The Exeter Road - free ebook by Charles G. (Charles George) Harper

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The Exeter Road

Charles G. (Charles George) Harper

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THE E X E T E R R O A D

THE E X E T E R R O A D

THE STORY OF THE WEST OF ENGLAND HIGHWAY By CHARLES G. HARPER Author of ‘The Brighton Road,’ ‘The Portsmouth Road,’ ‘The Dover Road,’ and ‘The Bath Road’ Image unavailable: colophon Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time Prints and Pictures London: CHAPMAN &amp; HALL, Limited 1899 All rights reserved T HIS, the fifth volume in a series of works purporting to tell the Story of the Great Roads, requires but few forewords; but occasion may be taken to say that perhaps greater care has bee

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I

I

From Hyde Park Corner, whence it is measured, to the west end of Hounslow town, the Exeter Road is identical with the road to Bath. At that point the ways divide. The right-hand road leads to Bath, by way of Maidenhead; the Exeter Road goes off to the left, through Staines, to Basingstoke, Whitchurch, and Andover; where, at half a mile beyond that town, there is a choice of routes. The shortest way to Exeter, the ‘Queen City of the West,’ is by taking the right-hand road at this last point and p

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II

II

But those travellers who, in the early days of coaching, a century and a half ago, desired the safest, speediest, and most comfortable journey to Exeter, went by a very much longer route than any of those already named. They went, in fact, by the Bath Road and thence through Somerset. The Exeter Road beyond Basingstoke was at that period a miserable waggon-track, without a single turnpike; while the road to Bath had, under the management of numerous turnpike-trusts, already become a comparativel

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III

III

In these pages, which purport to show the old West of England highway as it was in days of old and as it is now, it is not proposed to follow either of the two routes taken by the ‘Telegraph’ coach or the ‘Quicksilver’ Devonport mail, by Amesbury or by Shaftesbury, although there will be occasion to mention those smart coaches from time to time. We will take the third route instead, for the reasons that it is practically identical with the course of the Via Iceniana , the old Roman military way

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IV

IV

A very great authority on coaching—the famous ‘Nimrod,’ the mainstay of the Sporting Magazine —writing in 1836, compares the exquisite perfection to which coaching had attained at that time with the era of the old Exeter ‘Fly,’ and imagines a kind of Rip Van Winkle old gentleman, who had been a traveller by that crazy conveyance in 1742, waking up and journeying by the ‘Comet’ of 1836. Rousing from his long sleep, he determines to go by the ‘Fly’ to Exeter. In the lapse of ninety-four years, how

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V

V

The late Thomas Adolphus Trollope, brother of the better-known Anthony, was never tired of writing voluminously about old times, and what he has to say about the coaches on the Exeter Road is the more interesting and valuable as coming from one who lived and travelled in the times of which he speaks. The coaches for the South and West of England, he says, started from the ‘White Horse Cellars,’ Piccadilly, which was one of the fashionable hotels of 1820, the time he treats of. The ‘White Bear,’

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VI

VI

Suppose, instead of taking one of the fast mails to Exeter, and journeying straight away, we book a seat in one of the ‘short stages’ which were the only popular means of being conveyed between London and the suburbs in the days before railways, omnibuses, and tramways existed. We will take the stage to Brentford, because that is on our way. What year shall we imagine it to be? Say 1837, because that date marks the accession of Her Majesty and the opening of the great Victorian Era, in which eve

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VII

VII

And now we come to the first toll-gate, which, removed to this spot in 1825, opposite where the Alexandra Hotel now stands, stood here until 1854. There were many troublesome survivals in 1837 which have long since been swept away. Toll-gates, for instance. The toll or turnpike gate of sixty, fifty, forty years ago was a very real grievance, both on country roads and in London itself, or in those districts which we now call London. Many people objected to pay toll then, and a favourite amusement

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VIII

VIII

But we must not forget that we are travelling to Brentford sixty-two years ago. Let us, therefore, whip up the horses, and, passing the first milestone at the corner of the lane which a future generation to that of 1837 is to know by the name of the Exhibition Road, hurry on to Kensington. Kensington in this year of the accession of Her Majesty Queen Victoria is having an unusual amount of attention paid to it. Every one is bursting with loyalty towards the girl of eighteen suddenly called upon

