Hartley Row which adjoins. Hartley Row was absolutely called into existence by the demand in the old days of road travel for stabling, inns, and refreshments, and is one of the most thoroughly representative of such roadside settlements. Half a mile to the south of the great highway is the parent village of Hartley Wintney, unknown to and undreamt of by travellers in those times, and probably much the same as it was in the Middle Ages. The well-named ‘Row,’ on the other hand, sprang lip, grew lengthy, and flourished exceedingly during the sixty years of coaching prosperity, and then, at one stroke, was ruined. What Brayley, the historian of Surrey, wrote of Bagshot in 1841, applies even more eloquently to Hartley Row: ‘Its trade has been entirely ruined by the opening of the Southampton and Great Western Railroads, and its numerous inns and public-houses, which had long been profitably occupied, are now almost destitute of business. Formerly thirty stage coaches passed through the village, now every coach has been taken off the road.’ The ‘Southampton Railroad,’ referred to here, is of course the London and South-Western Railway, which has drained this part of the road of its traffic, and whose Winchfield station lies two miles away. [Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).] Before the crash of the ’40’s Hartley Row possessed a thriving industry in the manufacture of coaches, carried on by one Fagg, who was also landlord of the ‘Bell Inn,’ Holborn, and in addition horsed several stages out of London. Some day the coming historian of the nineteenth century will, in his chapter on travel, cite Hartley Row as the typical coaching village, which was called into existence by coaching, lived on coaching, and with the death of coaching was stranded high and dry in this dried-up channel of life. All the houses [Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).] [Sidenote: _OLD TRAVELLERS_]