RURAL INNS

Of first importance to the tourist who flits day by day to fresh woods and pastures new are the rural inns that afford so hospitable and unconventionally comfortable a welcome at the close of the day’s journey. Unwise is he who concludes the day at populous town or busy city, where modern hotels, pervaded by waiters and chambermaids, remind the Londoner of the metropolis he has just left. Your old and seasoned tourist, afoot or on a cycle, by himself or with one trusty, quarrel-proof companion, avoids altogether the Big Town. He has been there, more often than he could wish, and will be there again. His pleasure is in the village inn, or the tavern of some sequestered hamlet; and he knows, so only his needs be not sybarite, that he will be well served there.

Queer old places some of them are: bowered ofttimes in honeysuckle and jessamine; sometimes built by the side of some clear-running stream; at others fronting picturesquely upon the village green. How quaint their architecture, how tortuous their staircases and sloping their floors, and what memories they have gathered round them in their long career! Who, not being the slave of mere luxuries intended to make a man eat when he has no appetite, and to drink when he has no thirst upon him, does not delight in the rural inn?

THE “WHITE HORSE,” WOOLSTONE.

Many, like Canning’s “Needy Knife Grinder,” have—God bless you!—no story to tell, and leave you, it may be, pleasantly vacant-minded, after long spells elsewhere of close-packed mental effort. A welcome vacation indeed!

The “White Horse” at Woolstone, a queerly pretty little inn with a front distantly resembling a Chippendale bureau-bookcase, is an instance. No story belongs to the “White Horse,” which is tucked away under the mighty sides of White Horse Hill, Berkshire, and additionally overhung with trees and encircled with shrubberies and underwoods, and is finally situated on a narrow road that presently leads, as it would seem, to the end of the known world. The stranger stumbles by accident upon the “White Horse” inn while looking for a way uphill to that ancient Saxon effigy of a horse scored in the turf and chalk on the summit; and there, before he tackles that ascent, he does, if he be a wise man, fortify himself against the fatigue of much hard Excelsior business by that best of tourist’s fare—ale and bread and cheese—in the little stone-flagged parlour.

Among memories of old rural inns, those of the “White Horse” are not the least endearing; but the “Anchor” at Ripley has a warm corner in the hearts of many old-time frequenters of the “Ripley Road,” who, when the world was young and the bicycle high, made it their house of call every week in the summer season, and wavered little in their allegiance to the “Ripley Road” even in autumn and winter. Ripley, in the days of the high bicycle and in the first years of the “safety,” was well styled the “Cyclists’ Mecca,” for it was then the most popular place in the wheelman’s world. On Saturdays and Sundays it was no uncommon thing to see two or three hundred machines stacked in front of the “Anchor.”

THE “TALBOT,” RIPLEY.
Photo by R. W. Thomas.

There were several reasons for this popularity: the easy distance of twenty-three miles from London; the fine character of the road; and certainly not least, the welcome extended to cyclists at the “Anchor” by the Dibble sisters and brother in early days when all the world regarded the cyclist as a pariah, and when to knock him over with a brick, or by the simple expedient of inserting a stick between the spokes of his wheel, was a popular form of humour.

The two inns of Ripley—the great red-bricked “Talbot” and the rustic, white-faced “Anchor”—are typical, in their individual ways, of old road life that called them into existence centuries before ever the cycle came into being. The “Talbot,” you see at a glance, was the coaching-and posting-house; the “Anchor” was the house where the waggoners pulled up and the packmen stayed and the humbler wayfarers found a welcome. When railways came, both alike fell into the cold shade of neglect, but came into their own once more during those years of cycling popularity already mentioned. Now that Ripley has ceased to be the popular place it was, another reverse of fortune has overtaken them in common.

At Rickmansworth, which seems to be the battle-ground of Benskin’s Watford Ales, Mullen’s Hertford brews, and the various tipples of half a dozen other surrounding townlets, in addition to the liquors of its own local brewery, there are extraordinary numbers of inns. How do they exist? By consuming each other’s stock-in-trade? Or is the thirst of Rickmansworth so hardly quenched? The inquiring mind is at a nonplus, and is likely to remain so.

A romantic history, in the barley-brew sort, belongs to Rickmansworth; for there, until a year or so later than 1856, by the wish of some pious benefactor—heaven be his bed!—the local authorities every morning placed a cask of ale by the roadside, at the foot of the hill, on the way to Watford. If, however, it were no better than the very “small” and ditchwater-flat ale that to this day forms the “Wayfarers’ Dole” at the Hospital of St. Cross, near Winchester, its discontinuance could have been no great loss.

