So wooded are these lofty hills, so rustic their every bend and fold,
and of so wondrous a fertility their bounteous soil, that, were it not
for the established fact of mere distance from London lending the west
country an additional charm, one would dare to compare this district
with South Devon itself. Its actual merits are equal; its distance
from town less than thirty miles, as compared with two hundred. But
beyond compare are its old cottages, the red brick and timbered
farmsteads, and the ancient manor-houses of this corner of Surrey,
whose ruddy walls, or green and lichened roofs, exercise the palettes
and the pencils of artists innumerable. Surrey farmhouses have their
likeness nowhere else, and in no other county shall you seek with equal
certainty of success these characteristics, or those clustered chimneys
that make every humble home of these valley roads and sequestered
bylanes an old-world-mansion, dignified and reposeful.
It could be very persuasively argued, if need were, _à propos_ of the
title of this paper, that no one should climb hills if he would keep
a proper respect for them. Let the valleys be easefully pedalled and
exertion saved, and the fine sense of mystery and the illimitable which
hilltops give, whether wreathed in mists or bathed in sunlight, be at
the same time preserved. When you climb a hill you know its limits.
You know, as a result of your exploration, every minor feature of it,
and thus, fully informed, have of necessity something of that contempt
engendered by familiarity. Thus are the easefully inclined excused
of their easefulness. Not for such the toilsome climb—to discover
that the grass of the hilltop is merely the grass of the valley, only
of less luxuriant growth. “All is vanity and vexation of spirit,”
said the Preacher. He had probably climbed the hilltops and become
disillusioned. Thus it is to be an explorer! Why, even those stalwarts
who have climbed Parnassus have found the empyrean something too thin,
and the grass of those heights not so much rare as rank. Happy, then,
those who are content with the level lands, and regard the uplands from
that safe and comfortable vantage-point. They keep their illusions,
and if they be imaginative there is no reason why lions and tigers,
eagles and other fearful wild-fowl, should not inhabit the North Downs,
instead of the rabbits and the song-birds that reward the explorer’s
gaze.
[Illustration: Map—FARNHAM to ALBURY]
The readiest way to reach this district is by train to Redhill
Junction; not that anyone would resort to that modern town—that bald
and artless creation of railway times—for any interest attaching to
it, but its position makes it the key to a lovely stretch of country.
It is a charmingly happy circumstance that the southern face of the
North Downs is followed for many miles—indeed, along the whole extent
of that noble range, from Maidstone to Guildford and Farnham—by
splendid roads, reasonably level, good, and direct. Those roads are
traced in great measure in other pages of this book; let our route now
lie from Redhill to Guildford.
[Illustration: Map—SHERE to REDHILL]
From the grim cluster of asylums, reformatories, and industrial schools
at Redhill, one finds solace presently at Reigate, where houses of
from sixteenth to late eighteenth century date abound. It is a town
typical of the coaching age, to which it owed its eighteenth-century
prosperity, and is built in characteristic red brick. Thence to Reigate
Heath, on whose fine breezy expanse the curious may discover that prime
curiosity, the “Windmill Church.” The old windmill thus converted into
a church nearly a quarter of a century ago has a curious history. Now
a chapel-of-ease to Reigate, under the style of the “Chapel of Holy
Cross,” the first service was conducted on the 14th of September 1880,
and has been continued regularly on every Sunday since. The reason
for this singular conversion was purely sentimental, the mill standing
on the site of one of four ancient wayside oratories established
for the use of pilgrims in days when this, the Pilgrims’ road from
Southampton to Winchester and Canterbury, was largely travelled. One
of the oratories became a prison, another suffered a transformation
into a house attached to pleasure-grounds, and the Chapel of Holy Cross
became a windmill. The original building, built for worship and used
for milling, has long disappeared, and the present one, built as a mill
and now used as a church, took its place. No attempt has been made to
alter the character of the interior, whose oddly timbered circular
space is simply fitted with altar, rush-bottomed chairs, and cocoa-nut
matting, the great beams painted and here and there stencilled with
ecclesiastical designs. A rental of one shilling a year is paid for the
use of the building to Lady Henry Somerset.
[Illustration: REIGATE HEATH.]
All the way from Reigate Heath to Buckland the North Downs are seen
going in a procession to the right, beneath them nowadays springing up
the country homes of a generation that loves scenery and can scarce
understand why our grandfathers did not appreciate it. Thoroughly
typical of the old time was Captain Morris, author of those town-loving
lines—
“In town let me live, then; in town let me die;
For no, I can’t relish the country, not I.
