Chapter 15

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 smooth. The wretches can go from the “‘Change” without any danger to their worthless necks.’{90}

There are now, sad to say, after the lapse of nearly eighty years, a great many more of the ‘crew’ here, and they journey to and from Capel Court with even less danger to their necks, bad luck to them!

Egham Hill surmounted, the Holloway College for Women is a prominent object on the left-hand side of the road, the fad of Thomas Holloway, whose thumping big fortune was derived from the advertising enterprise which lasted wellnigh two generations, and during the most of that period rendered the advertisement columns of London and provincial papers hideous with beastly illustrations of suppurating limbs, and the horrid big type inquiry, ‘Have you a Bad Leg?’ Pills and ointments, what sovereign specifics you are—towards the accumulation of wealth! All-powerful unguents, how beneficent—towards the higher education of woman!
VIRGINIA WATER

No less a sum than ￡600,000 was expended on the building and equipment of this enormous range of buildings, opened in 1887, and provided royally with everything a college requires except students, whose number yet falls far short of the three hundred and fifty the place is calculated to house and teach. A fine collection of the works of modern English painters is to be seen here, where study is made easy for the ‘girl graduates’ by the provision of luxuriously appointed class-rooms and shady nooks where ‘every pretty domina can study the phenomena’ of integral calculus and other domestic sciences. It seems a waste of good money that, although a sum equal to ￡500 a year for each student is expended on the higher education of women here, no prophetess{91} has yet issued from Egham with a message for the world; and that, consequently, Mr. Thomas Holloway and his medicated grease have as yet missed that posthumous fame for which so big a bid was made.

In two miles Virginia Water is reached, passing on the right hand the plantations of Windsor Great Park. To this spot runs every day in summer-time the ‘Old Times’ coach, which, first put on this road in the spring of 1879, kept running every season until 1886, when it was transferred to the Brighton Road, there to become famous through Selby’s historic ‘record’ drive. Another coach, called the ‘Express,’ was put on the Virginia Water trip in 1886 and 1887; but, following upon Selby’s death in the November of the latter year, the ‘Old Times’ was reinstated on this route, and has been running ever since, leaving the Hotel Victoria, Northumberland Avenue, every week-day morning for the ‘Wheatsheaf,’ and returning in the evening.

This same ‘Wheatsheaf’ is probably one of the very ugliest houses that ever bedevilled a country road, and looks like a great public-house wrenched bodily from London streets and dropped down here at a venture. But it is for all that a very popular place with the holiday-makers who come here to explore the beauties and the curiosities of Virginia Water.

There are artificial lakes here, just within the Park of Windsor—lakes which give the place its name, and made so long ago that Nature in her kindly way has obliterated all traces of their artificiality. It is a hundred years since this pleasance of Virginia Water was formed by imprisoning the rivulets that run into{92} this hollow, and banking up the end of it; nearly a hundred years since the Ruined Temple was built as a ready-made ruin; and there is no more, nor indeed any other such, delightful spot near London. It is quite a pity to come by the knowledge that the ruins were imported from Greece and Carthage, because without that knowledge who knows what romance could not be weaved around those graceful columns, amid the waters and the wilderness? Beyond Virginia Water we come to Sunningdale.
ROMAN ROADS

From Turnham Green to Staines, and thence to Shrub’s Hill we are on the old Roman Road to that famous town which has been known at different periods of its existence as Aquae Solis, Akemanceaster, and Bath. The Saxons called the road Akeman Street. Commencing at a junction with the Roman Watling Street at the point where the Marble Arch now stands, it proceeded along the Bayswater Road, and so by Notting Hill, past Shepherd’s Bush, and along the Goldhawk Road, where, instead of turning sharply to the left like the existing road that leads to Young’s Corner, it continued its straight course through the district now occupied by the modern artistic colony of Bedford Park, falling into the present Chiswick High Road somewhere between Turnham Green and Gunnersbury. Through Brentford, Hounslow, and Staines the last vestiges of the actual Roman Road were lost in the alterations carried out for the improvement of the highway under the provisions of the Hounslow and Basingstoke Road Improvement Act of 1728, but there can be little doubt that the road traffic of to-day from Hounslow to Shrub’s Hill{93} follows in the tracks of the pioneers who built the original road in A.D. 43; while as for old-world Brentford, it would surprise no one if the veritable Roman paving were found deep down below its High Street, long buried in the silt and mud that have raised the level of the highway at the ford from which the place-name derives.

The present West of England road turns off from the Akeman Street at the bend in the highway at Shrub’s Hill, leaving the Roman way to continue in an unfaltering straight line across the scrubby wastes and solitudes of Broadmoor, to Finchampstead, Stratfieldsaye, and Silchester. It is there known to the country folk as the ‘Nine Mile Ride’ and the ‘Devil’s Highway.’ The prefix of the place-name ‘Stratfieldsaye,’ as a matter of fact, derives from its situation on this ‘street.’ Silchester is the site of the Roman city Calleva Atrebatum, and the excavated ruins of this British Pompeii prove how important a place this was, standing as it did at the fork of the roads leading respectively to Aquae Solis, and to Isca Damnoniorum, the Exeter of a later age. Branching off here to Isca, the Roman road was for the rest of the way to the West known as the Via Iceniana, the Icen Way, and was perhaps regarded as a continuation of what is now called the Icknield Street, the road which runs diagonally to Norfolk and Suffolk, the country of the Iceni.

Very little of this old Roman road on its way to the West is identical with any of the three existing routes to Exeter. There is that length just named, from Gunnersbury to Shrub’s Hill; another piece, a{94} mile or so from Andover onward, by the Weyhill route; the crossing of the modern highway between ‘Woodyates Inn’ and Thorney Down; and from Dorchester to Bridport, where, as Gay says of his cavaliers’ journey to Exeter:—
Now on true Roman way our horses sound,
Graevius would kneel and kiss the sacred ground.

Onwards to Exeter the measurements of Antoninus and his fellows—those literally ‘classic’ forerunners of Ogilby, Cary, Paterson, and Mogg—are hazy in the extreme, and it is difficult to say how the Roman road entered into the Queen City of the West.

Oh! for one hour with the author of the Antonine Itinerary, to settle the vexed questions of routes and stations along this road to the country of the Damnonii. ‘Here,’ one would say to him, ‘is your starting-point, Londinium, which we call London. Very good; now kindly tell us whether we are correct in giving Staines as the place you call Ad Pontes; and is Egham the site of Bibracte? Calleva we have identified with Silchester, but where was your next station, Vindomis? Was it St. Mary Bourne?’
THE HEATHS

In the meanwhile, until spiritualism becomes more of an exact science, we must be content with our own deductions, and, with the aid of the Ordnance map, trace the Roman Via Iceniana by Quarley Hill and Grateley to the hill of Old Sarum, which is readily identified as the station of Sorbiodunum. Thence it goes by Stratford Toney to ‘Woodyates Inn’ and Gussage Cow Down, where the utterly vanished Vindogladia is supposed to have stood. Between{95} this and Dorchester there was another post whose name and position are alike unknown, although the course of the road may yet be faintly traced past the fortified hill of Badbury Rings, the Mons Badonicus of King Arthur’s defeat, to Tincleton and Stinsford, and so into Dorchester, the Durnovaria of the Romans, through what was the Eastgate of that city. The names and sites of two more stations westward are lost, and the situation of Moridunum, the next-named post, is so uncertain that such widely sundered places as Seaton, on the Dorset coast, and Honiton, in Devon, eighteen miles farther, are given for it. Morecomblake, a mile from Seaton, is, however, the most likely site. Thence, on to Exeter, this Roman military way is lost.