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IX

IX

Brentford was dismissed somewhat summarily in the pages of the Bath Road , for which let me here apologise to the county town of Middlesex. Not that I will renounce one jot as to the dirtiness of the place; for what says Gay?— Now, if Brentford is certainly not tedious nowadays, it is unquestionably as dirty as ever. If you would know the true, poignant, inner meaning of tediousness, you must make acquaintance, say, with Gower Street on a winter’s day; a typical street of suburban villas, each ‘

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X

X

Hounslow, to which we now come, being situated, like all the other places between this and Hyde Park Corner, on the Bath Road, as well as on the road to Exeter, has been referred to at some length in the book on that highway. Coming to the place again, there seems no reason to alter or add much to what was said in those pages. The long, long uninteresting street is just as sordid as ever, and the very few houses of any note facing it are fewer. There remains, it is true, that old coaching inn, t

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XI

XI

It is a splendidly surfaced road that runs hence to Staines, and the fact is sufficiently well known for it to be crowded on Saturday afternoons and Sundays with cyclists of the ‘scorcher’ variety, members of cycling clubs out for a holiday, and taking their pleasure at sixteen miles an hour, Indian file, hanging on to one another’s back wheel, with shoulders humped over handle-bars and eyes for nothing but the road surface. But there are quiet, deserted bye-lanes where these highway crowds neve

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XII

XII

The village of East Bedfont, three miles from Hounslow, is a picturesque surprise, after the long flat road. The highway suddenly broadens out here, and gives place to a wide village green, with a pond, and real ducks! and an even more real village church whose wooden extinguisher spire peeps out from a surrounding cluster of trees, and from behind a couple of fantastically clipped yews guarding the churchyard gate. The ‘Bedfont Peacocks,’ as they are called, are not so perfect as they were when

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XIII

XIII

Staines , where the road leaves Middlesex and crosses the Thames into Surrey, is almost as commonplace a little town as it is possible to find within the home counties. Late Georgian and Early Victorian stuccoed villas and square, box-like, quite uninteresting houses struggle for numerical superiority over later buildings in the long High Street, and the contest is not an exciting one. Staines, sixteen miles from London, is, in fact, of that nondescript—‘neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red-h

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XIV

XIV

Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to Egham, once devoted almost wholly to the coaching interest, then the scene of suburban race-meetings, and now that those blackguardly orgies have been suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb—dusty, uninteresting. The old church has been modernised, and the old coaching inns either mere beer-shops or else improved away altogether. The last one to remain in its old form—the ‘Catherine Wheel’—has recently lost all its old roadside character, and has bec

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XV

XV

Regarding the country through which the road passes, between Kensington, Egham, Sunningdale, Virginia Water, and Bagshot, Cobbett has some characteristic things to say. Between Hammersmith and Egham it is ‘as flat as a pancake,’ and the soil ‘a nasty stony dirt upon a bed of gravel.’ Sunninghill and Sunningdale, ‘all made into “grounds” and gardens by tax-eaters,’ are at the end of a ‘blackguard heath,’ and are ‘not far distant from the Stock-jobbing crew. The roads are level, and they are smoot

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XVI

XVI

From Virginia Water up to the crest of Shrub’s Hill, Sunningdale, is a distance of a mile and a quarter, and beyond, all the way into Bagshot, is a region of sand and fir-trees and attempts at cultivation, varied by newly-built villas, where considerable colonies of Cobbett’s detested stock-jobbers and other business men from the ‘Wen of wens’ have set up country quarters. And away to right and left, for miles upon miles, stretches that wild country known variously as Bagshot and Ascot Heaths an

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XVII

XVII

The ruin that descended upon Hartley Row in common with other coaching towns and villages, nearly sixty years ago, has long since been lived down, and the long street, although quiet, has much the same cheerful appearance as it must have worn in the heyday of its prosperity. It is a very wide street, fit for the evolutions of many coaches. Pleasant strips of grass now occupy, more or less continuously, one side, and at the western end forks the road to Odiham, through a pretty common with the un

