GUILDFORD'S ENVIRONS
The prettiest town Cobbett ever saw.--Semaphores and the THING.--The
Road on the Ridge.--Newlands Corner.--The Father of the
Forest.--Pilgrims to St. Martha's.--A quiet churchyard.--Mr.
Allnutt's poem.--St. Catherine's and the
Hammer.--Worplesdon.--Sutton Place.--The Weston Rebus.--Lady Susan,
the Tame Wild Sow.--The earliest mention of Cricket.
Cobbett's is the most attractive description of Guildford and its
environs. "The town of Guildford," he writes in _Rural Rides_, "taken
with its environs I, who have seen so many, many towns, think the
prettiest, and, taken all together, the most agreeable and most
happy-looking that I ever saw in my life. Here are hill and dale in
endless variety. Here are the chalk and the sand, vieing with each other
in making beautiful scenes. Here is a navigable river and fine meadows.
Here are woods and downs. Here is something of everything but _fat
marshes_ and their skeleton-making _agues_. The vale all the way down to
Chilworth from Reigate is very delightful." He has as many praises for
the neighbourhood on the other side. "Everybody that has been from
Godalming to Guildford knows that there is hardly another such a pretty
four miles in all England. The road is good; the soil is good; the
houses are neat; the people are neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows,
all are beautiful. Nothing wild or bold, to be sure, but exceedingly
pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles
without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion,
as it happened to be with me." Would the scenery have pleased Cobbett
better if it had been "wild or bold"? Probably not, since he calls
Hindhead "the most villainously ugly spot on God's Earth." Cobbett liked
smiling pastures and well grown crops. His prettiness is good timber
and clean farming.
In Cobbett's time, there were no suburbs to Guildford; to-day the
suburbs grow. Pewley Hill, south-east of the town, which old pictures of
Guildford show you bare downland, is hardly so much spotted as hidden by
undistinguished villas and dreary brick. Perhaps it would please Cobbett
as well as it pleased him ninety years ago. Pewley Hill in his day stood
naked to the wind, except for the semaphore and its buildings, and
Cobbett deeply hated the semaphore. To us, who have the telephone and
telegram, there seems nothing hateful in it (unless we hate the
telephone), but to Cobbett the line of semaphore towers between London
and Portsmouth stood for all that was dreadful in war, debt, jobbery and
alarums. He could see nothing attractive in the cleverness and despatch
of a system which enabled news to be sent from London to Portsmouth in a
few seconds. (It took three-quarters of a minute to signal the hour of
one o'clock from Greenwich to Portsmouth and back again to Greenwich).
All he saw was bloody war and money wrongly spent. Thus, of one of the
line:--
"This building is, it seems, called a _Semaphore_, or _Semiphare_, or
something of that sort. What this word may have been hatched out of I
cannot say; but it means _a job_, I am sure. To call it an _alarm-post_
would not have been so convenient; for, people not endued with Scotch
_intellect_, might have wondered why the d---- we should have to pay for
alarm-posts and might have thought that with all our 'glorious
victories' we had 'brought our hogs to a fine market' if our dread of
the enemy were such as to induce us to have alarm-posts all over the
country!" The semaphore north of the road from Guildford to Farnham
urges him to even higher flights:--
"What can this be _for_? Why are these expensive things put up all over
the country? Respecting the movements of _whom_ is wanted this _alarm
system_? Will no member ask this in Parliament? Not one! not a man: and
yet it is a thing to ask about. Ah! it is in vain, THING, that you thus
are _making your preparations_; in vain that you are setting your
trammels! The DEBT, the blessed debt, that best ally of the people, will
break them all; will snap them, as the hornet does the cobweb; and even
these very 'Semaphores' contribute towards the force of that ever
blessed debt."
Semaphore House still stands upon Pewley Hill, a modern villa; opposite
it, which would infuriate the old reformer if he could see it, War
Office Ground, marked off with barbed wire and minatory notice-boards. A
hundred years hence, perhaps the fort on Pewley Hill will be exhibited
as one of the curiosities of nineteenth-century Guildford.