There was a similarly great and glorious time at Hoddesdon, not so long since but that some ancients still speak of it with moist eyes and regretful accents, when beer was free to all comers. A brewer of that town, one Christian Catherow—a Christian indeed—left a bequest by which a large barrel of ale was placed in the High Street and kept constantly replenished, for the use of all and sundry, who had but to help themselves from an iron pot, chained to a post beside the barrel. Alas! in some mysterious way the ale gradually deteriorated from good strong drink to table-beer, then it became mere purge, and then small beer of the smallest, and at last, about 1841—oh, horrible!—water.

THE “ANCHOR,” RIPLEY, IN THE DAYS OF THE DIBBLES AND THE CYCLING BOOM.
Photo by R. W. Thomas.

Apart from the “Swan” at Rickmansworth, with quaintly carved sign of a swan, dated 1799, swimming among bulrushes, there are but two or three important hostelries in the town; the others are chiefly ale-houses of the semi-rustic type, most of them old enough and quaintly enough built to seem natural productions of the soil. Among them the “Halfway House” and the “Rose and Crown” at Mill End are typical; houses that are, above all else, “good pull-ups” for carmen and waggoners, where a tankard of ale and a goodly chunk of bread with its cousinly cheese are usually called for while the horses outside are taking their nosebag refreshment. Both these old houses are racy of the soil: the “Rose and Crown,” the older of the two, but the “Halfway House” the most curious, by reason of its odd arrangement of seats outside, with backs formed by the window-shutters that were formerly—in times not so secure as our own—put up and firmly secured every night.

THE “HALFWAY HOUSE,” RICKMANSWORTH.

THE “ROSE AND CROWN,” MILL END, RICKMANSWORTH.

Two rural inns, typical in their respective ways of rustic England, are illustrated here. They neighbour one another; the one on the Bath Road at the fifty-fifth mile-stone from London, before entering Newbury, and being, in fact, the half-way house between the General Post Office, London, and the Post Office in Bath; the other but two miles away, at Sandleford Water, where a footbridge and a watersplash on the river Enborne mark the boundaries of Hampshire and Berkshire. Sitting in the arbours of the “Swan,” that looks upon the Bath Road, you may see the traffic of a great highway go by, and at Sandleford Water you have the place wholly to yourself, or share it only with the squirrels and the birds of the overarching trees. There was once an obscure little Priory here, whose every stone has utterly vanished.

THE “SWAN,” SANDLEFORD.

THE “SWAN,” NEAR NEWBURY.

THE “JOLLY FARMER,” FARNHAM.

The “Jolly Farmer” inn at Farnham, where William Cobbett was born in 1762, still stands and, overhung as it is with tall trees, and neatly kept, is in every way, we may well suspect, a prettier place than it was in his time. And it is, doubtless, in its way, now a higher-class house; a general levelling up, in the country, of ale-houses, taverns and rustic inns, being always to be borne in mind when we read or write of the rustic wayside inns of a hundred years or so since. You may in these days even play billiards, on a full-size table, at the “Jolly Farmer,” and order strange exotic drinks undreamt of by the rustics of Cobbett’s day.

THE “BOAR’S HEAD,” MIDDLETON.

Five and a half miles from Manchester, in the now busy township of Middleton, the old rural “Boar’s Head” inn stands, fronting the main street; a striking anachronism in that twentieth-century manufacturing centre, looking out with its sixteenth-century timbered front upon modern tram-lines and an unlovely commercialism. The projecting sign proclaims it to be that now rare thing among inns, a “Free House.” The sight of that inscription leads inevitably to the thought, how strange it is that in this boasted land of freedom, in this country that freed the black slaves, the “tied-house” system should be allowed, by which brewers can buy licensed premises and insist that their tenants shall sell no other liquors than those they supply. Pity the poor bondsman of a tenant, and still more pity the general public condemned by the system to drink the inferior brews that no one would dare to sell to a free man.

The curious late eighteenth-century addition to the “Boar’s Head,” shown in the illustration, was once the local Sessions House, but is now the Assembly Room.

THE “OLD HOUSE AT HOME” HAVANT.