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XVIII

XVIII

The whereabouts of Basingstoke may be noted from afar by the huge and odd-looking clock-tower of the Town Hall, added to that building in 1887. Its windy height, visible from many miles around, is also favourable to the hearing at a distance of its sweet-toned carillons, modelled on the pattern of the famous peal of Bruges. When the shrieking of the locomotives at the railway station is hushed, and the wind is favourable, you may hear those tuneful bells far away over the melancholy wolds that h

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XIX

XIX

The road between this point and Andover, ascending the high ground between the Ann and the Test, is utterly without interest, and brings the traveller down into the town at the south side of the market square without any inducement to linger on the way. Except on the Saturday market-day, Andover is given over to a dreamy quiet. The butchers’ dogs lie blinking sleepily on the thresholds, or on the kerbs, and regard with a pained surprise, rather than with any active resentment, the intrusive pass

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XX

XX

Cobbett , that sturdy Radical and consistent grumbler, had an adventure at Andover, at the ‘George Inn.’ It was in October 1826, on returning from Weyhill Fair, that he took occasion to dine here. Of course he had no business or pleasure at the ‘George,’ for he had secured a lodging elsewhere; but with that obsession of his for agitation he must needs repair to the inn and dine at the ordinary; less we may be sure for the sake of the meal than to embrace the opportunity of addressing the farmers

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XXI

XXI

Weyhill Fair, which brought Cobbett and the people he harangued into Andover, is a thoroughly old English institution, and although the old custom of fairs is gradually dying out, and this, the Largest Fair in England, is not so important as it was a hundred years ago, it is still a place where much money changes hands once a year. Weyhill is supposed to be one of the places mentioned in Piers Plowman’s Vision , in the line:— and it is the ‘Weydon Priors’ of the Mayor of Casterbridge , where Hen

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XXII

XXII

The trail of the Romans is over all the surroundings of Andover, and they must have loved this fishful and fertile valley well, for ample relics of extensive settlements and gorgeous villas have been unearthed by the plough. Some of the fine mosaic pavements discovered here are now in the British Museum, and every now and again the shepherd or the ploughman picks up a worn and battered coin of the Cæsars in the neighbouring fields. One of the finest Roman pavements came from the village of Abbot

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XXIII

XXIII

There are few more desolate and cheerless places in England than the spot where this old coaching inn stands beside the open road, with the unenclosed downs stretching away to the far horizon, fold after fold. Somewhere amid these hills and hollows, but quite hidden, is the village of West Winterslow, from which the ‘Hut’ obtains its name. The place, save for the periodical passing of the coaches, was as solitary in old times as it is now, and its quiet as profound. The very name is chilling, an

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XXIV

XXIV

It was here, however, that one of the most thrilling episodes of the road was enacted in the old days. The Mail from Exeter to London had left Salisbury on the night of 20th October 1816, and proceeded in the usual way for several miles, when what was thought to be a large calf was seen trotting beside the horses in the darkness. The team soon became extremely nervous and fidgety, and as the inn was approached they could scarcely be kept under control. At the moment when the coachman pulled up t

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XXV

XXV

Salisbury spire and the distant city come with the welcome surprise of a Promised Land after these bleak downs. Even three miles away the unenclosed wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three Mile Hill, down, down, down to the lowlands on a smooth and uninterrupted road, to where the trees and the houses can be distinguished, nestling around and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet ahead. It is coming thus with that needle-pointed spire, so long and so prominently in view, that

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XXVI

XXVI

It is really too great a task to follow the history of Salisbury through the centuries to the present time; nor, indeed, since the city and the cathedral are from our present point of view but incidents along the Exeter Road, would it be desirable to dwell very long on their story, which, as may have been judged from what has already been said, is an exceedingly turbulent one. The fearful martyrdoms carried out in Fisherton Fields by the bloody hell-hounds of the Marian Persecution still stain t

