Rural Rides Page 9

  10 November

  Went from Reading, through Aldermaston for Burghclere. The rain has been very heavy, and the water was a good deal out. Here, on my way, I got upon Crookham Common again, which is a sort of continuation of the wretched country about Oakingham.

  From Highclere I looked, one day, over the flat towards Marlborough; and I there saw some such rascally heaths. So that this villanous tract, extends from East to West, with more or less of exceptions, from Hounslow to Hungerford. From North to South it extends from Binfield (which cannot be far from the borders of Buckinghamshire) to the South Downs of Hampshire, and terminates somewhere between Liphook and Petersfield, after stretching over Hindhead, which is certainly the most villanous spot that God ever made. Our ancestors do, indeed, seem to have ascribed its formation to another power; for the most celebrated part of it, is called ‘the Devil’s Punch Bowl’. In this tract of country there are certainly some very beautiful spots. But these are very few in number, except where the chalk-hills run into the tract. The neighbourhood of Godalming ought hardly to be considered as an exception; for there you are just on the outside of the tract, and begin to enter on the Weald; that is to say, clayey wood-lands. All the part of Berkshire, of which I have been recently passing over, if I except the tract from Reading to Crookham, is very bad land and a very ugly country.

  11 November

  Uphusband once more, and, for the sixth time this year, over the North Hampshire Hills, which, notwithstanding their ever-lasting flints, I like very much. As you ride along even in a green lane the horses’ feet make a noise like hammering. It seems as if you were riding on a mass of iron. Yet the soil is good, and bears some of the best wheat in England. All these high, and indeed, all chalky lands, are excellent for sheep. But, on the top of some of these hills, there are as fine meadows as I ever saw. Pasture richer, perhaps, than that about Swindon in the North of Wiltshire. And the singularity is, that this pasture is on the very tops of these lofty hills, from which you can see the Isle of Wight. There is a stiff loam, in some places twenty feet deep, on a bottom of chalk. Though the grass grows so finely there is no apparent wetness in the land. The wells are more than three hundred feet deep. The main part of the water, for all uses, comes from the clouds; and, indeed, these are pretty constant companions of these chalk hills, which are very often enveloped in clouds and wet, when it is sunshine down at Burghdere or Uphusband. They manure the land here by digging wells in the fields and bringing up the chalk, which they spread about on the land; and which, being free-chalk, is reduced to powder by the frosts. A considerable portion of the land is covered with wood; and as, in the clearing of the land, the clearers followed the good soil, without regard to shape of fields, the forms of the woods are of endless variety, which, added to the never-ceasing inequalities of the surface of the whole, make this, like all the others of the same description, a very pleasant country.

  17 November

  Set off from Uphusband for Hambledon. The first place I had to get to was Whitchurch. On my way, and at a short distance from Uphusband, down the valley, I went through a village called Bourne, which takes its name from the water that runs down this valley. A bourne, in the language of our forefathers, seems to be a river, which is, part of the year, without water. There is one of these bournes down this pretty valley. It has, generally, no water till towards Spring, and then it runs for several months. It is the same at the Candovers, as you go across the downs from Odiham to Winchester.

  The little village of Bourne, therefore, takes its name from its situation. Then there are two Hurstbournes, one above and one below this village of Bourne. Hurst means, I believe, a Forest. There were, doubtless, one of those on each side of Bourne; and, when they became villages, the one above was called Up-hurstbourne, and the one below, Downhurstbourne; which names have become Uphusband and Downhusband. The lawyers, therefore, who, to the immortal honour of high-blood and Norman descent, are making such a pretty story out for the Lord Chancellor, relative to a Noble Peer who voted for the Bill against the Queen, ought to leave off calling the seat of the noble person Hursperne; for it is at Downhurstbourne where he lives, and where he was visited by Dr Bankhead!

