Bagshot has had dealings with Stuart and other princes hunting the deer and putting up at the inns. Both the Charleses used to hunt in Bagshot Park. Once there was a pretty princes' quarrel. It was at one of the Bagshot inns that the Duke of Buckingham, at the height of his wild career, had the coolness to turn Prince Rupert's horses out of the stables and put in his own. Rupert complained to the King, and the Duke of York backed him; but Charles decided for Buckingham. Twenty years or so later, John Evelyn was at a Bagshot inn with Pepys, and went to call on a Mrs. Graham at her house in Bagshot Park. It was "very commodious and well-furnished, as she was an excellent housewife, a prudent and virtuous lady." She begged him to stay to dinner and sleep the night; she told him all about her children--how the eldest was ill with the small-pox but going on pretty well, and the others running about among infected people so as to catch the disease and get it over while they were young. Evelyn quite approved; he had had small-pox in his own family, and knew something about it. The house in Bagshot Park was made even more commodious some forty years ago, as a residence for the Duke of Connaught. In the Ordnance Maps, Bagshot Heath is placed south of Bagshot; in the old maps of the county, the Heath lies to the north and north-east, and would merge into what is now Chobham Common. It must have covered many more miles than the maps allow it to-day. Chobham Ridges stretch from its south-west corner, a long, sandy scar of three miles, overlooking the Bisley rifle ranges and the desert ground behind them. You are sure to be invited to admire Chobham Ridges, and no doubt twenty years ago it was fine wild country. But frequent notice-boards observing that when the red flag is flying it is dangerous to walk any further, barbed wire, excavations of gravel, and sand trampled by cavalry horses into a paste like wet coaldust may temper the warmest enthusiasm. A hideous foreground can do something to spoil even a fine view, and the view from the Ridges is certainly wide and wild. The finest view I have had from Chobham Ridges was a thunderstorm driving down over Brookwood. It was a gusty, rainy day, and the rolling white and grey clouds and the lines of driven hail rode down the sky like a charge.