If one _must_ have a cottage in summer to dwell,
O give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall.”
His aspiration was denied him, for that eighteenth-century Anacreon
died here at Brockham.
A solemn row of immemorial yews along the shoulders of the hills
marks where the sandalled feet of pilgrims trod the Pilgrims’ Way. At
Buckland a pond, a sign-post, a tall elm, and a church that looks like
a barn, and a barn that looks like a church, make up a very pretty
picture. Betchworth lies to the left hand, a mile onward, and possesses
some stately old houses. To it succeeds Dorking.
Now Dorking, if you can conceive the conjunction, is at once
aristocratic and popular. The proximity of that Cockney pleasance,
Box Hill, is, of course, responsible for the one, and doubtless the
overawing neighbourhood of Denbies and Deepdene accounts for the other.
Dorking is celebrated for a mythical battle, for a breed of fowls,
and for having been the home of Tony Weller, who kept the “Markis o’
Granby” here. The name of the place was invariably spelt “Darking” a
hundred years ago, even by literary folks, and country people still
pronounce it in that way. It is a supremely cheerful town, with a very
wide High Street.
[Illustration: WESTCOTT.]
Beyond the town the North Downs assume a wilder and more wooded aspect,
where the modern but pretty hamlet of Westcott stands by the way, and
the deep valley and heavy woodlands of Wotton open out delightfully
upon the wayfarer. In the “little church of Wotton”—pronounced
“Wootton”—lies John Evelyn, the Diarist and lover of trees, with many
other Evelyns, and Wotton Park is just beyond, where many trees of his
planting yet flourish. Wotton Hatch, a lonely hamlet, overlooks the
scene.
[Illustration: THE LITTLE CHURCH OF WOTTON.]
At Abinger Hammer and Gomshall, the trickling streams that have
followed the valley are dammed up into “hammer ponds,” where, “once
upon a time,” iron was forged. But it is nearly two hundred years since
the last furnace was blown out and the final hammer rang upon the
ultimate anvil at Abinger. The days when iron-ore was dug and smelted
in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey are long forgot.
Shiere succeeds to Gomshall in half a mile. Shiere and picturesqueness
are synonymous and interchangeable terms; a place composed of a narrow
street with queer cottages all tumbled together, as though for warmth,
or as if land were scarce and dear.
Now, along a winding but excellent road, we come to Albury; the famous
“Silent Pool” lying a little way off to the right, on a fork of the
road leading to Newlands Corner. It was the egregious Martin Tupper who
made the “Silent Pool” famous, but, truth to tell, it is but a pretty
lakelet, whose real name was Sherbourne Pond. Its remarkably clear
waters swarm with trout, whose extraordinary tameness is perhaps due to
the many visitors, who feed them for the pleasure of seeing them spring
out of the water for their food.
Coming to Albury, we enter upon the loveliest section of the whole
journey. The long, scattered village, with picturesque old houses and
modern cottages, built with rare good taste, leads to Albury Park, the
Surrey home of the Duke of Northumberland. The partly ruined church in
the park, with the modern Irvingite transept and the curiously domed
roof of the central tower, is worth seeing and sketching, as also is
the romantically situated St. Martha’s Chapel, crowning one of the
most conspicuous hills of the North Downs.
[Illustration: AN OLD WEIR ON THE WEY.]
“St. Martha’s” Chapel may really have been “sancti martyris”
originally, and dedicated to the “holy blisful martyr,” St. Thomas
of Canterbury. It was built in the late twelfth century and was a
chapel on the old Pilgrims’ Way. The corruption of the name into “St.
Martha’s” can readily be understood.
[Illustration: POSTFORD PONDS.]
On the way to Chilworth, Postford Ponds skirt the roadside and form
a pretty grouping of water, woodlands, and old farmhouses, with St.
Martha’s in the distance. Chilworth, whose not very accessible parish
church St. Martha’s Chapel is, lies on the little stream that forms
this chain of ponds. But hear what old Cobbett says: “This valley,
which seems to have been created by a bountiful Providence as one
of the choicest retreats of man, which seems formed for a scene of
innocence and happiness, has been, by ungrateful man, so perverted
as to make it instrumental in effecting two of the most damnable
of purposes; in carrying into execution two of the most damnable
inventions that ever sprang from the mind of man under the influence
of the Devil! namely, the making of gunpowder and of banknotes.” The
banknotes are no longer made at Chilworth, but the manufacture of
“villainous saltpetre” still proceeds.