  Whitchurch is a small town, but famous for being the place where the paper has been made for the Borough-Bank! I passed by the mill on my way to get out upon the Downs to go to Alresford where I intended to sleep. I hope the time will come, when a monument will be erected where that mill stands, and when on that monument will be inscribed the curse of England. This spot ought to be held accursed in all time henceforth and for evermore. It has been the spot from which have sprung more and greater mischiefs than ever plagued mankind before. However, the evils now appear to be fast recoiling on the merciless authors of them; and, therefore, one beholds this scene of paper-making with a less degree of rage than formerly. My blood used to boil when I thought of the wretches who carried on and supported the system. It does not boil now, when I think of them. The curse, which they intended solely for others, is now falling on themselves; and I smile at their sufferings. Blasphemy! Atheism! Who can be an Atheist, that sees how justly these wretches are treated; with what exact measure they are receiving the evils which they inflicted on others for a time, and which they intended to inflict on them for ever! If, indeed, the monsters had continued to prosper, one might have been an Atheist. The true history of the rise, progress and fall of these monsters, of their power, their crimes and their punishment, will do more than has been done before to put an end to the doubts of those who have doubts upon this subject.

  Quitting Whitchurch, I went off to the left out of the Winchester-road, got out upon the high-lands, took an ‘observation’, as the sailors call it, and off I rode, in a straight line, over hedge and ditch, towards the rising ground between Stratum Park and Micheldever-Wood; but, before I reached this point, I found some wet meadows and some running water in my way in a little valley running up from the turnpike road to a little place called West Stratum. I, therefore, turned to my left, went down to the turnpike, went a little way along it, then turned to my left, went along by Stratton Park pales down East Stratton-street, and then on towards the Grange Park. Stratton Park is the seat of Sir THOMAS BARING, who has here several thousands of acres of land; who has the living of Micheldever, to which, I think, Northington and Swallowfield are joined. Above all, he has Micheldever Wood, which, they say, contains a thousand acres, and which is one of the finest oak-woods in England. This large and very beautiful estate must have belonged to the Church at the time of Henry the Eighth’s ‘reformation’. It was, I believe, given by him to the family of Russell; and, it was, by them, sold to Sir Francis Baring about twenty years ago. Upon the whole, all things considered, the change is for the better. Sir THOMAS BARING would not have moved, nay, he did not move, for the pardon of Lopez, while he left JOSEPH SWANN in gaol for four years and a half without so much as hinting at SWANN’S case! Yea, verily, I would rather see this estate in the hands of Sir Thomas Baring than in those of Lopez’s friend. Besides, it seems to be acknowledged that any tide is as good as those derived from the old wife-killer. CASTLEREAGH, when the Whigs talked in a rather rude manner about the sinecure places and pensions, told them, that the title of the sinecure man or woman was as good as the titles of the Duke of Bedford! this was plagiarism, to be sure; for Burke had begun it. He called the Duke the Leviathan of grants; and seemed to hint at the propriety of over-hauling them a little. When the men of Kent petitioned for a ‘just reduction of the National Debt’, Lord John Russell, with that wisdom for which he is renowned, reprobated the prayer; but, having done this in terms not sufficiently unqualified and strong, and having made use of a word of equivocal meaning, the man, that cut his own throat at North Cray, pitched on upon him and told him, that the fundholder had as much right to his dividends, as the Duke of Bedford had to his estates. Upon this the noble reformer and advocate for Lopez mended his expressions; and really said what the North Cray philosopher said he ought to say
! Come, come: Micheldever Wood is in very proper hands! A little girl, of whom I asked my way down into East Stratton, and who was dressed in a camlet gown, white apron and plaid cloak (it was Sunday), and who had a book in her hand, told me that Lady Baring gave her the clothes, and had her taught to read and to sing hymns and spiritual songs.11

  As I came through the Strattons I saw not less than a dozen girls clad in this same way. It is impossible not to believe that this is done with a good motive; but, it is possible not to believe that it is productive of good. It must create hypocrites, and hypocrisy is the great sin of the age. Society is in a queer state when the rich think, that they must educate the poor in order to insure their own safety: for this, at bottom, is the great motive now at work in pushing on the education scheme, though in this particular case, perhaps, there may be a little enthusiasm at work. When persons are glutted with riches; when they have their fill of them; when they are surfeited of all earthly pursuits, they are very apt to begin to think about the next world; and, the moment they begin to think of that, they begin to look over the account that they shall have to present. Hence the far greater part of what are called ‘charities’. But, it is the business of governments to take care that there shall be very little of this glutting with riches, and very little need of ‘charities’.

