has belonged to men of light and leading. It is
now the residence of Mr. Bryant, of Bryant & May, who purchased it of
Mr. Jeremiah Colman, of Colman’s Mustard.
The melancholy looking monument, looking like a tea-caddy or
biscuit-box on a pedestal, bears verses from Gray’s mournful muse—from
the “Elegy,” and from the “Lines on a Distant Prospect of Eton
College.” Having inspected this, walk a few yards down the lane. Here
a white gate on the right, with an old lodge absolutely covered from
the ground to the topmost bricks of the chimneys with ivy, appears
to lead into the park. This is, however, the entrance to Stoke Poges
churchyard. Leaving the cycle here, by the cottage fence, we walk to
this place of pilgrimage through a very beautiful modern lych-gate in
carved oak. The spire and “ivy-covered tower” of the church appear
beyond; the whole, strange to say, quite as beautiful as one expects
it to be; with the sole exception that the churchyard is now too large
and too crowded with staring white marble monuments to fully realise
the rural note of the famous poem. But that is a detail. Under the east
window, in the churchyard he has immortalised, Gray is appropriately
laid to rest, in a quiet, unpretending tomb, with his mother and his
aunt.
[Illustration: GRAY’S MONUMENT.]
Thomas Gray, who has come down to us chiefly as the author of the
“Elegy wrote in a Country Churchyard,” as he himself entitles that
famous poem, was born at the close of 1716, the son of Philip and
Dorothy Gray. Philip appears to have been a “law-scrivener,” and
would seem to have always been on the verge of madness. He died when
his son was twenty-five years of age. The poet, educated at Eton and
at Cambridge, weakly all his life, and cursed with a melancholy that
was partly real and partly affected, was the only one of his mother’s
twelve children who survived their infancy. Never more than slenderly
provided with the means of living, he dallied through his fifty-four
years of life with the classics, projecting many things but completing
few. His English poems are very few in number, and like the small total
of his writings, few even of these are more than fragmentary. His
morbid nature may perhaps be guessed from the fact that it was almost
only the death of a relative or friend that would inspire him to write.
Thus the famous Elegy, begun in 1742 and only completed in 1750, owes
its conception and its several slow stages to successive bereavements;
and the “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” originated in the
same doleful manner. Save to scholars, Gray’s whole career and repute
as a poet are comprised within those two poems, both in the very front
rank of English song.
Gray’s muse is unhealthy and ill-assorted with the thought of modern
times. Nor was it much better matched with that of his own. His
physique influenced his temperament; his narrow and inactive life
rendered him morbid, and finally shortened his days. He died in 1771.
It is credibly said that he never in his life received more than one
single payment of forty guineas for literary work. For the “Elegy,” on
which his deathless fame rests, he never received, nor would accept,
any pecuniary remuneration. He allowed Dodsley and the other publishers
to print it, which they did, reaping fortunes thereby. It is, perhaps,
scarce necessary to add that this kind of poet is quite extinct. Gray,
who refused the offer of Poet Laureate on the death of Colley Cibber
in 1757, was of opinion that it was beneath the dignity of a gentleman
to accept payment for his “inventions.” How he would have despised
Tennyson, who could drive a very shrewd bargain with his publishers,
built up a fortune on his writings, and went into the milk trade!
By the way, it is interesting to read a contemporary “review” of the
“Elegy.” Here it is: “An Elegy wrote in a country churchyard, 4to,
Dodsley 6d., seven pages. The excellency of this little piece more than
compensates for its lack of quantity.” Who wrote that “review”? Was it
some draper or grocer, whose objections to short measure were overcome
by the excellence of the goods?
Here, at Stoke, Gray spent his vacations with his mother and his aunt.
His mother died in 1753. She, good soul, thought this rickety son of
hers—as infirm of purpose as he was of body—engaged in reading for
the Law, and went to her grave unconscious of his odes. He loved his
mother, and on the lichened slab that covers the unpretending red brick
altar-tomb in the churchyard you may yet read the epitaph he wrote—“
... beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of Dorothy
Gray, widow, the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom
alone had the misfortune to survive her.”
The “yew tree’s shade” is cast over the south porch from a very ancient
tree of that species, and the scene generally accords well with the
poem. In this connection, as an additional proof that Gray referred
to Stoke Poges, it may be noted that the spire, surmounting “yonder
ivy-mantled tower,” is an addition since his time, being little over
a century old. This would appear to finally dispose of the claims put
forward for Upton Royal by the sticklers for absolute accuracy of
description, who have held that if Gray were writing of Stoke, he would
have written “spire” instead of “tower.”
[Illustration: THE “BICYCLE WINDOW,” STOKE POGES.]