Pewley Hill is dull enough in itself to-day, when the down grass has
gone and the bricks are multiplying, but it leads to some of the wildest
and oldest and sweetest of all scenes in the county. You must go over
Pewley Hill to come to the downs, and the downs between Guildford and
Netley, by Newlands Corner, above Albury and Chilworth, are for me, at
all events, the loveliest spot in Surrey. There are other heights in
Surrey with wider views of scenery; there is Hindhead with its almost
complete circle of horizon, from Nettlebed by Henley to the Devil's Dyke
above Brighton; there is the road above Reigate, which looks out over a
thousand roofs and miles of well farmed fields; and there is Leith Hill,
the highest of all hills in south eastern England. But the stretch of
downland running from Guildford to Newlands Corner has a charm that
belongs to none of these. It is not merely the peace and sunshine of the
broad path along the ridge, with its downland flowers and Chalk Hill
Blue butterflies; not only the width and extent of the view over the
Weald, though it is of all views in Surrey one of the loveliest--unlike
the flatter panoramas of Leith Hill and Reigate in that it is a view not
only of fields and meadows, but of tree-clad hills, shouldering into
fainter greens and greys away to Hampshire and Sussex. The enchantment
is something else; the closeness of touch with so much that is dim and
old; the nearness of so much that cannot be reached in changing towns,
on modern roads. For this is unchanged, untouched, unsoiled, part of the
great Way that brought the merchants of Cornwall riding to the Roman
port of Rutupiae in the Isle of Thanet with tin mined in the
Cassiterides. The valley below may have changed from forest to meadow
and plough, but the green road along the ridge remains what it was
before ever it felt a Roman wheel. No fresher air nor clearer sunlight
lies on any Surrey downs than on those broad aisles of shaven turf,
lichened whitethorns and wind-bent yews.
Newlands Corner has seen more than one battle. Mr. St. Loe Strachey,
editor of the _Spectator_, and one of the earliest founders of rifle
clubs in the country, has his home on the downs close by, and Newlands
Corner, the centre of the rifle clubs of Surrey, has been the scene of
assaults and the counter-attacks made by Volunteer cyclists against
defending bands of riflemen. The riflemen have held their own under the
severest fire; Ministers and distinguished soldiers have watched them.
On the downs by Newlands Corner, near the great trackway of the trading
Britons, stand some of the finest yews in England. To one of a group of
trees, a monarch whose descendants count their centuries in a ring about
him, belongs a noble poem. Mr. William Watson, under the shade of its
branches, wrote _The Father of the Forest_. These are the opening
lines:--
Old emperor Yew, fantastic sire,
Girt with thy guard of dotard kings,--
What ages hast thou seen retire
Into the dusk of alien things?
What mighty news hath stormed thy shade,
Of armies perished, realms unmade?
Already wast thou great and wise,
And solemn with exceeding eld,
On that proud morn when England's rays,
Wet with tempestuous joy, beheld
Round her rough coasts the thundering main
Strewn with the ruined dream of Spain.
Hardly thou count'st them long ago,
The warring faiths, the wavering land,
The sanguine sky's delirious glow,
And Cranmer's scorched, uplifted hand.
Wailed not the woods their task of shame,
Doomed to provide the insensate flame?
Mourned not the rumouring winds, when she,
The sweet queen of a tragic hour,
Crowned with her snow-white memory
The crimson legend of the Tower?
Or when a thousand witcheries lay
Felled with one stroke, at Fotheringay?
Ah, thou hast heard the iron tread
And clang of many an armoured age,
And well recall'st the famous dead,
Captains or counsellors brave or sage,
Kings that on kings their myriads hurled,
Ladies whose smile embroiled the world.
The pilgrims' road, as I have tried to show elsewhere, separates from
the Way again at Guildford. The old British track probably kept to the
northern ridge; the pilgrims who visited Guildford may have left by the
same road, but they turned away across the valley to the little chapel
of St. Martha, which stands on a hill two miles south-east of the town.
The pilgrim's track to the chapel, vanished in parts, becomes plain
enough when it crosses the road which now runs from Guildford to
Chilworth west of the chapel by perhaps half a mile. Here it is a wide
smooth path of the finest down grass, cropped close by rabbits, with
which all this breezy hill must be alive by night. Nearly at the top the
path breaks into sand, which must have tested the less elastic of the
travellers to the shrine pretty severely, but the sand breaks again into
an open plateau of as fine grass as the path below. On this plateau
stands the little church, alone in the sun and wind.