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XXVII

XXVII

Coach passengers entering Salisbury even so late as 1835 were sometimes witnesses of shocking scenes that, however picturesque they might have rendered mediæval times, were brutalising and degrading in a civilised era. Almost every year of the nineteenth century up to that date was fruitful in executions. In 1801 there were ten: seven for the crime of sheep-stealing, one for horse-stealing, one for stealing a calf, and one for highway robbery. The practice of hanging criminals on the scenes of t

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XXVIII

XXVIII

And now for some little-known literary landmarks. Salisbury, of course, is the scene of some passages in Martin Chuzzlewit ; but it is outside the city that we must go, on the road to Southampton, to find the residence of that eminent architect, Mr. Pecksniff; or the ‘Blue Dragon,’ where Tom Pinch’s friend, Mrs. Lupin, was landlady. St. Mary’s Grange, four miles from Salisbury, is the real name of Mr. Pecksniff’s home, but the house is only vaguely indicated in the novel. It is different with th

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XXIX

XXIX

It is a nine-miles journey, due north from Salisbury to Stonehenge, but although it would, under other circumstances, be unduly extending the scope of this work to travel so far from the highway, we need have no compunction in making this trip, for it brings us to one of the most interesting places on the Amesbury and Ilminster route to Exeter—to Stonehenge, in fact, and passes by the wonderful terraced hill of Old Sarum. You can see Old Sarum looming ahead immediately after passing the outlying

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XXX

XXX

And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up the steep road from Amesbury taken by the coaches. Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an awful thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, or can come upon the place at dead of night either by moonlight, or in the blackness of a moonless midnight, you will fail to be impressed; unless you are a literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, not by thoughts of the mythical human sacrifices offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by the las

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XXXI

XXXI

Away beyond Stonehenge stretches Salisbury Plain, in future to be vulgarised by military camps and manœuvres, and to become an Aldershot on a larger scale, but hitherto a solitude as sublime in its own way as Dartmoor and Exmoor. Dickens gives us his meed of appreciation of this wild country, and finds the boundless prairies of America tame by comparison. ‘Now,’ he says, writing when on his visit to America, ‘a prairie is undoubtedly worth seeing, but more that one may say one has seen it, than

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XXXII

XXXII

Soon after those two comrades had met their end, there arose a highway-woman to trouble the district. This was Mary Sandall, of Baverstock, a young woman of twenty-four years of age, who had borrowed a pair of pistols and a suit of his clothes from the blacksmith of Quidhampton, and, bestriding a horse, set out one day in the spring of 1779, and meeting Mrs. Thring, of North Burcombe, robbed her of two shillings and a black silk cloak. Mrs. Thring went home and raised an alarm, with the result t

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XXXIII

XXXIII

If you want to know exactly what kind of a road the Exeter Road is between Salisbury and Bridport, a distance of twenty-two miles, I think the sketch facing page 238 will convey the information much better than words alone. It is just a repetition of those bleak seventeen miles between Andover and Salisbury—only ‘more so.’ More barren and hillier than the Andover to Salisbury section, and less romantically wild than the rugged stretches between Blandford, Dorchester, and Bridport, it is a wearin

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XXXIV

XXXIV

Three more inns were situated beside the road between this point and Blandford in the old days. Of them, two, the ‘Thorney Down Inn,’ and the ‘Thickthorn Inn’ (romantic and shuddery names!), have disappeared, while the remaining one,—the ‘Cashmoor Inn’—formerly situated between the other two, ekes out a much less important existence than of old, as a wayside ‘public.’ Then comes a village—the first one since Coombe Bissett was passed, fifteen miles behind, and so more than usually welcome. A pre

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XXXV

XXXV

At the distance of a mile up the bye-road from Tarrant Hinton, in Eastbury Park, still stands in a lonely position the sole remaining wing of the once-famed Eastbury House, one of those immense palaces which the flamboyant noblemen and squires of a past era loved to build. Comparable for size and style with Blenheim and Stowe, and built like them by the ponderous Vanbrugh, the rise and fall of Eastbury were as dramatic as the building and destruction of Canons, the seat of the ‘princely Chandos’

