Last week I left the ghost of William Cobbett, the 19th-century rural radical, back in London, or the Wen, as he insisted on calling the capital. We had just completed a long rural ride in one another's company through the home counties. Travelling with Cobbett - he by horse or post-chaise, me by horse, bicycle and supercharged Jag - I learned that we are inventing new ways of enclosing and despoiling the countryside we say we love.
What most of us really seem to love, judging by the ways in which rural England is changing, is suburbia and luxury living. If old Cobbett thought that the southern countryside had been too gentrified by the time he published his glorious rant, Rural Rides, in 1830, what on earth would he make of it now? How would he begin to recognise a fast-changing town like Swindon in 2001?
Like Cobbett, I do my best to avoid Swindon; yet it is inescapable, a spider's web of a Wiltshire town that catches the rural rider by hook, crook and every trick known to Miss Moffet's nursery-rhyme assailant. Try as I might to follow Cobbett's route over the top of this postmodern Wen, I get caught up in a labyrinth of new roads that, like some eternally recurring nightmare, offer escape only into yet another brand-new cul-de-sac of executive housing. I begin to feel a touch paranoid after this joke against me wears thin. I truly cannot find a way out, caught in a world of "traditional luxury homes", each jammed against the other, each boxed in by its own double garage. Japanese and Ford cars lurch from one to the other over "sleeping policemen" and more roundabouts than the citizens of Milton Keynes could dream of.
If I follow this parade of executive cars, it will take me, as surely as a New Labour politician follows the creed of Margaret Thatcher and her placemen, to superstores, out-of-town shopping centres, multi-storey car parks, drive-thru burger joints, multiplex cinemas and, worst of all, Swindon's Great Western Designer Retail Outlet. He would have hated them all, and so do I. The culprit, at least in part, is PFI, the private finance initiative, which has spawned bad buildings across the land.
In the course of the ride I am following today, Cobbett attended the sale of a farmhouse owned by Christ's hospital close to the river Mole, near Reigate in Surrey. At first he was delighted by what he saw. "Every thing about this farm-house was formerly the scene of plain manners and plentiful living. Oak clothes-chests, oak bedsteads, oak chests of drawers, and oak tables to eat on, long, strong, and well supplied with joint stools. Some of these things were many hundreds of years old." So far, so good. But then, "One end of the front of this once plain and substantial house had been moulded into a 'parlour'; and there was the mahogany table, and the fine chairs, and the fine glass, and all as bare-faced upstart as any stock- jobber in the kingdom can boast of."
Furious, Cobbett has taken in a picture of the luxurious modern farmhouse, a house denied to the farm labourers who once ate thick slices of bacon and hunks of freshly baked bread around that ancient oak table. Now, the farmers, caught up in the exploitative machinations of the modern laissez-faire economy dreamed up by "Scotch feelosofers" - as he calls them - no longer welcome their workers, but treat them as wage slaves. Meanwhile (Cobbett was hardly PC), the "Irish come to help do the work, the Scotch come to help eat the taxes; or to tramp 'aboot mon' with a pack and licence". As for the table, Cobbett imagines it ending up at "the bottom of a bridge that some stock-jobber will stick up over an artificial river in his cockney garden". He decides to buy it and "keep it for the good it has done the world".
The new executive estates are as hard to escape in southern England as articles on television soap operas are in newspapers. Outside Godalming, I visit the home of an architect and his wife. The house, a converted barn, used to be a working part of a farm owned by nuns who live close by. Over coffee and cakes, I learn that some years ago, the nuns sold much of the farmland to developers to build executive housing. In the 1960s, the nuns had enjoyed tabloid fame. Sister Maria Mater, "the Nun with a Gun", liked to hunt, while her novices, all 57 of them - quite a variety - splashed around in a swimming pool.
Those nuns sounded fun. Not so much fun is the fact that you now look across Surrey fields in one direction, an illusion of rural England, and across triple-garaged mock-Tudor and neo-vernacular houses in the other. It can only get worse as the new housing we are said to need - 4.4m homes - spreads like some double-glazed brick pox across the far side of the green belt.
Hot-tempered on a hot day, Cobbett rode out from Salisbury along the Wylye valley. Visiting the all but empty cathedral, he was reminded of the ingratitude of the luxuriating Anglican clergy who continued to rail against the very Catholic faith that had built this peerless church in the first place. I find the sky-piercing cathedral crowded, although with its shops and cafes, it reminds me of a shopping mall. The ersatz congregation chews gum as if it was a herd of cows masticating cud. It is dressed all but uniformly in shorts, sweatshirts and baseball caps. I should be happier if railway locomotives were built inside Salisbury's nave, if shopaholic New Britain was capable of managing anything so skilled and useful.
