Highways and Byways in Buckinghamshire, 1910

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Originally published in London 1910 by MacMillan & Co., Ltd., this first edition of the Highways and Byways in Buckinghamshire, is republished here digitally. Macmillan began publishing the Highways & Byways series in 1899 and by 1909 had completed almost twenty publications in the series, which extended across the length and breadth of England, Scotland and Wales, with one publication on Normandy and and another on Ireland. This highly popular series continued until the beginning of the Second World War. In May 2009 Pan Macmillan reissued a one-volume collection of the best of the Highways and Byways series offering a glimpse of the very best of Britain. The original publication of the Highways and Byways in Buckinghamshire contains more than 340 printed pages, but unusually for the series as a whole no map of the route undertaken by the author, Clement Shorter, who chose to take a number of short trips, and almost 100 pen and ink illustrations by Frederick L. Griggs, providing as with all of the Highways and Byways series a wonderful mix of topography, local history and folklore, which perhaps more than ever allows the reader to rediscover parts of Britain that have long disappeared under a morass of concrete, motorways and bypasses. Clement Shorter undertook more than twenty-five 'tours' on which he reported in the Highways and Byways in Buckinghamshire, which included the following stops in his itinerary: Aylesbury and Thame; Aston; Brill; Quarrendon & QuaintonTring; Wendover; Great Missenden; Amersham; High & West Wycombe as well as chapters on noted personalities of the county such as the Chalfont family and noted establishments, including Eton College, Chequers and Hampden House.

Much of the charm a vigour of the Highways and Byways series, which has stood the test of time is down to the travellers and in the case of Buckinghamshire this is no exception. Clement Shorter (1857-1926), a noted journalist, began his career at the Star, before becoming editor of the Illustrated London News and founded icons in British publishing such as Sketch, Tatler and Sphere. Shorter was married to Dora Sigerson, author and daughter of George Sigerson a noted Dublin surgeon, writer and folklorist. The Highways and Byways in Buckinghamshire is replete with more than 100 pen and ink sketches by Frederick Landseer Griggs (1876-1938). A native of Hertfordshire, this was one of thirteen books illustrated by Griggs in the Highways and Byways series. An architectural draughtsman, illustrator, early conservationist, associate of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the Cotswolds, Griggs was the most distinguished etcher of his age and the first etcher to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy. His illustrations from this period 'capture a vanishing England of a brooding spiritual intensity, harking back to an idyll of vanished dreams' and as such fit very well with the general themes of the Highways and Byways series, that of a vanished or forgotten heritage. The presence of so many of Griggs' sketches in one place is sufficient reason to purchase any of the series in which he was the illustrator.

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