THE HOG'S BACK
Whitewaysend.--Tongham.--A carillon of
sheep-bells.--Timber-carting.--Falling on board a
transport.--Cottages under the Hog's Back.--Puttenham. The Maypole
at Compton.--The two-storied sanctuary.--A great
picture.--Bird-baths.--Swarming bees.--The Hog's Back; a noble
highway.
If any of the pilgrims from Farnham were drawn aside down the banks of
the Wey to the hospitality of Waverley Abbey, they probably rejoined the
rest at the foot of the Hog's Back, perhaps near Whitewaysend. That is a
name with some meaning, for here first the road from Farnham runs up on
to the great chalk ridge which traverses the county from west to east.
The break in the colour of the roads under the ridge is from bright
yellow sand to staring white, but the full white does not begin until
the road is almost at its highest level, at the cross-roads above
Tongham.
Tongham is the only village between Farnham and Guildford north of the
Hog's Back and near the ridge, and though there is little in it for
antiquarians, the pretty little white inn and the oasthouses have often
attracted painters, and the approach to the village from the south is
by a road pillared and canopied with lofty elms. The churchyard holds a
curious structure. A slender oak tower, recently erected as a memorial,
stands apart from the church, riveted to the ground with iron struts,
and contains a peal of thirteen small bells. A carillon is rung every
Sunday and Wednesday; I have not heard it, but have been told that it
sounds "like sheep-bells."
[Illustration: _Tongham Church, with Wooden Tower for Bells._]
Not much can have been written about the older days of Tongham, but at
least one delightful passage in a modern book belongs to it, and should
be read under the great elms by the roadside. In Mr. George Bourne's
_Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_, Bettesworth describes an almost
incredible feat of carting timber:--
"I see a carter once," said Bettesworth, "get three big elm-trees up
on to a timber-carriage, with only hisself and the hosses. He put
the runnin' chains on and all hisself."
"And _that_ takes some doing," I said.
"Yes, a man got to understand the way 'tis done ... I never had
much hand in timber-cartin' myself; but this man.... 'Twas over
there on the Hog's Back, not far from Tongham Station. We all went
out for to see 'n do it--'cause 'twas in the dinner-time he come,
and we never believed he'd do it single-handed. The farmer says to
'n, 'You'll never get they up by yourself.' 'I dessay I shall,' he
says; and so he did, too. Three great elm-trees upon that one
carriage.... Well, he had a four-hoss team, so that'll tell ye what
'twas. They _was_ some hosses, too. Ordinary farm hosses wouldn't
ha' done it. But he only jest had to speak, and you'd see they
watchin' him.... When he went forward, after he'd got the trees up,
to see what sort of a road he'd got for gettin' out, they stood
there with their heads stretched out and their ears for'ard. 'Come
on,' he says, and _away_ they went, _tearin'_ away. Left great ruts
in the road where the wheels sent in--that'll show ye they got
something to pull."
We got one shrub a little further, Bettesworth grunting to a heavy
lift; then, in answer to a question:
"No, none o' we helped 'n. We was only gone out to see 'n do it. He
never wanted no help. He didn't say much; only 'Git back,' or 'Git
up,' to the hosses. When it come to gettin' the last tree up, on top
o' t'other two, I never thought he could ha' done it. But he got 'n
up. And he was a oldish man, too: sixty, I dessay he was. But he
jest spoke to the hosses. Never used no whip 'xcept jest to guide
'em. Didn't the old farmer go on at his own men, too! 'You dam
fellers, call yerselves carters,' he says; 'a man like that's worth
a dozen o' you.' Well, they couldn' ha' done it. A dozen of 'em 'd
ha' scrambled about, an' _then_ not done it! Besides, their _hosses_
wouldn't. But this feller the old farmer says to 'n, 'I never
believed you'd ha' done it.' 'I thought mos likely I should,' he
says. But he never had much to say."
A few hundred yards further along the Hog's Back the road drops down
south-east to Seale, the first of the three ancient and interesting
villages which lie under the ridge between Farnham and Guildford. Seale
is a fascinating little place. It consists only of a few cottages, shy
and red-roofed, deep among high hedges, bushy dells and reedy meadows,
with wheatfields and barleyfields clothing the chalky slopes above. The
church has been rebuilt, but has some inscriptions worth looking at. One
is an epitaph on a young officer, Edward Noel Long, who was drowned at
sea. According to the inscription:--
"On his way to join the British forces in Spain, he, with others of
his regiment, perished in the sea near Cape St. Vincent, during the
confusion of a fatal accident occasioned by the _Isis_ man-of-war
falling on board the transport on which he was embarked on the night
of the 6th March, 1809."
