Another country lane affords the opportunity of regaining the Portsmouth Road from Buriton, without undergoing what always is the penance of retracing one’s steps. It brings the traveller out into the highway just below where the railway crosses, underneath a bridge; while away in front lies the long slope that climbs steadily and straight towards the crest of Butser Hill, that tall knob of the South Downs rising to a height of nine hundred and twenty-seven feet above the Meonware country, and commanding views stretching to Salisbury in one direction, and in others extending to Andover, to the Isle of Wight, and to the rich lands of the Sussex Weald.

Butser Hill is the highest ground in Hampshire. Here the traveller enters upon the chalk country extending to the southern slopes of Portsdown Hill, and here the character of the scenery changes suddenly with the geological strata. Beech woods, oak and fir, give place to barren downs, clothed only with a short and scanty covering of grass, or with meagre patches of gorse. In favoured nooks, sheltered from the winds and brought by the painful unremitting labour of years to a condition not altogether prohibitive of cultivation, farmsteads stand, with their surrounding barns and cow-sheds, the whole comprised within walls constructed of flints picked plentifully from the land.

Here, on the incline leading across Butser Hill, may be noticed the beginning of these things. At one point, to the left hand, turns off what was once the old road, leading across the Hill, now a secluded track-way, bringing the explorer upon excavations in the chalk, and suddenly upon lime-kilns and lime-burners, working away in a solitude where every sound re-echoes from the enclosing chalk in gruff and hollow murmurs. The old road was in course of time abandoned for the new, which marches straight ahead and is carried in a deep and precipitous cutting through the hill-top. The winds whistle shrilly through this chalky gorge, and the frosts and thaws loosen great pieces of chalk which come down into the road with tremendous leaps, and break into a thousand fragments at the bottom. It is a lonely place. A single cottage stands some distance away; the lime-burners are hidden in their resounding dell, and the only company the wayfarer has on ordinary days through the cutting are the two notice-boards that, with a fine disregard of punctuation, caution folks “against Chalk falling from the Sides by Order.” These, together with a board warning cyclists that “This Hill is Dangerous,” are not cheering to the spirits on a winter’s day.

It was on Butser Hill that a post-boy from the “Anchor,” at Liphook, was stopped by an unmounted highwayman, who took the horse he was riding and cantered off upon its back, in the direction of London. The post-boy returned, sorrowful, to Petersfield, where he procured another horse and rode back to Liphook.

On his way, riding up to the turnpike-gate at Rake, he received information of the robber’s passing through, and, upon reaching the “Anchor,” told the landlord of what had happened. Immediately “mine host” organized pursuit, and so quickly did the party take to the road that they overtook man and horse at Hindhead. When the highwayman observed his pursuers gaining upon him, he lost his nerve, and did the very worst thing possible under the circumstances. He dismounted and attempted to conceal himself amid the gorse of that wild spot. But he was soon discovered, captured, and hauled off in custody; afterwards receiving sentence of transportation at Winchester Assizes.

Passing through the precipitous cutting of Butser Hill, the road now comes upon the bare and windy expanse of Oxenbourne Downs, where, at a distance of fifty-eight miles from London, stands beside the road the “Coach and Horses” Inn, marked on the Ordnance maps “Bottom” Inn, and known in coaching days as “Gravel Hill” Inn, from the hill in the Downs rising at some distance to the rear, covered in patches with scrub and gorse. This is the roadside inn referred to by Dickens in “Nicholas Nickleby.”

We left Nicholas and Smike looking down into the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and now take up their journey over Rake Hill and the heights of Butser to this lonely roadside inn, which Dickens, using the latitude allowed to novelists, describes as twelve miles from Portsmouth. It is, in fact, thirteen miles, but its identity is unassailable, because there is no other house beside the road for miles on either hand.

“Onward they kept with steady purpose, and entered at length upon a wide and spacious tract of downs, with every variety of little hill and plain to change their verdant surface. Here, there shot up almost perpendicularly into the sky a height so steep, as to be hardly accessible to any but the sheep and goats that fed upon its sides, and there stood a huge mound of green, sloping and tapering off so delicately, and merging so gently into the level ground, that you could scarce define its limits. Hills swelling above each other, and undulations shapely and uncouth, smooth and rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown negligently side by side, bounded the view in each direction; while frequently, with unexpected noise, there uprose from the ground a flight of crows, who, cawing and wheeling round the nearest hills as if uncertain of their course, suddenly poised themselves upon the wing and skimmed down the long vista of some opening valley with the speed of very light itself.

“By degrees the prospect receded more and more on either hand, and as they had been shut out from rich and extensive scenery, so they emerged once again upon the open country. The knowledge that they were drawing near their place of destination gave them fresh courage to proceed; but the way had been difficult, and they had loitered on the road, and Smike was tired.

“Thus twilight had already closed in, when they turned off the path to the door of a roadside inn, yet twelve miles short of Portsmouth.

“‘Twelve miles,’ said Nicholas, leaning with both hands on his stick, and looking doubtfully at Smike.

“‘Twelve long miles,’ repeated the landlord.

“‘Is it a good road?’ inquired Nicholas.

“‘Very bad,’ said the landlord. As, of course, being a landlord, he would say.

“‘I want to get on,’ observed Nicholas, hesitating. ‘I scarcely know what to do.’

“‘Don’t let me influence you,’ rejoined the landlord. ‘I wouldn’t go on if it was me.’”

And so here they stayed the night, much to their advantage, in a manner familiar to the readers of Dickens. Of their progress to Portsmouth the next day, with Mr. Vincent Crummles and his troupe, we will say nothing, for no other outstanding features of the road are described between this and Hilsea Lines.