The Bath Road Part 13

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARLBOROUGH DOWNS, NEAR WEST OVERTON.]

[Sidenote: _AVEBURY_]

The first mention of Avebury Temple is by Aubrey the antiquary. It was in 1648 that he first saw the place, which seems, curiously enough, to have been until then quite unknown. He came upon it quite by chance, when hunting, and must have been astonished at the discovery of so extraordinary a place. His account of it led that kingly amateur of science, Charles the Second, to visit Avebury on his way to Bath in 1668.

Pepys, too, going to Bath, unexpectedly happened both upon Avebury and Silbury Hill, and viewed them and the sepulchral barrows that, crowned with pine trees, look down from the hill sides, with an admiration not unmixed with a superst.i.tious dread.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AVEBURY.]

The road to Swindon goes straight through this great earthwork, and is crossed midway by another; together, with part of the village built within the circle, cutting it up lamentably.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SILBURY HILL.]

[Sidenote: _SILBURY HILL_]

Silbury Hill, which stands within sight, is a fitting pendant to these mysteries. Antiquaries have contended together in referring both to ancient Britons, Phoenicians, Danes, Saxons, and even Romans, and are divided in opinion as to their object: whether they were intended for Druids' or Snake-worshippers' temples, or whether they marked the last resting-places of those slain in some great battle fought before the dawn of history. That Silbury Hill stood here when the Romans came seems, however, to be certain from the fact that the old Roman road from _Cunetio_ to _Aquae Solis_ (the existing Bath Road between Marlborough and Bath), engineered along the whole of its course in a perfectly straight line, swerves slightly from the south base of the hill, evidently to avoid injuring it. A learned antiquary (but the most learned must be reduced to the level of the most ignorant before these mute earthworks) considers that Silbury was raised to commemorate a battle, probably Arthur's second and last battle of Badon Hill. The same authority thinks Avebury to be a burying-place of the dead slain in a great battle, and planned to show the dispositions of the forces engaged on either side.

But Silbury remains inscrutable. It is wholly an artificial hill, somewhat pyramidical in shape, and 170 feet in height. Its base covers five acres of ground, and was once surrounded by a stone circle, of which scanty traces are now left. The contents of it are estimated at 468,170 cubic yards of earth. Repeated attempts have been made to pluck out the heart of this mystery, but without success. So far back as 1777 it was mined from above by a party of Cornish miners, who worked under the direction of the then Duke of Northumberland and others, but nothing was discovered. Then in 1849 it was tunnelled from the base to the centre, where a s.p.a.ce of twelve feet in diameter was examined, with the same disappointing result.

Antiquaries consequently regard Silbury with hungry and expectant eyes.

Just beyond this baffling relic stands the Beckhampton inn, where the "coaches dined" and changed teams, and where the Bath Road divides into the two routes; the right-hand road going through Calne, Chippenham, and Box; the other reaching Bath by way of Devizes and Melksham. Some coaches went one way and some the other. The crack coaches, including the "Beaufort Hunt," went by the former, which is two and a half miles shorter, and is the cla.s.sic route, and always the one selected nowadays by record-breaking cyclists.

x.x.xIV

The road between Newbury and Bath was in coaching days known as the "lower ground." So far as physical geography goes, however, the land is a great deal higher, and much more hilly than the "upper ground" between London and Newbury, and it is not to be wondered at that accidents would sometimes happen here. This, then, was the scene of an accident to a coach driven by a gay young blade, one "Jack Everett;" an accident in which he and an elderly lady pa.s.senger had a broken leg each. Both sufferers were put into a cart filled with straw, and taken to the nearest surgeon. On the road into Marlborough the coachman beguiled the tedium of the way and the pain of his injured limb by saying to the old lady, "I have often kissed a young woman, and I don't see why I shouldn't kiss an old one"--and he suited the action to the words.

[Sidenote: _THE CHERHILL WHITE HORSE_]

Beckhampton inn, whose real sign is the "Waggon and Horses," is the place mentioned by d.i.c.kens in the "Bagman's Story" in the _Pickwick Papers_. It remains as old-fashioned to-day as ever,[5] but does not very closely resemble the word-picture d.i.c.kens draws of it. He probably made acquaintance with the downs and the inn only in pa.s.sing on his way between Bath and London in 1835. It stands at a spot where the road promises to become more cheerful and less gaunt and inhospitable; but the promise is not kept, the way going inexorably again along downs as bare as before, for another two miles. All the way between here and Cherhill village the "Lansdowne Column" is seen crowning the rolling hills to the left front.

Built within the ramparts of an ancient hill-fort of the Danes, who encamped naturally enough in the most inaccessible position they could find, this "column," which is an obelisk, is an exceedingly prominent object in every direction. As one proceeds and turns the flank of the hill, the strange sight of a trotting White Horse is seen carved in the chalk of its swelling shoulder. This is not one of the ancient White Horses that decorate the hillsides of some parts of the West County and date from Anglo-Saxon times, but dates only from 1780, when it was cut by Dr. Allsop, an eccentric physician of Calne. The site it occupies is said to be the highest point between London and Bath, and the White Horse is supposed to be visible for thirty miles--which there is no occasion to believe. The figure measures 157 feet from head to tail, and the eye alone is 12 feet in diameter. The way the figure was designed is just a little curious.

No one could possibly have correctly traced the outlines of so huge an affair, except by external aid, which probably accounts for the bad drawing of the ancient examples. Dr. Allsop adopted the plan of stationing himself on the downs in full view of the rough draft, so to speak, which he had already staked out with flags, and of shouting directions to his workmen by the aid of a speaking-trumpet.

The hillside is so steep at this point that when the White Horse was restored in 1876, a workman was nearly killed by a truck load of chalk descending upon him down the slope.

