CYCLING PAGEANTS OF THE ROADS ROADSIDE CREATURES HARMONIOUS BUILDING COLLECTING OLD FURNITURE AND CHINA.

“I may soberly confess that sometimes, walking abroad after
my studies, I have been almost mad with pleasure the effect
of nature upon my soul having been inexpressibly ravishing
and beyond what I can convey to you.”
JOHN INGLESANT.

I suppose that the bicycle has given, and gives, as much pleasure to fairly active people as any machine ever invented. I must have been one of the first cyclists in England, as my experience dates from the days when bicycles were first imported from France. The high bicycle appeared later, but the earlier machines were about the height of the present safety, with light wooden wheels and iron tyres. The safety, with pneumatic tyres, did not arrive till nearly thirty years later, and it was the latter invention that brought about the popularity of cycling.

The difference between cycling and walking has been stated thus:

“When a man walks a mile he takes on an average 2,263 steps, lifting the weight of his body with each step. When he rides a bicycle of the average gear he covers a mile with the equivalent of 627 steps, bears no burden, and covers the same distance in less than one third of the time.”

People constantly tell me that cycling is all very well for getting from place to place, but otherwise they don’t care about it, which I can only account for by supposing that they find it a labour more or less irksome, or that they have never developed their perceptive faculties, and have no real sympathy with the life of woods and fields or the spirit of the ancient farms and villages.

Cycling to me is a very easy and pleasant exercise, but it is far more than that; it is like passing through an endless picture-gallery filled with masterpieces of form and colour. The roads of England not only present these delights to the physical sense, but they stir the imagination with historic visions from the earliest times. There are the ancient camps, now silent and deserted, which become at the bidding of fancy peopled with the unkempt and savage British, and later with their well-disciplined and well-equipped Roman conquerers: archers and men in armour appear; pilgrims’ processions such as we read of in Chaucer; knights and ladies on their stately steeds. There are the ghosts of royal progresses, kings and queens, and wonderful pageantry gorgeous in array; decorously ambling cardinals and abbots with their trains of servitors; hawking parties with hawks and attendants; soldiers after Sedgemoor in pursuit of Monmouth’s ill-fated followers; George IV. and his gay courtiers on the Brighton road; beaux and beauties in their well-appointed carriages bound for Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, or Bath; splendid teams with crowded coaches, and great covered waggons laden with merchandise; the highwayman at dusk in quest of belated travellers, and companies of farmers and cattle-dealers riding home from market together for safety.

I often see a vision here in the ancient Forest tracks of a gang of wild and armed smugglers, and among them still more savage-looking foreign sailors. They have two or three Forest trucks, made especially to fit the ruts in the little-used tracks, laden with casks of spirits and drawn by rough Forest ponies. I can hear the shouts of the drivers as they urge them forward, and I can see the steaming sides of the ponies in the misty moonlight of a winter night. The spirits were landed at Poole or Christchurch, and they are on their way to Burley where, under the old house I bought with my land, there is still the cellar, then cleverly concealed, where the casks were stored in safety from the watchful eyes of the Excise; a quaint old place built of the local rock.

There is one vision of the roads in the Forest which nobody who saw it can ever forget: the companies of infantry, the serious officers, the ruddy-faced men, and the then untried guns of the glorious Seventh Division, on their route marches, with fife and drum to cheer the way with the now classic strains of “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.” There are spots where I met them in the autumn of 1914 that I never pass without feeling that for all time these places are sacred to the memory of heroes.

Besides the fancied pageantry of the roads there are the natural objects of the woods, the lanes, and the fields; the blossoming hawthorn and the wild roses trailing from the hedges, the hares and rabbits, the birds, the butterflies, and the flowers; sturdy teams with the time-honoured ploughs and harrows, the sowing of the seed, the young gleaming corn, the scented hayfields or the golden harvest; every man at his honourable labour, happy children dashing out of school; noble timber, hazel coppices, grey old villages; cattle in the pastures, or enjoying the cool waters of shallow pools or brooks; sheep in the field or the fold, the shepherd and his dog; apple blossom, or the ripe and ruddy fruit, bowery hop-gardens, mellow old cottages, country-folk going to market, fat beasts, cows and calves, carriers’ carts full of gossips.

Pictures, real pictures, everywhere, endless in variety. Steady! go steady past these woods; see the blue haze of wild hyacinths, the cool carpet of primroses. Look at the cowslips yellowing that meadow; do you see the heron standing patiently in the marsh? Look overhead, watch the hovering hawk; hark! there is the nightingale. Stop a moment at the bridge; can you see the speckled beauties with their heads upstream? Thank God for the blue, blue sky! thank God for the glory of the sun, for the lights and shadows beneath the trees! Thank God for the live air, the growth, the life of plant and tree, the fragrance and the beauty! Thank God for rural England!

One can tell the most ancient, apart from the scientifically made Roman roads, by the way they were worn down from the original level, especially on hillsides, by the constant and heavy traffic. Every passing wheel abraded a portion of the surface, and the next rain carried the debris down the hill, forming in time a deep depression, between banks at the sides, often many feet deep, and giving the impression of the track having been purposely dug out to lessen the gradient. In places where the road became impassable from long use and wet, deviations on either side were made, so that ten or a dozen disused tracks can be seen side by side, often extending laterally quite a long distance from the existing road in unenclosed surroundings.