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XXXVI

XXXVI

Returning to the road at Tarrant Hinton, a steep hill leads up to the wild downs again, with a corresponding descent in three miles into the village of Pimperne whose chief part is situated in the same manner, along a byeway at a right angle to the coachroad. There is a battered cross on an open space near the church, and the church itself has been severely restored. Christopher Pitt was Rector of Pimperne, and it requires no great stretch of imagination to conjure up a vision of him pacing the

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XXXVII

XXXVII

Sixteen and a quarter miles of very varied road brought the old coachmen with steaming horses clattering from Blandford into Dorchester, past the villages of Winterborne Whitchurch, Milborne St. Andrew, and the village of Piddletown, which is by no means a town, and never was. It is a long, long rise out of Blandford, past tree-shaded Bryanstone and over the Town Bridge, to the crest of Charlton Downs, a mile out; where, looking back, the town is seen lying in a wooded hollow almost surrounded b

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XXXVIII

XXXVIII

All the incidents in Dorchester’s history seem insignificant beside the tremendous melodrama of the ‘Bloody Assize.’ The stranger has eyes and ears for little else than the story of that terrible time, and longs to see the Court where Jeffreys sat, mad with drink and disease, and sentenced the unhappy prisoners to floggings, slavery, or death. Unhappily, that historic room has disappeared, but ‘Judge Jeffreys’ chair’ is still to be seen in the modern Town Hall, and one can approach in imaginatio

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XXXIX

XXXIX

The Exeter Road begins to rise immediately on leaving Dorchester. Leaving the town by a fine avenue of ancient elms stretching for half a mile, the highway runs, with all the directness characteristic of a Roman road, on a gradual incline up the bare and open expanse of Bradford Down, unsheltered as yet by the stripling trees newly planted as a continuation of the dense avenue just left behind. The first four miles of road from the town are identical with the Roman Via Iceniana , the Icen Way or

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XL

XL

Winterborne Abbas, one of the twenty-five Winterbornes that plentifully dot the map of Wilts and Dorset, lies on the level at the bottom of this treacherous descent: a small village of thatched cottages with a church too large for it, overhung by fir trees, and a remodelled old coaching inn, apparently also too large, with its sign swinging picturesquely from a tree-trunk on the opposite side of the road which, like the majority of Dorsetshire roads, is rich in loose flints. Half a mile beyond t

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XLI

XLI

The last mile into Bridport has none of these terrify-descents, although, to be sure, there are sudden curves in the road which it behoves the cyclist to take slowly, for they may develop anything in the way of traffic, from a traction engine to the elephantine advance-guard of a travelling circus. At Bridport, nine miles from the Devon border, the country already begins to lose something of the Dorset character, and to look like the county of junket and clotted cream. As for the town, it is dif

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XLII

XLII

There are steep ups and downs on the nine miles and a half between Axminster, the byegone home of carpets, and Honiton, once the seat of the lace industry, where all routes from London to Exeter meet. ‘Honiton lace’ is made now in the surrounding villages, but not in the town itself. The first hill is soon met with, on passing over the river Yart. This is Shute Hill, where the coaches generally were upset, if either the coachman or the horses were at all ‘fresh.’ Then it is a long run down to Ki

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XLIII

XLIII

Exeter is called by those who know her best and love her most the ‘Queen City of the West.’ To historians she is perhaps better epithetically remembranced as the ‘Ever Faithful,’ loyal and staunch through the good fortune or adversity of the causes for which she has, with closed and guarded gates, held fast the Key of the West. She has suffered much at different periods of her history for this loyalty; from the time when, declaring against the usurpation of Stephen, her citizens fought and starv

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XLIV

XLIV

It is a relief to turn from the thronging streets to the absolute quiet of the cathedral precincts, shaded by tall elms and green with trim lawns. Externally, the cathedral is of the grimiest and sootiest aspect—black as your hat, but comely. Not even the blackest corners of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London, show a deeper hue than the west front of St. Peter’s, at Exeter. The battered, time-worn array of effigies of saints, kings, crusaders, and bishops that range along the screen in mutilated ar

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