IT’S hard to imagine the problems of getting around the Chilterns before the age of motorised transport and properly surfaced roads.
And it’s a thought that often comes to mind a lot around Holtspur and Beaconsfield, for a variety of reasons.
Not least it’s the awareness that transport has played such a seminal role in the growth and prosperity of the town across the centuries, and how much has changed since the heyday of horse-drawn travel.
Today, the constant thrum of traffic barrelling along the nearby motorway and clogging the other main local arteries is a reminder of just how much of a transport hub this town has always been.
But back in the 17th century it must have been an innkeeper’s dream. Having grown up around the crossing between the London to Oxford and Windsor to Aylesbury roads, as stagecoach traffic expanded, the town found itself perfectly placed for overnight stops.
Towards the end of the 18th century coaches were heading through to Oxford and beyond: Woodstock, Banbury, Bicester, Cheltenham, Gloucester and Shrewsbury.
We’ve written about the heyday of stagecoach travel before, of course, as well as the perils of highwaymen across the region.
But we have short memories, it seems. Our familiarity with horses spans so many centuries, yet for modern generations the thought of life before the motor car is hard to even visualise.
Glimpses into past times like period dramas on television may remind us of that lost reality, but even faced with scenes from Downton Abbey or a Jane Austen film, we may still struggle to grasp what it actually felt like to rely on horses for so many different purposes.
Horses had been used in transport and battle by the end of the Iron Age, and Caesar encountered thousands of war chariots when he invaded in 55BC. They would remain the primary source of power for agriculture, mining, transport and warfare until the arrival of the steam engine hundreds of years later.
Nowhere would that have been more evident than around these parts, but we tend to forget that our ancestors needed to travel too, and for centuries that would have involved horses.
There are dozens of different names for horse-drawn carriages, from carts and wagons to broughams, hansom cabs, charabancs and landaus. And there are dozens of jobs that were once reliant on horse-drawn travel too: not just the riders and grooms, but the blacksmiths, wheelwrights and coachmakers, farriers and saddlers.
Long into the railway era horses were still required to pull trolleys and omnibuses, carriages, delivery carts and brewery wagons.
And right up to the end of the 19th century, families around the world were dependent on the horse, with cities dominated by thousands of horse-drawn vehicles, as well as being swamped in urine and manure.
A glance through some old pictures of this part of the Chilterns at the dawn of the 20th century proves the point.
The Bourne End Residents Association published a collection of old photographs from their archives in 1985 called The Way It Was, with views of the parishes of Wooburn, Little Marlow and Hedsor.
From the baker’s cart to the doctor’s carriage or brewer’s dray, the years at the start of the 20th century show the last years of horse-drawn traffic before cars really start to take a hold.
Even today it’s possible to find deserted byways across the Chilterns where it would not feel out of place to see a pony and trap appearing round the bend.
But of course the transport revolution was impossible to resist, on both sides of the Atlantic, and when Henry Ford revolutionised the cost of motoring in 1913 with the Model T, there was no going back.
When madcap motorist Toad of Toad Hall burst into our imaginations in 1908 with the publication of The Wind In The Willows, it was clear that cars were here to stay.
The mass production of automobiles gave the middle classes as well as the wealthy the opportunity to savour the appeal the open road, even if there were few adequate roads on which to drive them.
Looking at the gruelling 1 in 10 gradients that characterise the narrow roads leading down into the Wye Valley from Flackwell Heath, Hedsor and Cliveden, it’s hard to imagine a horse showing much enthusiasm at the prospect of such an ascent, however light their load.
Perhaps it would look like the old nag portrayed by Thomas Hardy in the opening pages of The Woodlanders, “whose hair was of the roughness and colour of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders and hoofs were distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood”.
But we also know that even ancient peoples took good care of their horses and saw them as prized and valuable assets.
Whatever the reality of life on the backroads of Buckinghamshire at the tail end of the 19th century, we can guess such journeys were time-consuming and often far from comfortable, if a lot less unsafe than they were in the age of marauding highwaymen.
But even today on those Chilterns back roads, it’s not hard to imagine the clip-clop of hooves taking the path in a previous century during the age before the motor car where horses really did reign supreme.
Melissa Harrison captures the apparent immutability of the horse-drawn era in her evocative novel All Among The Barley when her youthful narrator writes:
“We would bring each golden field home in the wagon and I would ride atop the last one bearing a green bough like Demeter, in triumph, Moses and Malachi ringing their harness bells proudly as they hauled the final load home.
“Then the rick-yard would be full of wheat and barley, Father would be himself again and we would sit down all together for a harvest meal. In autumn we would plough and harrow and drill once more, and when the steam tackle came we would thresh, and afterwards sell the piles of bright grain.
“No more harm would ever come to us, and so it would go on forever, world without end: the elms always sheltering our old farmhouse, the church looking out over the fields. For the fields were eternal, our life the only way of things, and I would do whatever was required of me to protect it. How could it be otherwise?”