[Illustration: _St. Catherine's Chapel, Guildford._]
Sixty years ago St. Martha's was a ruin; as unhappy a little building as
St. Catherine's on the hill beyond the Wey. It was restored in 1848, and
has taken out of the past a quiet and serenity that set it in the old
years, in tranquil sunshine, in the peace of English Sundays. All the
winds blow about it; it is alone in its acre of smooth down grass;
within its churchyard wall are the graves of country labourers and their
children, lowly mounds hardly seen, without the memory of a name, at one
with the purpose of the earth they dug and sowed. Pine trees stand round
the open space of the hill; bluebells in May spread a film under them;
beyond the grasses, heather and ling die from August purples to the
bronze of autumn. The Surrey hills are to the south and west; farthest
on the horizon is the faint blue of the Sussex downs.
There are early Norman walls and arches in the restored chapel. St.
Martha's may be one of the three churches which Domesday assigns to the
manor of Bramley, belonging to Bishop Odo of Bayeux. A less trustworthy
tradition is that Stephen Langton is buried there; the lids of the old
stone coffins found in the chapel when it was restored probably account
for that legend. Martin Tupper accepted the legend as history.
St. Martha's chapel has inspired more than one poet, Tupper among them,
but none have written with more charm on the lonely little building than
Mr. Sidney Allnutt, in a poem which was published in the _Spectator_
last year. Here are six stanzas out of many:--
A little chapel grey with years,
And bleached with sun and rain,
One solid four-square tower it rears
Above strong walls which still oppose
Firm front to elemental foes
That rage at them in vain.
Far southward from St. Martha's Hill,
And to the east and west,
The downs heave up green shoulders, till
The distance with its magic blue
Envelops every other hue,
And crest is lost in crest.
Safe sheltered by the encircling downs
The chequered valleys show
Their tapestry of greens and browns,
Made rich by fields of golden grain,
And threaded by a silver vein
Where Wey's clear waters flow.
A churchyard bare of shrub or tree,
All open to the sky,
To every wind of heaven free,
Lies round the chapel, carpeted
With soft, sweet turf where happy dead
In dreamless slumber lie.
For, far removed from camp or mart,
Beneath the sacred sod
Of that blest hill they sleep apart:
Forgotten by the world below,
After life's spendthrift toil they know
The rest that comes from God.
And, oh, it must be good to sleep
Within that churchyard bare,
While turn by turn the seasons keep
A bedside watch, and God may see
Safe in St. Martha's nursery
His children pillowed there.
If I had to choose a month and an hour to visit St. Martha's, it would
be an evening late in April with the trees in the valley at their
freshest and the song of blackbirds about the hill. Others, perhaps,
would choose an August day, with the wind scented and the hill purpled
with heather; perhaps, too, in August the rabbit-cropped turf is
smoothest and greenest. Others may find the chief beauty of the hill in
the bronze and yellow of the changing leaves of October; there are no
hills where the beech glows with a deeper fire than over Albury and the
Tillingbourne. Others even might ask for the vague, wet airs of
midwinter, with the shouldering hilltops east and south and west faint
and mysterious in the clinging mist, and never a house-roof to be seen.
That is an effect of strange loneliness; but the abiding charm of St.
Martha's is the peace of clear air, in the enchantment of low spring
sunlight on the down turf and the quiet walls.
Once I saw a remarkable sight by St. Martha's. Incongruously enough, the
wooded hillsides below the chapel are preserved as game-coverts; indeed,
pheasants are shot quite close to the churchyard. There are rides cut
through the wood in which broods of young pheasants are fed by their
fostermothers' coops; and looking down one of these rides on a day early
in August, I watched for some time a curious collection of birds
feeding together in front of the coops. There were the young pheasants,
of course, there was quite a crowd of small birds, finches chiefly, but
a few thrushes and hedge-sparrows; there were seven or eight
turtle-doves, five jays, and, queerest of all companions for doves and
pheasants, a carrion crow. I thought at first he must be a rook, but
there was no doubt about it. I looked up as I walked away, and over me
sailed five herring gulls, high and slow.
[Illustration: _St. Martha's Chapel._]
St. Catherine's chapel, on the other side of Guildford, has not the same
lonely charm as St. Martha's. It has never, like St. Martha's, been
restored, and the hill on which it stands is sacred to nobody. Children
climb about its walls and windows; cockneys scratch their names, and
picnic parties bestrew the grass with paper. Yet St. Catherine's, in the
days before pilgrimages ceased and shrines were left to moulder, perhaps
heard as many Aves as her sister chapel on the hill beyond the Way. A
country legend is common to both chapels. St. Catherine and St. Martha,
in the wonderful days of the giants, were sisters who built chapels on
neighbouring hills. They had but one hammer between them, and they
hurled it high over the valley one to another, St. Martha catching it
from St. Catherine, driving in a nail and hurling it back again.
