Surrey: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope MoncrieffMoncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
History
Surrey: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope Moncrieff
Moncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
Surrey (England) -- Description and travel
about Woking Junction, a town that has grown up fast in one generation
to attract some score thousand people scattered roomily over a parish
whose centre of gravity became shifted by the railway. Among its public
buildings is one notable for singularity among Surrey pine-woods, a
Mohammedan mosque at the south end of a row of brick buildings beside
the down line of the railway as it approaches Woking station. This
exotic institution was planted by the late Dr. Leitner as a college for
Oriental students of different creeds; and at the other end the mosque
had or was to have had its _juwab_ in a temple for Hindoo devotions; but
since the death of its eclectically pious founder, the enterprise seems
to have come to nought.
The amplest stretch of what is called Chobham Common lies some miles
away, upon the Berkshire edge. The best way of reaching this from London
is to get out at the border station of Sunningdale; then at once one can
mount to the common, on this side subdued by its inevitable destiny to
be cut up with lines of houses and swept by a fire of golf balls. Due
south one has still a fine open walk by sandy tracks and among ragged
thickets, making what our fathers called a dreary waste; then come the
wooded ridges and peopled hollows of Windlesham, one of Surrey's most
pleasant nooks, that, fortunately for its peacefulness, is not too near
a railway station. There is one at Bagshot, to which a path leads over
the valley of the Windle, striking into the high-road from Egham beside
Bagshot Park, a hunting lodge of former kings, now the seat of H. R. H.
the Duke of Connaught. Bagshot, a noted coach station, twenty-six miles
from London, that fell into some decay when railways overshadowed roads,
has been reviving again in our time. Its chief fame is the nursery
gardens of a well-known firm, with its huge holly hedges, the most
imposing of which may be sought out above the Church.
Beyond, the road rises on Bagshot Heath, at the "Jolly Farmer," a mile
on, forking for Basingstoke and for Winchester by either side of Crawley
Hill. This inn was once known as the "Golden Farmer," a name connected
with Dick Turpin, when the road over Bagshot Heath made a Harley Street
of his profession. The then lonely heath has borne a crop of military
and other institutions, which people the new town of Camberley in the
fork of the roads, its villas also sought as a retreat for "captains and
colonels and knights at arms." The extensive woods on the Berkshire side
are pierced by a Roman road, and by a fan of long, straight ridges that
look like War Office work, nine of them converging at a point called the
Star Post, from which other fine woodland walks go northward to Ascot,
westward to Broadmoor and Wellington College--but one must not be
tempted to expatiate on this trim wilderness where Hants, Berks, and
Surrey meet among the heaths and pine ridges shutting in the Blackwater
valley.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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