Here for you is the tale of my latest solitary ramble. The journey covers, as you shall see, some two hundred odd miles, through five southern counties of England, and was conceived on an unusual plan. To keep clear of the main roads, and, with two exceptions, the great towns; seeking out the least frequented lanes and by-paths. I covered the whole two-hundred-mile stretch of the way, with camera and pack at surprisingly little expense, by means of lifts taken in any chance vehicle that might be faring in my direction. My plan consisted in waiting by the roadside, or strolling gently onward until something on wheels, it mattered not what, overtook me. And thus by fits and starts - slow joltings in lumbering farm-waggons, steady crawls in brewers’ drays, quiet hours on the tail-boards of pantechnicons and a momentous evening in a missionary van - I found myself, after many days of travel, at my journey’s end in drowsy Arundel and a great and all but resistless longing to turn about there and then, and do the journey all over again. (From: Lift-Luck on Southern Roads).... This book is considered to be one of the very first to document the concept of hitchhiking as a method of travelling to your destination by asking to ride in various stranger’s vehicles for different sections of your journey. So then, why not join Mr Edwardes and me on this intriguing and fascinating trip as we go ‘off the beaten track’ and hitchhike our way through a magnificent part of Southern England at the turn of the last century?
By : Tickner Edwardes (1865 - 1944)
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