That was just after Corunna. A carved bas-relief represents the _Isis_
under full sail "falling on board" the transport.
[Illustration: _Seale._]
Here, under the Hog's Back north and south, nearly all the cottages are
old and nearly all have gardens. One perfect little building stands not
far from Seale on the road to Puttenham, bowered in vines and quaintly
chimneyed, with white-curtained windows opening on a low wall and
stone-crop and high box borders, and, when I saw it in July, bunches of
pink and white mallows glowing under an old oak door. No cottages count
sunnier hours than these that stand about the long strip of green
country under the chalk downs. This part of Surrey, perhaps, has changed
as little as any part during the last twenty or thirty years, which have
added so many miles of brick and slate to Surrey villages and towns;
probably the greatest change has been in the roads. Mrs. Henry Ady, for
instance, writing of the Pilgrims' Way just fifteen years ago, speaks of
the road that runs through Seale, Puttenham, and Compton as being "a
grassy lane, not always easy to follow, and little used in places." The
road as it runs here may not take the exact line of the Pilgrims' Way,
but no one could call it difficult to follow. Here and there it passes
through cornfields, and it is by leaving the road to take a footpath
through a cornfield that the best view is to be had of Puttenham, whose
red roofs and grey church tower are set delightfully among rich elms,
with a splash of ploughed chalk blazing white through the trees beyond.
Puttenham has added only a few new cottages to its outskirts; under the
church it is still red and mossy and lichened. The cottages are oddly
built to suit the sloping ground, for the road to the church rises on a
hill, and necessitates different levels for foundations and stone
pathways. One of the cottages has an outside staircase to its front
door, for what reason there is no guessing.
The next village under the Hog's Back on the way to Guildford is
Compton, perhaps the third stage of thirsty pilgrims journeying from
Whitewaysend. The main road enters Compton from the north, but the
prettiest way to find the village is to drop down on it by a woodland
footpath from the west. Icehouse Wood is the name of the few acres of
trees through which the path runs; an old brick-lined pocket in the side
of the hill suggests the name, but there are remains of another brick
building higher up the slope which look nothing like an icehouse. Was
the name ever Oasthouse wood, perhaps, and did they grow hops here as at
Farnham? If any pilgrims left the beaten track from Puttenham which runs
north of Compton they may have come to the church and the inn by this
footpath. It is centuries old; it is lined, before it enters the wood,
by ordered holly which may once have marked a road, and as it drops down
the hill it cuts as deep into the sand as the old trackways north of
Anstiebury Camp or west of Albury. Great beeches coil their roots about
its edge--younger than the road if ever oasthouses stood by it.
Compton looks like a village presided over by a single mind. The
cottages which add themselves to whatever is old in neighbouring
buildings are designed to fit with a scheme; the cottage gardens are
challenges of roses and phloxes, which shall be brightest. The black
beams and jutting stories of an ancient timbered house stand above the
road, an example and a guardian; the whole aspect of the village is of
the quietest country. When I was walking through Compton I was told of a
village festival which had been held in the spring, in which children
from Bermondsey--Bermondsey once a Thames-side village itself--dressed
in the old dresses and danced the old dances. They had a Queen of the
May and they twined a maypole with ribands; and as I went out of Compton
there were the Compton village children, six or seven of them, dancing
over the dances the Bermondsey children had shown them, in the same
field where the festival was held. The first of May would come round
again; they would choose their own Queen and twine their own maypole.
Compton church is one of the most interesting in the country. It must be
forgiven a hideous organ, whose blue and red pipes block the western
arch of the nave; the sanctuary is the beauty of the church. It is the
only two-storied sanctuary in England, and the origin of two-storied
sanctuaries is unknown. Mr. Lewis Andre, writing in the _Surrey
Archaeological Collections_, is inclined to think that the dedication of
the upper sanctuary may have been to St. Michael; there are several
altars dedicated to St. Michael in the galleries of continental
churches. Another feature of the church is the wooden Norman screen
which fences off the upper sanctuary; it is the oldest known in England,
and dates back to 1180, according to the archaeologists. Some Jacobean
screen work in the pulpit and the altar rails is an interesting
contrast.