  From Stratton I went on to Northington Down; then round to the South of the Grange Park (Alex. Baring’s), down to Abbotston, and over some pretty little green hills to Alresford, which is a nice little town of itself, but which presents a singularly beautiful view from the last little hill coming from Abbotston. I could not pass by the Grange Park without dunking of Lord and Lady Henry Stuart whose lives and deaths surpassed what we read of in the most sentimental romances. Very few things that I have met with in my life ever filled me with sorrow equal to that which I felt at the death of this most virtuous and most amiable pair.

  It began raining soon after I got to Alresford, and rained all the evening. I heard here, that a Requisition for a County Meeting was in the course of being signed in different parts of the county. They mean to petition for Reform, I hope. At any rate, I intend to go to see what they do. I saw the parsons at the county meeting in 1817. I should like, of all things, to see them at another meeting now. These are the persons that I have most steadily in my eye. The war and the debt were for the tithes and the boroughs. These must stand or fall together now. I always told the parsons, that they were the greatest fools in the world to put the tithes on board the same boat with the boroughs. I told them so in 1817; and, I fancy, they will soon see all about it.

  November 18

  Came from Alresford to Hambledon, through Titchbourne, Cheriton, Beauworth, Kilmston and Exton. This is all a high, hard, dry, foxhunting country. Like that, indeed, over which I came yesterday. At Titchbourne there is a park, and ‘great house’, as the country-people call it. The place belongs, I believe, to a Sir somebody Titchbourne, a family, very likely half as old as the name of the village, which, however, partly takes its name from the bourne that runs down the valley. I thought, as I was riding alongside of this park, that I had heard good of this family of Titchbourne, and, I therefore saw the park pales with sorrow. There is not more than one pale in a yard, and those that remain and the rails and posts and all seem tumbling down. This park-paling is perfectly typical of those of the landlords who are not tax-eaters. They are wasting away very fast. The tax-eating landlords think to swim out the gale. They are deceived. They are ‘deluded’ by their own greediness.

  Kilmston was my next place after Titchbourne, but I wanted to go to Beauworth, so that I had to go through Cheriton; a little, hard, iron village, where all seems to be as old as the hills that surround it. In coming along you see Titchbourne church away to the right, on the side of the hill, a very pretty little view; and this, though such a hard country, is a pretty country.

  At Cheriton I found a grand camp of Gipsys just upon the move towards Alresford. I had met some of the scouts first, and afterwards the advanced guard, and here the main body was getting in motion. One of the scouts that I met was a young woman, who, I am sure, was six feet high. There were two or three more in the camp of about the same height; and some most strapping fellows of men. It is curious that this race should have preserved their dark skin and coal-black straight and coarse hair, very much like that of the American Indians. I mean the hair, for the skin has nothing of the copper-colour as that of the Indians has. It is not, either, of the Mulatto cast; that is to say, there is no yellow in it. It is a black mixed with our English colours of pale, or red, and the features are small, like those of the girls in Sussex, and often singularly pretty. The tall girl that I met at Titchbourne, who had a huckster basket on her arm, had most beautiful features. I pulled up my horse, and said, ‘Can you tell me my fortune, my dear?’ She answered in the negative, giving me a look at the same time, that seemed to say, it was too late; and that if I had been thirty years younger she might have seen a little what she could do with me. It is, all circumstances considered, truly surprising, that this race should have preserved so perfectly all its distinctive marks.

  I came on to Beauworth to inquire after the family of a worthy old farmer, whom I knew there some years ago, and of whose death I had heard at Alresford. A bridle road over some fields and through a coppice took me to Kilmston, formerly a large village, but now mouldered into two farms, and a few miserable tumble-down houses for the labourers. Here is a house, that was formerly the residence of the landlord of the place, but is now occupied by one of the farmers. This is a fine country for fox-hunting, and Kilmston belonged to a Mr Ridge who was a famous fox-hunter, and who is accused of having spent his fortune in that way. But, what do people mean? He had a right to spend his income, as his fathers had done before him. It was the Pitt-system,12 and not the fox-hunting, that took away the principal. The place now belongs to a Mr Long, whose origin I cannot find out.