Salisbury's ring road is a horrid thing, an urban racetrack that does this city no favours. The route out along the river Wylye is grim as far as Wilton House. Inside Wilton are some of the finest classical rooms in Britain, designed by Inigo Jones. Outside are mean, bricky houses that adhere as closely to the geometric principles of classical architecture as a drive-thru burger restaurant.
Cobbett's route took him off the main road and up the river towards Stonehenge. There are estates of pig sties along it. I stop by the river at the village of Wylye. A newspaper boy skateboards past. Signs on brideway trees along the river banks read "private fishing". Others point to the continuing danger of the spread of foot and mouth disease. The country here feels as uncivil as it is unhealthy.
Cobbett might well have torn the private fishing notice down. He felt the country, and certainly its landowners, could afford to be generous to the hungry and poor. At Tetbury, he admonished a crowd pursuing an old man who had run off with a cabbage. The crowd was angry and in no mood to listen to Cobbett preaching. The old man, they said, was a bad character. Cobbett replied: "Very poor and almost starved people are apt to be bad characters."
The views across Salisbury Plain, stirring then, are stirring now as well. I zigzag alongside Cobbett along what is now the A36 to reach bypassed villages with "singularly bright and beautiful views" and drop down into Warminster. The town bustles in the way that lively market towns do. It seems to be full of Indian and Chinese take-aways and army families out shopping. I eat freshly baked sausage rolls here. Cobbett liked Warminster because "everything belonging to it is solid and good". Even the sausage rolls. The market trades fairly, he says, and there are no middlemen.
Westbury lies uphill from Warminster. I stop here to ride across the downs and to see the white horse cut into the hillside and the site of Bratton Castle, where King Alfred fought the Saxons. Cobbett rides through in a huff, because this "really rotten place" is "a nasty, odious, rotten borough". He does, however, admire the turnips growing here as well as healthy apples, pears and walnuts. And, he can't help liking the houses around nearby Earl's Stoke, rendered white and adorned with clematis, jasmine and rose trees.
The ride on to Devizes via Calne and under the privatised Great Western main line at Dauntsey is remarkable for its sudden dips into thick embraces of woodland and steep rolls out into dramatic views across a valley studded here and there, but all too infrequently, with sheep. For Cobbett, it is all pretty despicable because he can see the canal, "the great channel through which the produce of the country is carried away to be devoured by the idlers, the thieves and the prostitutes, who are all tax-eaters, in the Wens of Bath and London". Today it seems the other way around; I mean, the produce of the Wen, or more accurately of southern China, Vietnam, Mexico and elsewhere, is shipped to the country from the city by articulated lorries and white vans.
At Edington, I stop to talk to two builders whom I take to be American. They drive a big red pick-up and sport dungarees and baseball caps. They insist they are from the county of Wiltshire rather than Wiltshire County, and their accents prove the fact. Like most working people in southern England, they dress as if for a bit part in an Eminem video rather than for farmyards or building sites.
Calne, a rotten borough and thus a villainous hole in Cobbett's day, is a mini-Swindon today. Between mini-roundabouts are concatenations of brand-new executive housing. Back in the Jaguar by this stretch of the ride, I stop to take a photograph opposite the new housing of a sign painted on the wall of a farmer's barn. It reads: "Toot your horn if Tony Blair makes you sick." Blair and his Scotch crew are PFI men. I should toot, but it would be demeaning to do so.
At this point, a livid youth driving a bright red car with what looks like the entire contents of a Halford's motor accessory shop superglued to it blasts his horn at me for parking not exactly in his way. He gives me two fingers, mouths the national cry of Saxon England and roars off, angry eyes half hidden under the long peak of a newly traditional English red baseball cap. He didn't even toot. By chance, I tail him into the designer retail outskirts of - where else? - Swindon. He turns off for the Caravan Centre.
Once free of the octopus-grasp of Swindon, I drive slowly through what is now labelled the Cotswold water park, a cluster of lakes turning on Ashton Keynes and surrounding villages. Cobbett sees more goldfinches here than he has ever seen in his life. I see none. What I do see is an abundance of roadside kill that has begun to feed a growing population of birds of prey. With luck we will yet see kites soaring over central London as they once did, although long before Cobbett's day.
Goldfinches appear to follow Cobbett into Gloucestershire. I stop to walk a handsome lurcher with a friend who lives at Bisley. If it wasn't for the stone-wall-to-stone-wall Jaguars, Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes here, you might think you were back in Cobbett's time. Yet the presence of these svelte cars indicates the wealth that all so often in England goes hand-in-manicured-hand with lovingly preserved villages like these. Bisley could be 1,000 miles from Swindon, 100 from nearby Stroud. Ducks and geese play in the village's Gothic revival fountain. You expect to find a village idiot in a smock sucking a straw.
· Next week, in the final part of Rural Rides Revisited, Jonathan Glancey traces Cobbett's route by air. A new edition of Rural Rides is published by Penguin on September 27. To order a copy in advance, call 0870 066 7979.