The church is very picturesque, and the interior worth seeing for the
sake of the ancient architecture and for the curious little fragments
of stained glass set in one of the windows, among them one representing
a nude angel, or wingless cherub, with a monastic tonsure, blowing a
trumpet and bestriding a veritable “hobby-horse,” or primitive bicycle.
There is no questioning the antiquity of the fragment, for the date,
1642, appears on another portion of the glass, and so the mystery of
the bicycle is unexplained. Every visitor to Stoke Poges visits Gray’s
tomb, and no less a matter for pilgrimage has the so-called “Bicycle
Window” become of late years. Indeed, to those who have no literary
sympathies, this undoubtedly takes the first rank as an object of
interest.
Having seen everything, we retrace our steps to the road, and, turning
to the left, make for Farnham Royal, where there is a very beautiful
modern church, and in the churchyard an extraordinary monument to a
Mr. Henry Dodd, who died in 1861, “brickmaker and contractor. Began
life as a ploughboy within a mile of St. Paul’s.” On the south side of
the churchyard is the grave of Sarah Hart, victim of George Tawell,
who administered prussic acid to her, in 1845, at Salt Hill. He had
been carrying on an intrigue with the woman and made her an allowance;
but fearing that his wife would hear of the connection, determined
to put her out of the way. Tawell himself lived at Berkhamsted, in
Hertfordshire. His was an evil career. Living in his youth a secret
dissolute life, he had been sent to penal servitude in Australia for
forgery. Released after a time, he amassed a fortune out there in
business, and retired. Dark rumours, however, were current that he
acquired a great part of his fortune by poisoning his partner.
The unhappy woman’s grave is unmarked by any stone, but is the nearest
mound to the door in the churchyard wall. Tawell was the first criminal
arrested through the agency of that then novelty, the electric
telegraph. He rushed off to Slough Station after committing the crime,
and just succeeded in catching the train to Paddington. He was clad in
Quaker dress, and the telegraphist sent a message up to detain “a man
in the garb of a Kwaker,” the original code not containing the letter
Q. He was duly arrested and hanged.
From the church we retrace our steps to the village, and taking the
middle one of three roads, past the ornamental well-house in the centre
of the street, make for that famous woodland, Burnham Beeches, along
a very winding lane, taking every left-hand turning. Along a strip of
common land, bordered by refreshment houses, we come downhill to the
first glade, where the giant beeches crowd together in a dim light. The
purchase of Burnham Beeches, unquestionably the finest piece of natural
woodland in England,—finer than anything in the New Forest or in
Savernake Forest,—was a noble work of the City of London Corporation,
which has thus preserved the spot for ever.
[Illustration: AT BURNHAM BEECHES.]
The peculiarly sturdy, stunted, and fantastically gnarled character of
Burnham Beeches is due to their having been pollarded at some unknown
period. Legends have it that this was done by Cromwell’s soldiers.
The inner recesses are weird enough to suggest warlocks and wizards,
or Puck at the very least, and Queen Mab herself could find no fitter
place wherein to hold her Court than in the crepuscular glades where,
amid that purple shade which is the especial glory of Burnham Beeches,
a chance patch of sunlight falls, more golden by contrast, on the more
than emerald green of the moss, or where the moonbeams filter through
on cloudless nights to light Her Majesty’s midnight masques. I would
not, being no courtier and unequipped with fairy passwords, adventure
alone in the depths of these woodlands at midnight for anything you
could promise me. At midday it is another matter.
It is difficult to decide at what period of the year this spot is most
beautiful. It has one peculiar glory of the summer and another of the
winter, when in the short November and December days the brown leaves
that carpet these alleys give out a mist that mingles strangely with
the coppery glow of the sinking sun. Amid this impressive coloration
the contorted ashen-coloured trunks stand forth strangely ghostlike.
Gray, of course, knew Burnham Beeches very thoroughly. His uncle lived
at Burnham when the poet was a youth, and we find Gray writing to
Walpole in 1737, in a lively manner quite unexpected of him who was
already, in his twenty-first year, the affected prey of melancholy.
But the prig in this precocious young gentleman is distastefully
evident in this otherwise very excellent description. The description
is in fact delightful; only one could wish the writer of it forty-one,
instead of twenty years younger: “My uncle is a great hunter in
imagination; his dogs take up every chair in the house, so I am forced
to stand at the present writing; and though the gout forbids him
galloping after them in the field, yet he continues still to regale
his ears and nose with their comfortable noise and stink. He holds me
mighty cheap, I perceive, for walking when I should ride, and reading
when I should hunt. My comfort amidst all this is, that I have, at the
distance of half a mile through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar
call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no
human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and
precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the
clouds, nor are the declivities so amazing as Dover Cliff; but just
such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture
to climb, and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were
more dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable
beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other
ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds.