To Chilworth succeeds the wide common of Shalford, leading close by the
winding Wey to Guildford town. Here that little river, evidently not so
little, ages ago, has cut a deep cleft through the immense rampart of
the North Downs, so that the road to the town is quite deeply recessed
in a valley, and flat.
Do you know Guildford, and yet not love it—its quaint High Street, the
steepest, they say, in all England, built along the slope of this cleft
made by the Wey; its churches, Abbot’s Hospital, and that quaintest and
most curious of old buildings, the Guildhall?
[Illustration: THE GUILDHALL AND HIGH STREET, GUILDFORD.]
They do not build Guildhalls of this kind to-day, the architects who
are called in to design such things. Perhaps they are not allowed.
Nor are they called Guildhalls. “Perish the name!” say in effect the
upstart towns of this expansive era, and nothing will serve their turn
but “Municipal Buildings.” We know the Municipal Building order
of architecture, and, sooth to say, we do not like it, whether it be
named Classic or Victorian Renaissance, or labelled in any other style
intended to cloak poverty of design and display a crazy patchwork of
priggish eclecticism.
Compared with the frowning Keep of Guildford, the Guildhall is, of
course, the merest parvenu, having been built in 1683, two years before
Monmouth was dragged up to execution on Tower Hill after Sedgemoor
fight. But the old Norman tower is four-square and stern, with only the
picturesqueness that historic association can find; while the belfried
turret of the Guildhall, and its boldly projecting clock, impending
massively over the pavement of the High Street, are the pride of the
eye and a delight to the artistic sense of all them that love their
like.
Leaving Guildford’s picturesque High Street by one of the retiring
thoroughfares branching from it on the north side, past that most
sketchable of Guildhalls, we come, in something less than a mile, to a
crossing of the Wey, and so to a hillside parting of the roads. Here
we take the left-hand turning, to the secluded hamlet of Wood Street,
whence roads and lanes in plenty—some straight, many devious—lead to
that hamlet of “Normandy” where, in 1835, William Cobbett died. If it
be true that William the First “loved the red deer like a father,” it
may be said with at least equal appropriateness that Cobbett had as
great a love for trees. Here, at oddly named Normandy, he oscillated
between the equally congenial occupations of harrying a political
opponent and of creating plantations, and many of the saplings he
planted with his own hands are now grown up to form the woodlands that
clothe this countryside.
It was well for Cobbett’s peace of mind that Aldershot Camp, the signs
of whose neighbourhood now begin to be evident on our way to Ash and
Farnham, had not come into being while he still lived; for, soldier
though he had been, and a characteristically independent and sturdy
one, he grew to hate the military, and never missed an opportunity of
venting his apocalyptic wrath upon the Army. Did he live now, he would
find plenty opportunities here, and around his birthplace at Farnham;
for the presence of the redcoats—and the blue, the grey, the green, and
the khaki coats too—is very much in evidence, alike on the road and on
the surface of the road, cruelly cut up by ammunition waggons and guns.
And so through crooked-streeted Ash, with its public-houses dedicated
to military commanders distinguished and heroic, or merely Royal, and
the stores and the shops showing the unromantic and domestic side of
the soldier’s life, which, and not glory, is nearly the whole of Tommy
Atkins’s existence, varied with dusty and inglorious drills in gritty
barrack-yards and field-days in the Sahara-like Long Valley.
The neighbourhood of Aldershot and its camp is highly interesting to
those who take an interest in soldiering (and most feel an attraction
that way), but it is utterly destructive of the picturesque.
A mile beyond Ash we cross insensibly from Surrey into Hampshire, and
in another mile back again, owing, not to any vagary in the road, an
eminently and respectably straight highway, but to the serpentine and
elusive character of the county boundary. And thus—through unsponsored
new hamlets, the sporadic but unacknowledged offshoots of Aldershot,
sprawling yonder across the sandy wastes—to the tail of the Hog’s Back,
whose bristles are the larches and firs of this heathy country.