A great charm of the bicycle is its noiselessness which, with its speed, affords peeps of wild creatures under natural conditions. Cycling on the Cotswolds I came upon two hares at a boxing match; they were so absorbed that I was able to get quite close, and it was amusing to watch them standing upright on their hind legs, and sparring with their little fists like professionals. I have often seen the pursuit of a rabbit by a persistent stoat; the rabbit has little chance of escape, as the stoat can follow it underground as well as over; finally the rabbit appears to be paralyzed with fright, lies down and makes no further effort. Weasels, which probably make up for depredations of game by their destruction of rats, often cross the road, and sometimes whole families may be seen playing by the roadside. I was shooting in Surrey when I once had an excellent view of an ermine the stoat in its winter dress. I did not recognize it until it was out of sight, but I should not have shot it in any case, for the ermine is a very rare occurrence in the south of England. I believe that further north it is not unusual, as is natural where the light colour would protect it from observation in snow, but as far south as Surrey this would be a danger, and I should scarcely have noticed it in the thick undergrowth had it been normal in colour.

We had a squirrel’s nest, or “drey,” as it is called, near my house last year, and the squirrels have been about my lawn and the Forest trees ever since. It was charming, in the summer, to watch them nibbling the fleshy galls produced on the young oaks by a gall-fly (Cynips). They chattered to each other all the time, holding the galls between their fore feet, fragments dropping to the ground beneath the trees. Squirrels are fond of animal food, and I wondered, as there was so much apparent waste, whether they were not really searching for the grubs in the galls. Of late years squirrels have been scarce here; they were formerly abundant, but their numbers were much reduced by an epidemic. They seem to be increasing again, possibly the felling of so many Scots-firs has driven them from their former haunts into adjoining oak and beech woods, such as those which almost surround my land.

During lunch in a meadow by the roadside, on a cycling ride, we found a snake with a toad almost down its throat; the snake disgorged the toad and escaped, but before we had finished lunch it returned and repeated the process. This time I carried the toad, none the worse for the adventure, some distance away, where I hope it was safe. Hedgehogs are said to eat toads, frogs, beetles, and snakes, as well as the eggs of game, to which I have already referred ; it is curious that the old name “urchin” has been superseded in some places by “hedgehog,” but still survives in the “sea-urchin,” and is also used for a troublesome boy.

It is very interesting, when cycling, to notice the changes in passing from one geological formation to another, and in railway travelling, with a geological map, one can quickly observe the transition; the cuttings give an immediate clue, and the contours of the surface and the agriculture are further guides. The alteration in the flora is particularly marked in passing from the Bagshot Sands, for instance, to the Chalk, or from the Lias Clay to the Lias Limestone or the Oolite; the lime-loving plants appear on the Chalk and Limestone, and disappear on the Sands and Clays.

The sunken appearance of the old roads is one of the best proofs of their antiquity, and one is inclined to wonder at their windings, but in following the tracks across the Forest moors one gets an insight into the way roads originated. The ancients simply adopted the line of least resistance by avoiding hills, boggy places, and the deep parts of streams, choosing the shallow fordable spots for crossing. The winding road is, of course, much more interesting and beautiful than the later straight roads of the Romans, though no doubt many of the former were improved by the invaders for their more important traffic. It is to be regretted that the formal lines of telegraph and telephone poles and wires have vulgarized so many of our beautiful roads, and destroyed their retired and venerable expression; more especially as in many places these were erected against the will of the inhabitants, and under the mistaken idea that the farmer’s business is retail, and that he is prepared to deal in and deliver small quantities of goods daily, receiving urgent orders and enquiries by telephone.

The villages in the Vale of Evesham and the Cotswolds afford an excellent illustration of building in harmony with surroundings, and the suitability of making use of local materials. Thus, in the Vale we find mellow old brick, has limestone, half timber and thatch; while on the Cotswolds, oolite freestone and “stone slates” of the same freestone seem the only suitable material. Where the ugly pink bricks and blue slates have of late years been introduced, they appear out of place and contemptible. There is an immense charm about these old villages of hill and vale, and it is curious to think that Aldington was an established community with, probably, as many inhabitants as at the present day, when London and Westminster were divided by green fields.

A story is told of the time before the line to Oxford from Wolverhampton and Worcester was built, when persons visiting Oxford from the Vale of Evesham had to travel by road. An old yeoman family, having decided upon the Church as the vocation for one of the sons, sent him, in the year 1818, on an old pony, under the protection of an ancient retainer for his matriculation examination. On their return, in reply to the question, “Well, did you get the young master through?” “Oh, yes,” he said, “and we could have got the old pony passed too, if we’d only had enough money!”