Half a mile north of Compton are a chapel and a cemetery, the joint gift
of the late George Frederick Watts and Mrs. Watts; the chapel, designed
by Mrs. Watts, strikes a dominant note of terracotta and red brick.
There are strengths and splendours which belong to the building and its
frescoes, but to me, at all events, it seems to lack the peace and
mystery of quieter, duller chapels. A noble memorial of a master mind is
the picture gallery in the grounds of the terracotta designing school
founded by the late painter's wife. The gallery contains many of his
finest pictures, and in particular the last of all which he
painted--_Destiny_, a tremendous figure with a shadowed face; masses of
filmy light are about it, and power moves in the arm that holds the
book; there is a secret hidden which the grey face knows. The gallery is
lighted as no London gallery is; the ceiling and walls are washed with
old gold, which takes all the hardness from the spaces of sunshine
playing through the roof. Mrs. Watts, I believe, added this charm to the
gallery. Others besides critics owe her gratitude. Outside the gallery
stand rows of pottery, the work of her pupils. Urns, vases, basins,
cups, pedestals, fountains await translation to flower gardens. The
birds of many Surrey lawns owe a debt to Compton for wide splash-baths
of water to bathe in and drink at in the heats of summer.
Compton can be seen either from Guildford or from Godalming, and the
traveller has the choice at Puttenham either of rejoining the Hog's Back
immediately above the village, and so dropping down into Wanborough on
the other side, or going on to Compton and perhaps climbing up again to
the road on the ridge afterwards. Wanborough, a fascinating little
hamlet, is worth the extra climbs up the hill. It is little more, in
reality, than a manor house or farm homestead, wealthy with huddled
ricks and superb barns, and a simple little church, perhaps the tiniest
of all in Surrey; it measures only forty-five feet by eighteen. I found
it locked, but a village child with engaging confidence told me to "look
under the brick" for the key, and under a loose brick in the porch I
found it. It may be lying there to-day. There is little in the church
itself; but when I saw it there was a fine nest of honeybees in the
roof near the bell that hangs on the wall outside. Why do bees so often
swarm in churchyards? Country villagers believe that they like the sound
of dinning metal; perhaps they are attracted to a church by Sunday's
bell.
[Illustration: _Wanborough Church._]
Wanborough sends a rough but pleasant field-road up again to the Hog's
Back, which from here runs another four straight miles along the ridge
to Guildford. This is certainly the noblest highway in Surrey, and,
perhaps, the most characteristic of the county. You may often travel
along it and yet not see the finest of the view on either side; in the
summer, more frequently than not, the whole countryside north and south
of the ridge is swimming in a blue haze which dims and muffles the
horizon. But there is no other road on which you can walk so far and see
so much broad Surrey country open out mile after mile on either side,
and from which you can watch so many changes of woodland and common and
cultured fields, from the green and golden hops about Farnham to the
wheat and oats above Seale and Puttenham, and the long potato drills in
the chalk by Wanborough. But the view is not the single beauty of the
Hog's Back, though to walk high in the wind along open spaces is
possible only on a few roads in the county. The Hog's Back has a treble
charm belonging wholly to the roadway itself; its width, its spacious
grassy rides on each side of the broad hard riband of metal that runs
white and unswerving east and west, and most gracious of all, its deep
and exuberant hedges. All along the road in a light wind you will get
the scent of bed-straw and thyme and clover from the green border of the
road, and in the short down grass find the plants that love
chalk-ground, like the little blue milkwort, which spreads like a film
over the higher slopes of the ridge in summer. If the roadside is
scented with flowers, so are the hedges. Guelder rose and dog rose and
privet blossom side by side with elder and spindle wood; above holly and
hazel and buckthorn stand up gnarled and wind-driven yews, bent over the
road from the south-west. To the south, it is often only through the
gate-gaps in the hedge that you can see out over the flank of the hill;
on the northern side the hedge is lower--low enough, indeed, to be
broken in summer by tall spikes of mullein, yellow against the grey-blue
air over the heaths of Pirbright and Worplesdon. The highest point of
the road lies a mile beyond Wanborough on the way to Guildford; here you
are over five hundred feet up, and the road drops gradually, ending with
a sudden slope almost as soon as Guildford, bricky and cheap-looking
from this aspect, comes into view.
[Illustration: _Barn at Wanborough._]