At Havant, adjoining the church, as may be seen in the illustration, is an extremely ancient and highly picturesque inn, the “Old House at Home,” enormously strong and sturdy, with huge beams criss-crossing in every direction, and stout enough to support a superstructure several storeys high, instead of merely two floors. It is as excellent an example as could probably be found anywhere of a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century lavishness of material and want of proportion of means toward ends. But that should not make us grieve; no builder is guilty of such things to-day; let us rather be thankful for the picturesqueness and the strength of it. Those who axed these timbers out of the tree-trunks, and reared up this framework, built to last; and those others who doubtless will some day pull it down, to make way for modern buildings, will have hard work to do so. It can never merely fall down. The history of it is told in few words. It was not built as an inn, and was indeed originally the vicarage, and so remained for some centuries.

An inn with a similar history to that just mentioned—although by no means so humble—is the “Pounds Bridge” inn, on a secluded road between Speldhurst and Penshurst, in Kent. As will be seen by the illustration, it is an exceedingly picturesque example of the half-timbered method of construction greatly favoured in that district, both originally and in modern revival. It is, however, a genuine sixteenth-century building, and was erected, as the date upon it clearly proclaims, in 1593. The singular device of which this date forms a part is almost invariably a “poser” to the passer-by. The “W” is sufficiently clear, but the other letter, like an inverted Q, is not so readily identified. It is really the old Gothic form of the letter D, and was the initial of William Darkenoll, rector of Penshurst, who built the house for a residence, in his sixty-ninth year: as “E.T.A. 69”—his quaint way of rendering “aet.,” i.e. aetatis suae—rather obscurely informs us. Three years later, July 12th, 1596, William Darkenoll died, and for many years—to the contrary the memory of man runneth not—the house he built and adorned with such quaint conceits has been a rustic inn.

“POUNDS BRIDGE.”

A house rural now that the old semi-urban character of the great road to Oxford has, with the passing of the coaches and the post-chaises, long become merely a memory is the great “George and Dragon” inn at West Wycombe. West Wycombe once called itself a town, and perhaps does so still, but it cannot nowadays make that claim convincingly. If we call it a decayed coaching town, that is the most that can be conceded, in the urban way; for to-day its every circumstance is rustic. The “George and Dragon,” a glance at its upstanding, imposing front is sufficient to show, was built for the accommodation of the great, or at any rate for those who were great enough to be able to command the price of chaise-and-four and sybarite accommodation; but the passing stranger would nowadays be unlikely to secure any better meal than bread and cheese, and the greater part of the house is silence and emptiness, while the once bustling yard has subsided into that condition of picturesque decrepitude which, however pleasing to the artist, tells of business decay.

YARD OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WEST WYCOMBE.

It is, indeed, remarkable what picturesqueness lingers in the courtyards of old inns. The front of the house may have been modernised, or in some way smartened up, but the old gables and the casement windows are still generally to be found in the rear, and sometimes the local church-tower comes in, across the roof-tops, in a partly benedictory and wholly sketchable way, as at the village of Dedham, near Colchester, where the yard of the “Sun” inn and the church-tower combine to make a very fine composition. A relic of the bygone coaching days of Dedham remains, in the small oval spy-hole cut through the wall on either side of the tap-room bay-window, and glazed, commanding views up and down the village street, so that the approach of coaches coming either way might be clearly seen.

THE YARD OF THE “SUN,” DEDHAM.

THE “OLD SHIP,” WORKSOP.

Dedham, however, is very far from being exceptionally fortunate among Essex villages, in retaining old inns. It is an old-world county, largely off the beaten track, and offering few inducements to the innovator. Among the many humble old Essex inns the “Dial House” at Bocking, adjoining Braintree, is notable; for although it is now only an ale-house, the elaborately panelled and sculptured Renaissance oak of the tap-room walls indicates a bygone grandeur whose history cannot now be even surmised. Local records do not tell us the story of the “Dial House” before it became an inn. The sign, it should be said, derives from an old sundial on the wail. A curious contrivance may be noticed in one of the old wooden seats in the tap-room; a circular hole, with a drawer below. The purpose at first sight seems mysterious; but it appears that this is the simple outfit for that ancient, and now illegal, game, shove-halfpenny. A recent visit discloses the fact that all the beautiful panelling of the “Dial House” has now been sold and removed.

THE “OLD SWAN,” ATHERSTONE.

The uniquely projecting porch of the “Old Ship” at Worksop, and the old gabled house behind it, still keep a rustic air in the streets of that growing town, just as the “Old Swan” at Atherstone, restored in a judiciously conservative manner, will long serve to maintain memories of the old England of four hundred years ago.

