Blackwater until recently possessed a picturesque old coaching inn, the ‘White Hart,’ which has unhappily been rebuilt. But it remains, as ever, a village of old inns. Climbing out of its one street we come to a wild and peculiarly unprepossessing tableland known as Hartford Bridge Flats. To the lover of scenery this is a quite detestable piece of road, but the old coachmen simply revelled in it, for here was the best stretch of galloping ground in England, and they ‘sprang’ their horses over it for all they were worth, through Hartley Row and Hook, and well on towards Basingstoke. The famous (or infamous let us rather call them) Hartford Bridge Flats are fully as dreary as any of the desolate Californian mining flats of which Bret Harte has written so eloquently. Salisbury Plain itself, save that the Plain is more extensive, is no worse place in which to be overtaken by bad weather. Excessively bleak and barren, the Flats are well named, for they stretch absolutely level for four miles: a black, open, unsheltered heath, with nothing but stunted gorse bushes for miles on either side, and the distant horizon closed in by the solemn battalions of sinister-looking pine-woods. The road runs, a straight and sandy strip, through the midst of this wilderness, unfenced, its monotony relieved only by a group of ragged firs about half-way. The cyclist who toils along these miles against a head wind is as unlikely to forget Hartford Bridge Flats as were the unfortunate ‘outsides’ on the coaches when rain or storm made the passage miserable. Hartford Bridge, at the foot of the hill below this nightmare country, is a pretty hamlet of yellow sand and pine-woods, sand-martins and rabbits uncountable. The place is interesting and unspoiled, because its development was suddenly arrested when the Exeter Road became deserted for the railway in the early ’40’s; and so it remains, in essentials, a veritable old hamlet of the coaching days. Even more eloquent of old times is the long, long street of [Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON)] [Sidenote: _HARTLEY ROW_]