Pa.s.sing this interesting spot and the village of Cherhill, which lies hidden to the right of the road, the highway reaches Calne through its suburb of Quemerford, along a flat road.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WHITE HORSE, CHERHILL.]

x.x.xV

[Sidenote: _CALNE_]

Calne (whose name be pleased to p.r.o.nounce "Carne") is not a pleasing place. Once the seat of a cloth-making industry, it has seen its trade utterly decay, and is only now regaining something of its commerce in the very different staple of bacon-curing. One does not contemn Calne on account of its misfortunes, but it must always have been a slipshod place.

"Calne," according to Hartley Coleridge, who described his father's three years' residence there, "is not a very pretty place. The soil is clayey and chalky; the streams far from crystal; the hills bare and shapeless; the trees not venerable; the town itself irregular, which is its only beauty. But there were good, comfortable, unintellectual people in it."

With all of which one may agree; save that the "irregularity" of the town is now rather s.l.u.ttish than beautiful. As for the people, we are but travelling the road, and Calne is only an incident on our way--the people of it something less to ourselves, resembling, in fact, x, an unknown quant.i.ty.

The outskirts of Calne are not prepossessing, nor does the long, stony street of mean characterless stone houses that leads to the centre of the little town alter the stranger's view. Calne, in fact, lying so near Bowood, long the seat of the Marquises of Lansdowne, and being their property, wears an abject, servile look. All that makes life worth living is at lordly Bowood; only that which is mean and commonplace is left to Calne. It seems (although one's prejudices are Conservative) as though some vampire were seated near, sucking away the life-blood of the place.

There are two hills just out of Calne; Black Dog Hill, and Derry Hill, and they lead the traveller through picturesque scenery, past one of the lodges of Bowood, and so down into the flat alluvial lands where the Avon flows, and now and again floods out all the dwellers in those levels. The road down there is dreadfully dull to the pedestrian. To the cyclist, on the other hand, who has for these miles past been struggling up hills he cannot climb, and walking down others he dare not coast, the change is one from a penitential pilgrimage to Paradise.

The entrance to the "ancient and royal" borough of Chippenham is hatefully like that into Calne, whose paltry houses are reproduced there. The centre of the town is, however, of a better character, although the streets are cramped and narrow. A singularly foreign air is given to the place by its bal.u.s.traded stone bridge across the Avon, and if one cares to pursue the Continental tone further it may be found in the huge factory near by, where "Swiss" Condensed Milk, of the "Milkmaid" brand, is manufactured on an immense scale. For the rest, its cheese and corn markets and bacon-curing keep it very much alive, and a modern (and brutally ugly) Town Hall, built in 1856, shows sufficiently well how trade has grown since the time when the picturesque old Town Hall, still standing, was built in the sixteenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD MARKET HOUSE, CHIPPENHAM.]

[Sidenote: _MAUD HEATH'S CAUSEWAY_]

The most interesting thing in Chippenham is (to borrow a "bull" for the occasion) outside the town. "Maud Heath's Causeway," a stone-pitched path along the road that runs through the heavy clay lands beside the Wiltshire Avon, extends for four and a half miles, from Chippenham to the summit of Bremhillwick Hill. It was made under the will of Maud Heath, who died about 1474, for the benefit of the market folk resorting to Chippenham, who found the low-lying roads almost impa.s.sable in winter. Little is known of this old-time benefactress, but legend supplies the lack of knowledge, and the popular belief is that she was a market-woman who, finding the road from Langley Burrell into the town in so dreadful a state, determined to leave the savings of a lifetime for the provision of a stone causeway, so that future generations might go dry-shod to market.

This causeway goes from the north-east side of the town, and continues through Langley Burrell to Tytherton Kellaways, up the shoulder of Bremhillwick Hill. The portion between Chippenham and Langley Burrell was, for some unexplained reason, not constructed until 1852-3.

According to the inscriptions on the stone posts beside it, the Causeway is held to commence at the Hill, and to end at Chippenham--

"From this WICK HILL begins the praise Of MAUD HEATH'S gift to these highways."

At the other end, next Chippenham, where the road joins those from Malmesbury and Draycott, is another stone, with the inscription--

"Hither extendeth MAUD HEATH'S gift, For where I stand is Chippenham Clift."

Midway, on the bridge over the Avon, is another stone--a pillar twelve feet high, erected by the Trustees in 1698, with the following facts recorded on it:--

"To the memory of the worthy MAUD HEATH, of Langley Burrell, Spinster: who in the year of grace, 1474, for the good of travellers, did in charity bestow in land and houses, about eight pounds a year, for ever, to be laid out on the highway and causeway, leading from Wick Hill to Chippenham Clift."

CHIPPENHAM CLIFT. Injure me not. WICK HILL.

A statue of Maud Heath, a purely imaginary likeness of course, since no portrait of her is known to exist, was set up on a pillar on the summit of Bremhillwick Hill in 1838 by the Marquis of Lansdowne and a local clergyman.

The pillar is forty feet high, and the seated statue on the top of it represents Maud Heath in the costume of the period of Edward the Fourth, with a staff in her hand, and a basket by her side. An inscription bids--

"Thou who dost pause on this aerial height, Where MAUD HEATH'S Pathway winds in shade or light, Christian wayfarer in a world of strife, Be still--and ponder on the path of life."

The sentiments are admirable, if a little depressing: the verse atrocious.

[Sidenote: _IMPROVING SENTIMENTS_]

But worse remains. There are three dials on the pillar, with an inscription on the side facing the rising sun--

"VOLAT TEMPUS.

"Oh, early pa.s.senger, look up, be wise: And think how, night and day, TIME onward FLIES."