NORTH TO RUNEMEDE
Virginia Water.--Ruined Temples.--Grebes and Pheasants.--Bishop's
Gate.--Shelley's "Alastor."--"Perdita" at Englefield Green.--Mrs.
Oliphant's Neighbours.--Runemede rolled.--Egham's Almshouses.--Sir
John Denham.--Frightful Monuments.--King Charles and the grateful
stag.--The quiet of Thorpe.--The Crouch Oak.--Love Philtres.
[Illustration: _Ruins at Virginia Water._]
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.
Epitaphs and monuments can be dull enough, but no one could call the
monuments dull which family piety has erected in Egham church to the
memory of Sir John Denham, father of the poet. Sir John, clothed in a
shroud, quits his tomb at the Last Trump; below him, among skeletons and
skulls, two grisly corpses writhe to the light. It is edifying to
conceive the satisfaction with which Sir John's descendants must have
feasted on such horrors every Sunday. A gentler memory lives on a stone
erected "to the most dutiful, engaging, and tender child of seven years
old. Miss Sarah Honywood"; and a finer epitaph is Garrick's, written to
the memory of Thomas Beighton, a former vicar:--
"He had no foe, and CAMDEN was his friend."
[Illustration: _Entering Egham._]
Sir John Denham, the poet and unsuccessful defender of Farnham Castle in
the Parliamentary Wars, lived at the house which is now the vicarage,
and from its windows looked out on the long rising slope of Cooper's
Hill. He has been laughed at for his description of the hill as an "airy
mountain," but three hundred years ago, before the hill was cut up with
hedges and ditches, and when he could look across open grass to its
foot, Cooper's Hill may well have seemed higher than to-day. It is
higher than St. Anne's Hill, after all, and can make an imposing break
on the horizon.
Here is Runemede as Sir John Denham saw it from Cooper's Hill:--
"There lies a spatious and a fertile Greene,
Where from the woods, the _Dryades_ oft meet
The Nayades, and with their nimble feet,
Soft dances lead, although their airie shape
All but a quicke Poeticke sight escape,
There _Faunus_ and _Sylvanus_ keepe their Courts,
And thither all the horrid hoast resorts,
When like the Elixar, with his evening beames,
The sunne has turn'd to gold the silver streames.
Here have I seene our _Charles_, when great affaires
Give leave to slacken, and unbend his cares,
Chacing the royall Stagge, the gallant beast,
Rowz'd with the noyse 'twixt hope and feare distrest,
Resolv's 'tis better to avoyd, than meet
His danger, trusting to his winged feet."
Which he does, a most moving business, until at last the gallant animal
turns. He stands at bay--
"Till _Charles_ from his unerring hand lets flie
A mortall shaft, then glad, and proud to dye
By such a wound he fals, the Chrystall flood
Dying he dyes, and purples with his blood."
Between Egham and Thorpe to the south is one of the few fine Elizabethan
houses in the county, pleasantly named Great Fosters. But even Great
Fosters, with all the charm of its gables, its chimneys and its
mullioned windows, does not stand in quite such sharp contrast to the
garishness of the Holloway buildings as the little village of Thorpe
itself. Thorpe has been little written about. It lacks its sacred bard.
But neither Shere, nor Gomshall, nor Thursley, nor Chiddingfold, which
have been compared and criticised as the most beautiful of all Surrey
villages, can surpass Thorpe for richness of peace of ancient homes and
quiet brooding over the past. Enter Thorpe from the north by the fields,
and you will walk by lanes over which a hundred years have passed
without adding a tile or a tree to cottages or cottage gardens; and in
Thorpe itself you can sit near the church on the edge of a stone stile,
and look round at walls and roofs which might surely have sheltered Sir
John Denham himself, walking by Thorpe to Chertsey. The stile stands
across an ancient right of way, which crosses the fields; a straight
line from the churchyard to Chertsey. John de Rutherwyk, doubtless,
often walked or rode that lonely byway; perhaps it was he who raised the
level path dry and well-drained out of the swampy, snipe-haunted meadows
that lay between the little church and the great Abbey.
[Illustration: _Thorpe._]
South of Chertsey to the Wey is rather uninteresting country. Addlestone
lies between Chertsey and Weybridge, though not in a direct line, and
was the home for years of two octogenarian authors, each of whom had a
pension from the State, and who between them wrote or edited over five
hundred books--Samuel Carter Hall and his wife Anna Maria Fielding. Both
are buried at Addlestone; so is Fanny Kemble's mother, Mrs. Charles
Kemble, who as Mademoiselle Decamp had delighted French theatres. But
Addlestone's great possession is still living, the huge Crouch Oak which
spreads vast branches over ground where Wycliff is said to have
preached, and Queen Elizabeth to have dined. Once the Crouch Oak stood
to mark the bounds of Windsor Forest; and up to years not long gone by
love-lorn young women gathered its bark to boil down into philtres to
ensnare the hearts of unwilling swains.
[Illustration: _The Crouch Oak, Addlestone._]
At Anningsley Park, two miles away, lived Thomas Day, author of
_Sandford and Merton_; Thomas Day, who took a foundling child of
thirteen and named her Sabrina, and educated her to be his wife--a
position which she, at an age to marry, refused. His fate was perverse
to the end. He taught himself to dance, wooing another lady who spurned
him; and, teaching himself to ride, he was thrown and killed.