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 and Chobham Ridges.

The extensive and dreary-looking tract of land,{96} still wild and barren for the most part, called Bagshot Heath, has during the last century been the scene of many attempts made to bring it under cultivation. These populous times are ill-disposed to the continued existence of waste and unproductive lands, which, when near London, are especially valuable, if they can be made to grow anything at all. One thing which, above all others, has led to the beginning of the end of these old-time wildernesses, formerly the haunts of highwaymen, is the modern discovery of the country and of the benefits of fresh air. When the nineteenth century was yet young the townsman still retained the old habits of thought which regarded the heaths and the hills with aversion. He pigged away his existence over his shop or warehouse in the City, and thought the country fit only for the semi-savages who grew the fruit and vegetables that helped to supply his table, or cultivated the wheat of which his daily bread was compounded. It has been left to us, his descendants, to love the wilds, and thus it is that villa homes are springing up amid the heaths and the pines of this region, away from Woking on the south to Ascot in the north.
BAGSHOT

One comes downhill into the large village or small (very small) town of Bagshot, which gives a name to these surrounding wastes of scrubby grass, gorse, and fir-trees. The now quiet street faces the road in the hollow, across which runs the Bourne brook that perhaps originated the place-name, ‘Beck-shot’ being the downhill rush of the stream or beck. The many ‘shotts’ that terminate the names of places in Hants and Surrey have this common origin, and are similarly{97} situated in the little hollows watered by descending brooks.

Bagshot has nearly forgotten the old coaching days in the growing importance of its military surroundings, and most of its once celebrated inns have retired into private life, all except the ‘King’s Arms.’
Image unavailable: BAGSHOT.
BAGSHOT.

The ground to the north of the Exeter Road, on the west of Bagshot village, was once a peat moor. Hazel-nuts and bog-oak were often dug up there. Then began the usual illegal encroachments on what was really common land, and stealthily the moor was enclosed and subsequently converted into a nursery-ground for rhododendrons, which flourish amazingly on this soil when it has once been trenched. Beneath the black sand which usually covers this ground there frequently occurs a very hard iron rust, or thin stratum{98} of oxide of iron, which prevents drainage of the soil, with a blue sandy clay underlying. This stratum of iron rust requires to be broken through, and the blue clay subsoil raised to the surface and mixed with the black sand, before anything will grow here.

There is to be seen on the summit of the steep hill that leads out of Bagshot an old inn called the ‘Jolly Farmer.’ This is the successor of a still older house which stood at the side of the road, and was famous in the annals of highway robbery, having been once the residence of William Davis, the notorious ‘Golden Farmer,’ who lived here in the century before last.

The agriculturist with this auriferous name was a man greatly respected in the neighbourhood, and acquired the nickname from his invariable practice of paying his bills in gold. He was never known to tender cheques, bank-notes, or bills, and this fact was considered so extraordinary that it excited much comment, while at the same time increasing the respect due to so substantial a man. But respect at last fell from Mr. William Davis like a cloak; for one night when a coach was robbed (as every coach was robbed then) on Bagshot Heath by a peculiar highwayman who had earned a great reputation from his invariable practice of returning all the jewellery and notes and keeping only the coin, the masked robber, departing with his plunder, was shot in the back by a traveller who had managed to secrete a pistol.
THE ‘GOLDEN FARMER’

Bound hand and foot, the wounded highwayman was hauled into the lighted space before the entrance to the ‘King’s Arms,’ when the gossips of the place recognised in him the well-known features of the{99} ‘Golden Farmer.’ A ferocious Government, which had no sympathy with highway robbery, caused the ‘Golden Farmer’ to be hanged and afterwards gibbeted at his own threshold.

The present inn, an ugly building facing down the road, does not occupy the site of the old house, which stood on the right hand, going westwards. A table, much hacked and mutilated, standing in the parlour of the ‘Jolly Farmer,’ came from the highwayman’s vanished home. A tall obelisk that stood on the triangular green at the fork of the roads here—where the signpost is standing nowadays—has long since disappeared. It was a prominent landmark in the old coaching days, and was inscribed with the distances of many towns from this spot. A still existing link with the times of the highwaymen is the so-called ‘Claude du Vail’s Cottage,’ which stands in the heathy solitudes at some distance along Lightwater Lane, to the right-hand of the road. The cottage, of which there is no doubt that it often formed a hiding-place for that worthy, has lost its ancient thatch, and is now covered with commonplace slates.

Almost immediately after leaving the ‘Jolly Farmer’ behind, the road grows hateful, passing in succession the modern townships of Cambridge Town Camberley, and York Town. The exact point where one of these modern squatting-places of those who hang on to the skirts of Tommy Atkins joins another may be left to local experts; to the traveller they present the appearance of one long and profoundly depressing street.

Cobbett knew the road well, and liked this shabby{100} line of military settlements little. Coming up to ‘the Wen’ in 1821, and passing Blackwater, he reached York Town, and thus he holds forth: ‘After pleasure comes pain’, says Solomon, and after the sight of Lady Mildmay’s truly noble plantations (at Hartley Row) came that of the clouts of the ‘gentleman cadets’ of the ‘Royal Military College of Sandhurst!’ Here, close by the roadside, is the drying ground. Sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were here spread upon lines covering perhaps an acre of ground! We soon afterwards came to ‘York Place’ on ‘Osnaburg Hill.’ And is there never to be an end of these things? Away to the left we see that immense building which contains children breeding up to be military commanders! Has this place cost so little as two millions of pounds? I never see this place (and I have seen it forty times during the last twenty years) without asking myself this question, ‘Will this thing be suffered to go on; will this thing, created by money raised by loan; will this thing be upheld by means of taxes while the interest of the Debt is reduced, on the ground that the nation is unable to pay the interest in full?’

It is painful to say that ‘this thing’ has gone on, and that ‘the sweet simplicity of the Three per Cents’ has given place to very much reduced interest. But one little ray of sunshine breaks on the gloomy picture. If Cobbett could ride this way once more he would discover that the acre of drying ‘sheets, shirts, and other things’ is no longer visible to shock the susceptibilities of old-fashioned wayfarers, or of that new feature of the road, the lady cyclist.{101}
BLACKWATER

There is a great deal more of Cambridge Town, Camberley, and York Town now than when Cobbett last journeyed along the road; there are more ‘children breeding up to be military commanders,’ more Tommies, more drinking-shops, and an almost continuous line of ugly, and for the most part out-at-elbows, houses for a space of two miles. It is with relief that the traveller leaves behind the last of these wretched blots upon the country and descends into Blackwater, where the river of that name, so called from the sullen hue it obtains on running through the peaty wastes of this wild, heathy country, flows beneath a bridge at the entrance to the pretty village. Over this bridge we enter Hampshire, that county of hogs and chalky downs, but no sign of the ch............