The right-hand way, at the junction of the roads, leads into Farnham,
“rather better,” as the country people say, than a mile off. It is
conceivable that, at the end of a long day, this might appear to be
“rather worse.” Farnham remains itself still, despite its near military
neighbour, a quietly prosperous old town, with a long east to west
street, and a short and broad one in the middle of the town, running
north to the Castle, and beyond it to a very welter of firs and sands.
Farnham Castle yet gives its tone to Farnham, for it is still—as it has
been for nearly eight hundred years—the residence of the Bishops of
Winchester; although, to be sure, the Bishops cut a very small figure
nowadays beside that soldier-statesman-churchman, Henry of Blois, who
originally built the fortress. Farnham is appropriately sedate and
decorous. The ruined Keep is here, in its pretty garden shaded by
ancient cedars, and there are a few vestiges of antiquity within the
great range of buildings; but very few, for the restorations by Bishop
Morley in the late seventeenth century, and those of recent years, have
preserved the place as a residence at the expense of archæology. Even
so, the picture made by the long and varied front looking down upon
Farnham and seeming to block the street, is very grand.
Away on the other side of the main street is the church; the churchyard
a place of pilgrimage for the sake of Cobbett, that ardent reformer who
frothed at the mouth with political denunciations for forty years, and
now lies beneath a closely railed-in altar-tomb on the north side. A
more cheerful resort is his birthplace, a very old gabled house, now
the “Jolly Farmer Inn,” facing a bridge across the Wey, in Abbey Street.
He was born in 1762; and almost alone, perhaps, among the places with
which he was familiar, the house is unchanged.
It is past the railway station that one leaves Farnham for Waverley
Abbey. Signs of the hop-growing industry of which this town is a centre
are evident to sight and smell in early days of autumn, for then are
rumbling carts laden with fat sacks (“pockets,” they call them) of
fragrant hops met with at every turn, and the scent of them produces
the most furious appetite.
After passing the level crossing take the left-hand road, which leads
to Waverley in under two miles, with Moor Park on the left, once the
seat of Sir William Temple, the patron of Swift, the “eccentric,
uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman” who was that retired statesman’s
secretary. How little dignified was the post above that of a lackey may
be judged from the flirtation Swift began in the servants’ hall with
Lady Giffard’s waiting-maid, a flirtation “which,” says Macaulay, “was
to be as widely famed as the passion of Petrarch or of Abelard.” The
waiting-maid was “Stella,” and the poor secretary became that terrible
genius, Dean Swift.
The park, rugged and impressive, with sombre conifers, is traversed by
the Wey. Under a sundial before the house is buried the heart of Sir
William Temple, the former owner of the place, at his own request, in
a silver box; and at the other end of this domain is that celebrated
cavern, “Mother Ludlam’s Hole,” a cave containing a spring, now railed
off from vulgar profanation by an ornamental iron railing. It was here
that the brethren of Waverley Abbey, it is thought, found the source of
their drinking water. “Mother Ludlam” was a chimerical personage of the
Robin Goodfellow type, who, according to the superstitious peasantry,
supplied suppliants with any article they might require, on their
repairing to her cave at the stroke of midnight, turning round thrice,
and three times repeating the request; promising to return the borrowed
article in two days. The next morning the object wished for would be
found outside the mouth of the cavern. This beneficent personage at
last lent a cauldron to some ill-principled person or another who
forgot to return it, and since then the charm has ceased to work. The
proof of this story lies in the fact that the cauldron is to be seen
to this day, preserved in the vestry of Frensham Church; a fact, of
course, conclusive!
A pretty, rose-entwined cottage by the entrance to Moor Park still goes
by the name of “Stella’s,” and opposite, on the right hand of the road,
is the lodge gate leading to the grounds of Waverley Abbey, whose
scanty ruins stand in a flat meadow beside the river Wey, within sight
of dark, pine-clad Crooksbury Hill. The river describes three parts of
a circle around these crumbling walls, the poor relics of the first
Cistercian Abbey in England. There is, indeed, more left of the Abbey
underground than above, for the crypt remains perfect.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this spot is intangible, and
lies in the fact that the title of the Waverley novels derives from
these ruined walls, Scott having read those still-existing records of
this religious brotherhood,—the “Annales Waverlienses,”—and having been
impressed with the musical sound of the name.