North of Guildford to the west is Worplesdon Common, a stretch of
heathery, rushy ground over which have gone many marches and
manoeuvres, and north of the common is the home of Mr. Frederick
Selous, the African traveller and naturalist. Mr. Selous throws his
collection of trophies open to the public for a small sum, and his
garden is known to the readers of the _Field_ as the home of rare and
shy birds. The owner has described, with callous disregard of the
feelings of less fortunate ornithologists, the nesting operations among
his bird boxes of half a dozen nuthatches.
To the north-east, a mile from the main road from Guildford to Ripley,
is Sutton Place, perhaps the finest piece of domestic architecture in
the south of England. Mr. Frederic Harrison has described it at length
in his _Annals of an Old Manor House_. It was built by Sir Richard
Weston about 1525. The architect is unknown, but the house is peculiarly
interesting, partly because it is the best example of the use of terra
cotta in the moulding combined with brickwork, and partly because it is
one of the earliest houses in England built as a country home rather
than a castle. Sir Richard Weston, the founder, was one of the ablest
servants and greatest friends of Henry VIII, the more astonishing a
friendship in that it was never broken. Henry VIII sent his friend's son
to the scaffold, accused as a lover of Anne Boleyn; he went to the block
protesting his innocence, and there was nothing to prove him guilty; his
last words were a defence of the queen. His son, a baby when his boyish
father was executed, married the daughter of Sir Thomas Arundell. Sir
Thomas had suffered for treason, so that husband and wife were the
children of parents who had been sent to the block. They entertained
Elizabeth at Sutton; she would have a child's memory of the founder of
the house, and doubtless praised the rebus in the terra cotta moulding,
the "R.W.," the grapes and the tun.
Later representatives of the Westons at Sutton were the Salvin family,
and it was one of these Salvins, I imagine, to whom Frank Buckland
refers in his edition of White's _Selborne_. Captain Salvin lived at
Whitmoor House, near Guildford, and was the happy owner of a tame wild
sow. Lady Susan was her name, and this is how her master describes
her:--
"My sow originally came from Syria, and was given to me by H.H. the
Maharajah Duleep Singh. She is a remarkably fine healthy animal,
and her instinct and affection can only be equalled by the dog. She
follows me almost daily in my walks like a dog, to the great
astonishment of strangers. Of course I only take her out before the
crops are up, and too low to injure, during the spring and summer
months. I always have her belled, to hear when she is in the wood,
etc.; and the bell, which is a good sheep's bell, is fastened round
her neck with a strap and a buckle.
"Her leaping powers are extraordinary, either over water or timber;
indeed, only a few weeks since she cleared some palings (between
which she had been purposely placed to secure her for a time) three
feet ten inches in height. Knowing my pig's excellent temper, even
when she has young pigs, and when domestic sows are always most
savage, I was once guilty of a practical joke. I got a blacksmith
who was quite ignorant of even the existence of my pig, to 'come and
ring a pig.' The stye being under a building, he had to enter it at
a low door, which was some distance from the sow's yard, where she
was feeding. He entered, shutting the door to keep the pig in, and
thinking his subject was an ordinary one and that assistants were
following him to hold the cord, etc. He had not been gone a minute,
before I heard the greatest 'rum-ti-tum' at the door, and cries of
'For goodness' sake, sir, let me out! let me out! I never saw such a
beast in all my life!' and out came the poor blacksmith pale with
fright, but all the consolation he got was a jolly good laugh at his
own expense."
All English cricket owes a debt to Guildford. It is in the annals of
Guildford that there occurs the first known mention of the game of
"crickett." In 1598 there was a dispute over the rights of a plot of
land near the north town ditch, and "John Derrick, gent., one of the
Queen's Majestie's coroners of the county of Surrey, aged fifty-nine"
was called to give evidence. He stated that he had known the land for
fifty years and more, and that when he was a boy at the Free School at
Guildford he and his fellows "did runne and plaie there at crickett and
other plaies." The evidence is interesting, because he is not asked for
an explanation. Everybody at that date evidently knew at once what
cricket meant. Besides being a cricket ground, the land was used for
baiting bears.