At the foot of one of these squats ME (_il penseroso_), and there I
grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive
squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise before he had an Eve;
but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do.”
The “reverend vegetables” phrase has a strangely modern flavour, and
so indeed has this appreciation of the picturesque. Before Gray’s time
scenery was not only unappreciated; it was detested. Dr. Johnson,
who hated hills, was at one with his generation in this respect.
Even Horace Walpole, who ought surely to have known better, calls
hills “mountains,” and shudders at the sight of them. Gray has this
additional title to fame, that he was the first to tour in search
of the picturesque, and, in a sense, invented the taste for it.
Wordsworth, who was but little later than Gray, says, “When I was
young, there were no lakes or mountains.”
But it is quite impossible within these limits to fully describe the
Beeches, or to indicate the route through them. The Corporation has
made a magnificent series of broad drives in every direction, with
splendid surface for cycling; and if the gradients are severe, there
is nothing that cannot, with due care, be coasted. Many picnic parties
come to the Beeches, but they rarely penetrate far into these lovely
woodland glades; leaving the solitudes to the painters, who are always
at work here, producing Academy pictures. Find the Plain, the Ponds,
and Hardicanute’s Moat, away in the recesses of the woods. See “Beauty
and the Beast”; the one being a graceful silver birch, with a gaunt,
knotty, blasted oak standing beside it. For the rest, given a fine day,
be content to lose yourself here, amid the fairyland of immemorial
moss and lusty bracken, and then, when you are tired of it (or, more
likely, when evening is drawing on), inquire of one of the artists who
are painting the sunset the way for Farnham Common and Slough. This
is a fine down-grade road of three and a half miles leading through
Farnham Royal down to Salt Hill, where, turning sharply to the left,
we are on the Bath road, twelve miles from Hounslow. Slough adjoins
Salt Hill. A mile beyond it, up a lane to the left, is Langley. Langley
is a wayside station on the Great Western Railway, set down in a
beautiful and secluded neighbourhood, the name clipped and mutilated in
modern railway fashion, for its full style is “Langley Marish”—“Marshy
Langley,”—or, as some would have it, “Langley Maries,” the church being
dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Near the station notice the old-fashioned
inn, the “North Star,” nestling under the embankment; a house which
obtained its present sign from the first locomotive ever used on the
Great Western. The engine of that name was originally built for a
Russian broad-gauge railway, but never delivered.
While yet some way from the village, the mellowed red brick tower of
Langley Church is seen across the flat meadows. The church owns the
very singular feature of an old parish library, contained in a room
within the building; not a library consisting merely of a few chained
books, but a collection of some five or six hundred volumes, given
by Sir John Kederminster, under his will of 1631, to “the town” of
Langley Marish. No one ever borrows any of these mighty tomes for home
reading, for they are chiefly black-letter works of the Greek and Latin
fathers, and dry-as-dust treatises on the Reformation controversy. The
room containing all this bygone learning is curiously painted with
Renaissance designs, and very interesting.
The Kederminsters, of whom this bookworm Sir John was one, were the
old lords of the manor. They built the beautiful almshouses looking
upon the churchyard. It may be noted that the grouping of church and
almshouses is strikingly picturesque, and that the low-toned brick is
eminently paintable. Langley, in short, is one of the very few really
beautiful and retired villages so near town.
The curious, who roam the churchyard and read the epitaphs on the
simple memorials of the villagers, will notice on one of the many
wood-rail tomb-“stones” an inscription to a certain “Mrs. Sarah Wall,
the old and faithful, but ill-requited Servant of Lord Carrington, who
departed this life June 1832, aged 70 years.”
The story goes that she was grievously affronted by being consigned by
Lord Carrington to one of the neighbouring almshouses in her old age,
when she had expected more consideration at his hands. She it was who
directed the expression “ill-requited” to be painted on the board. A
former vicar, disapproving of it, had the words painted out, but in the
lapse of years the paint of the rest of the lettering decaying, the
offending words have been preserved and stand out with an extraordinary
prominence, attracting immediate attention.
Pretty hamlets, still wonderfully rural, considering the short distance
from London, line the way home, along the old Bath road, or lie a
little way from it. Among them is Cranford; but it is probably too
late now to see that pretty place, and so we will continue, through
the gathering darkness, along the high road home. Every cyclist knows
this road, but it is not everyone who knows it when night has fallen;
when the little inns and cottages take on a romantic interest they do
not possess by daylight; when red blinds in villagers’ windows shed a
comfortable ray, and wayside trees and fields wear an unaccustomed and
portentous significance. In short, it is a delightful lamp-lit journey
along these closing miles, and a pleasantly cool conclusion to the heat
of the day.