Partly as an excuse for a bicycle ride I used often to visit distant villages where auction sales at farm-houses were proceeding, and sometimes I came home with old china and other treasures. Wherever there are old villages with manor houses and long occupied rich land, wealth formerly accumulated and evidenced itself in well-designed and well-made furniture, upon which time has had comparatively little destructive effect. As old fashions were superseded, as oak gave way to walnut, and walnut to Spanish mahogany, the out-of-date furniture found its way to the smaller farm-houses and cottages, in which it descended from generation to generation. Now that the cottages have been ransacked by dealers and collectors, the treasures have not only been absorbed by wealthy townspeople, but are finding their way with those of impoverished landowners and occupiers to the millionaire mansions on the other side of the Atlantic.

There is no limit to the temptation to collect when once the fascination of such old things has made itself felt furniture, china, earthenware, glass, paintings, brass and pewter become an obsession. If I had only filled my barns with Jacobean and Stuart oak and walnut, William and Mary, and Queen Ann marquetry, and Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite mahogany, instead of wheat for an unsympathetic British public, and at the end of my time at Aldington offered a few of the least interesting specimens for sale by auction, I might still have carried away a houseful of treasures which would have cost me less than nothing.

An old friend of mine, who had been collecting for many years, and in comparison with whom I was a novice, though my enthusiasm long preceded the fashion of the last twenty-five years, told me that he once discovered a warehouse in a Cotswold village crammed with Chippendale, and that the owner, having no sale for it, was glad to exchange a waggon-load for the same quantity of hay and straw chaff.

Among the more interesting articles which my cycling excursions and previous pilgrimages on foot produced, I have a charming blue and white carnation pattern, Worcester china cider mug with the crescent mark. These mugs are said to have been specially made for the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 at Stratford-on-Avon when Garrick was present. The date corresponds with the time when the mark was in use, and establishes the age of the mug as 150 years. The china in my old neighbourhood was naturally Worcester, Bristol and Salopian, of which I have many specimens of the Worcester more especially ranging from the earliest days of unmarked pieces through the Dr. Wall period, Barr, Flight and Barr, down to the later Chamberlain.

An old pair of bellows is a favourite of mine; it is made of pear-tree wood, decorated with an incised pattern of thistles and foliage, referring possibly to the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, or as a Jacobite emblem of a few years later. The carving is surrounded by the motto:

“WITH MEE MY FREND MAY STILL BE FREE YET VSE MEE NOT TILL COLD YOV BEE.”

These old bellows show unmistakable signs of their more than 200 years of honourable service, and they have literally breathed their last though still surviving; but it would be sacrilege to renew the leather, and might disturb the ghosts of generations of old ladies who blew the dying embers into a ruddy glow when awaiting, in the twilight of a winter’s evening, their good-men’s return from the field or the chase.

One of my greatest finds was a pair of Chippendale chairs at a sale at Mickleton at the foot of the Cotswolds; they belong to the early part of the Chippendale period, before the Chinese style was abandoned. That influence appears in incised fretted designs on the legs, and the frieze below the seats. The seats are covered with the original tapestry, adding much to the interest, and the backs present examples of the most spirited carving of the maker. At the sale, when I went to have a second look, I found two dealers sitting on them and chatting quite casually; the intention was evidently to prevent possible purchasers from noticing them, and more especially to hide the tapestry coverings. The value of the chairs immediately rose in my estimation, and I increased the limit which I had given to a bidder on my behalf, so that I made sure of buying them. The old chairs looked very shabby when they came out into the light of day, and they fell to my representative’s bid amid roars of laughter from the rustic crowd. What a price for “them two old cheers”! they “never heard talk of such a job!” It would surprise them to know that I have been offered five times what they then cost.

My wife has had to do with many parochial committees from time to time, and I have often trembled for my Chippendale chairs when these meetings, accompanied by tea, have been held at my house, for it is not everybody who regards them with the reverence due to their external beauty and true inwardness, or who recognizes in them the

“Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
Or while the patch was worn.”

A very successful afternoon was one I spent at a sale at North Littleton. I remember the beautiful spring day, and the old weather-worn grey house in an orchard of immense pear-trees covered with sheets of snowy blossom. I secured a Jacobean elm chest with well-carved panels, a Jacobean oak chest of drawers on a curious stand, a complete tea set of Staffordshire ware, including twelve cups and saucers, teapot, and other pieces, with Chinese decoration; four Nankin blue handleless tea-cups, a Delft plate, and a Battersea enamel patch-box. My bill was a very moderate one, but the executor who had the matter of the sale in hand was well pleased that these old family relics had passed into the possession of someone who would value them, and not to careless and indifferent neighbours, and was more than satisfied with the amount realized. Next morning, as a token of his satisfaction, he brought me a charming old brass Dutch tobacco box, with an oil painting inside the lid, of a smoker enjoying a pipe.

I have seen some amusing incidents at sales of household goods in remote places; incredulous smiles as to the possibility of the usefulness of anything in the shape of a bath generally greeted the appearance of such an article, and on one of these occasions an ancient, with great gravity, and as an apology for its existence, remarked that it was “A very good thing for an invalid!” I am reminded thereby of an old-fashioned hunting man in Surrey, who was astonished to hear from a friend of mine that he enjoyed a cold bath every morning. He “didn’t think,” he said, “that cold water was at all a good thing next to the skin!”