Leaving the grounds of Waverley Abbey, the dark, pine-clad mass of
Crooksbury Hill lies ahead, and must be climbed to reach Seale and
the neighbouring villages that lie down below its northern shoulder,
and under the lee of that ten miles’ stretch of the North Downs, from
Guildford to Farnham, known as the Hog’s Back. Seale is a sheltered,
secluded nook, shut in by pines. Two miles distant from it, following
under the ridge towards Guildford, along an unfrequented road, comes
Puttenham, owing everything, in a picturesque sense, to its solemn
background of hills and woodlands. Without that scenic backing it would
be nothing remarkable.
[Illustration: PUTTENHAM.]
From here we bend in a south-easterly direction, away from the near
companionship of the hills and woods, towards Compton, a village
remarkable for its little Norman and Early English church, almost
hidden from the stranger’s notice by the trees that densely surround
it and its unassuming shingled spire. Notice the odd dormer windows in
the roof, like those of a dwelling-house. But the great peculiarity
here is that the chancel is in two storeys, a most remarkable and
unusual device. The exterior of the chancel is commonplace, not to say
ugly, and was rebuilt in 1860, when traces of an outside staircase
to the upper storey of the chancel were destroyed; but the interior
remains particularly beautiful and interesting. The chancel is divided
from the nave by a round-headed Norman arch, ornamented with dog-tooth
moulding, and immediately over the altar rises another of exactly the
same type, but of only half its height. It is this, with its groined
ceiling, dividing the eastern end of the building into two floors,
which makes the chancel two-storeyed. This upper chamber is conjectured
to have served the double purpose of rood-loft and chantry chapel; but
beyond conjecture no one has ever been able to go, for the history of
the church is silent on this point.
From Compton to the entrance of Loseley Park is a mile. The gates
will be seen on the left, and admit to a tree-shaded park, which
might almost, from its solitude and wildness, have been the original
of the legend of the Sleeping Beauty. Such is Loseley, and such the
grey stone Early Elizabethan house, standing ghostlike at the end of
the avenue. Loseley was begun by Sir William More in 1515, and never
completed after the architect’s full design. Still, it is a large and
stately mansion, and contains treasures of stained glass and carvings,
of armour and relics, that make it notable indeed. The “Loseley MSS.”
preserved here, the correspondence during nearly five hundred years of
England’s most famous statesmen and history-makers, is among the best
of such collections.
A ramble through the park brings the traveller to a road running right
and left. The turning to the right helps us toward the completion of
our circle, and leads past another old mansion, Brabœuf House, to
the old Portsmouth road, by St. Catherine’s Hill. Here our way lies
downhill, to the left, into Guildford; but, before concluding, let
us ascend the easy path to the hilltop, and look down to where that
elusive companion of the greater part of this tour, the river Wey, runs
far below, past picturesque St. Catherine’s Ferry. It is a romantic
spot, this hollow on the hillside, through which runs the old highway
to Portsmouth. Many years ago some long-dissolved Highway Trust lowered
the road through the crest of the hill for the sake of the horses, and
“St. Catherine’s Hollow,” as it is known, has since become the spot
for a painter. Turner, indeed, painted it, but he was more concerned
to show the ruined Chapel of St. Catherine beyond than to linger over
the exquisite wildness and ruggedness of these overhanging banks. They
are of the yellowest sand and softest sandstone, and here and there
they form cliffs not so diminutive but that the sand martins have dug
their tunnelled homes in them, and have found safety from attack. The
face of these clifflets is as full of these nest-holes as the white
cliffs of Dover are of batteries and casemates, and if you are content
to wait quietly and to watch patiently, the lively inhabitants of
them will be observed coming and going. Other tunnels there are here,
bigger and less tidy. These are the burrows of the rabbits. There is
a greater tunnel still down below—that of the South-Western Railway,
between Guildford and Godalming, which collapsed suddenly one midnight
in 1895, burying horses and carriages from the stables of a villa on
this hilltop. Animals and carriages alike fell through into the depths
beneath and were destroyed. The line was blocked for a week, and during
that period this road was strangely peopled with omnibuses imported
from London to convey passengers between Guildford Station and the
temporary station of “St. Catherine’s,” built in a meadow beside the
line, at the other end of the tunnel. The long-since ruined chapel of
St. Catherine narrowly escaped complete demolition on that occasion;
but it still stands, roofless and desecrated, as it has done for
centuries past. Perhaps, in these days of restorations and revivals, it
will be brought back to a decent condition of repair, even as was the
hilltop chapel of St. Martha’s near by. With this speculation we will
make for Guildford, and the conclusion of this lengthy run.