  From Kilmston I went right over the Downs to the top of a hill called Beacon Hill, which is one of the loftiest hills in the country. Here you can see the Isle of Wight in detail, a fine sweep of the sea; also away into Sussex, and over the New Forest into Dorsetshire. Just below you, to the East, you look down upon the village of Exton; and you can see up this valley (which is called a Bourne too) as far as West-Meon, and down it as far as Soberton. Corhampton, Warnford, Meon-Stoke, and Droxford come within these two points; so that here are six villages on this bourne within the space of about five miles. On the other side of the main valley down which the bourne runs, and opposite Beacon Hill, is another such a hill, which they call Old Winchester Hill. On the top of this hill there was once a camp, or, rather fortress; and the ramparts are now pretty nearly as visible as ever. The same is to be seen on the Beacon Hill at Highclere. These ramparts had nothing of the principles of modern fortification in their formation. You see no signs of salliant angles. It was a ditch and a bank, and that appears to have been all. I had, I think, a full mile to go down from the top of Beacon Hill to Exton. This is the village where that Parson Baines lives who, as described by me in 1817, bawled in Lord Cochrane’s ear at Winchester in the month of March of that year. Parson Poulter lives at Meon-Stoke, which is not a mile further down. So that this valley has something in it besides picturesque views! I asked some countrymen how Poulter and Baines did; but, their answer contained too much of irreverence for me to give it here.

  At Exton I crossed the Gosport turnpike-road, came up the cross valley under the South side of Old Winchester Hill, over Stoke down, then over West-end down, and then to my friend’s house at West End in the parish of Hambledon.

  Thus have I crossed nearly the whole of this country from the North-West to the South-East, without going five hundred yards on a turnpike-road, and, as nearly as I could do it, in a straight line.

  The whole country that I have crossed is loam and flints upon a bottom of chalk. At Alresford there are some watered meadows, which are the beginning of a chain of meadows that goes all the wa
y down to Winchester, and hence to Southampton; but, even these meadows have, at Alresford, chalk under them. The water that supplies them comes out of a pond, called Alresford Pond, which is fed from the high hills in the neighbourhood. These counties are purely agricultural; and they have suffered most cruelly from the accursed Pitt-system. Their hilliness, bleakness, roughness of roads, render them unpleasant to the luxurious, effeminate, tax-eating crew, who never come near them, and who have pared them down to the very bone. The villages are all in a state of decay. The farm-buildings dropping down, bit by bit. The produce is, by a few great farmers, dragged to a few spots, and all the rest is falling into decay. If this infernal system could go on for forty years longer, it would make all the labourers as much slaves as the negroes are, and subject to the same sort of discipline and management.

  November 19 to 23

  At West End. Hambledon is a long, straggling village, lying in a little valley formed by some very pretty but not lofty hills. The environs are much prettier than the village itself, which is not far from the North side of Portsdown Hill. This must have once been a considerable place; for here is a church pretty nearly as large as that at Farnham in Surrey, which is quite sufficient for a large town. The means of living has been drawn away from these villages, and the people follow the means. Cheriton and Kilmston and Hambledon and the like have been beggared for the purpose of giving tax-eaters the means of making ‘vast improvements, Ma‘am’ on the villanous spewey gravel of Windsor Forest! The thing, however, must go back. Revolution here or revolution there: bawl, bellow, alarm, as long as the tax-eaters like, back the thing must go. Back, indeed, it is going in some quarters. Those scenes of glorious loyalty, the sea-port places, are beginning to be deserted. How many villages had that scene of all that is wicked and odious, Portsmouth, Gosport, and Portsea; how many villages had that hellish assemblage beggared! It is now being scattered itself! Houses which there let for forty or fifty pounds a-year each, now let for three or four shillings a-week each; and thousands, perhaps, cannot be let at all to any body capable of paying rent. There is an absolute tumbling down taking place, where, so lately there were such ‘vast improvements, Ma‘am!’ Does Monsieur de Snip call those improvements, then? Does he insist, that those houses form ‘an addition to the national capital’? Is it any wonder that a country should be miserable when such notions prevail? And when they can, even in the Parliament, be received with cheering?