All the old inns of the decayed port of Sandwich have, by dint of the fallen circumstances of that once busy haven, become, with all their surroundings, rural. Golfers have of late years enlivened the surroundings of Sandwich, and partly peopled the empty streets, but commerce has for ever forsaken this old Cinque Port. In one of the most silent streets stands the inn now known as the “King’s Arms,” although, according to the date of 1592 on the richly carved angle-post of the building, and with the additional evidence of the Royal Arms supported by the Red Dragon of the Tudors, it was erected in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The grotesque figure carved in high relief on the angle-post appears to be a Tudor Renaissance combination of Sun-god and the great god Pan. The front of the house is covered with plaster, but there can be little doubt that here, beneath that coating, as in numberless other instances, a good half-timbered construction awaits discovery. Already, when the “King’s Arms” was built, Sandwich haven was being choked with the sand and shingle brought by the Channel currents, and the seaport was seen to be doomed to extinction. He was, therefore, a rash man who then built anew here, and few indeed have been the new houses since then.

A characteristic old inn of Sandwich is the queer old house with peaked gables, contemporary with the “King’s Arms,” bearing the sign of the “Malt Shovel,” and exhibiting one of those implements of the maltster’s trade over the doorway.

The fisher village of Mousehole, in Cornwall—whose name is a perennial joy to visitors—possesses a manor-house turned inn; a private house made public: if indeed it be not altogether derogatory to a picturesque village inn to style it by a name more usually associated with a mere modern urban drinking-shop.

THE “KING’S ARMS,” SANDWICH.

Mousehole may be found a little to the westward of Penzance and Newlyn. Like most of its fellows, it lies along the sides and in the bottom of a hollow, where the sea comes in like a pool, and gives more or less shelter to fisher-boats. No one who retains his sense of smell ever has any doubt of Mousehole being engaged in the fish trade, for there are fresh fish continually being brought in, and there are fish, very far from fresh, preserved in the fish-cellars that are so striking a feature of the place, in the olfactory way. In those cellars the pilchards that are the staple of the Cornish fishery are barrelled until such time as they are wanted for export to the Mediterranean, whence, it is commonly believed, they return, in all the glory of oil, tinned and labelled in strange tongues, “sardines.”

THE “KEIGWIN ARMS,” MOUSEHOLE.

In midst of the crowded houses, and in the thick of these ancient and fishlike odours, stands this rugged old inn, the “Keigwin Arms,” remarkable for its picturesque exterior and for the boldly projecting porch, supported on granite pillars, rather than for any internal beauties. It survives, as it were, to show that not all manor-houses were abodes of luxury, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

I do not know what the Keigwins blazoned on their old coat, for the sign displays no armorial bearings, and the Keigwins were long since extinct. But they were once great here and otherwhere. Here they were the squires, and you read that in 1595, when the Spaniards, grown saucy and revengeful after their Armada disaster of seven years earlier, came and burnt the town while Drake and Hawkins and our sea-dogs were looking the other way, Jenkin Keigwin, the squire, was killed by a cannon-ball, in front of his own house.

THE “SWAN,” KNOWLE.

SIGN OF THE “SWAN,” KNOWLE.

When the “Swan” at Knowle, near Birmingham, was built, “ever so long ago,” which in this case was somewhere about the beginning of the seventeenth century, the neighbourhood of Knowle was wild, open heath. The country round about has long ceased to be anything at all of that nature, but the village has until quite recently retained its rural look, and only in our time is in process of being swallowed by the boa-constrictor of suburban expansion. In a still rustic corner, near the church, the “Swan” stands as sound as ever, and will probably be standing, just as sound in every particular, centuries hence, when the neighbouring houses, built on ninety-nine years leases, and calculated to last barely that time, will be in the last stages of decay. The “Swan” has the additionally interesting feature of a very fine wrought-iron bracket, designed in a free and flowing style, to represent leaves and tendrils, and supporting a handsome oval picture-sign of the “Swan.”

THE “RUNNING HORSE,” MERROW.

Surrey lies too near London and all that tremendous fact implies for very many of its ancient rural inns to have survived, but among those that remain but little altered the “Running Horse” at Merrow stands out with distinction. It was built, as the date over the great window of the centre gable shows, in 1615, and, in unusual fashion for a country inn, in a situation where ground space is plentiful, runs to height, rather than to length.

The frontispiece to this volume, “A Mug of Cider,” showing a picturesquely gabled and white-faced village inn, is a representation of the “White Hart” at Castle Combe, Wiltshire, without doubt the most old-world village in the county, where every house is in keeping, and the modern builder has never gained a footing. It is one of the dozen or so villages that might be bracketed together for first place in any competition as to which is the “most picturesque village in England.”