THURSLEY AND THE MOORS
Painters among heather.--The Devil's Jumps.--The Devil
redivivus.--Cobbett at Thursley.--A superb belfry.--The Sailor's
Grave.--Pig-iron and hammers.--The natterjack at eve.--A plank for
bellringers.--Witley fifty years hence.--Mehetabel in the church.
Thursley lies nearly three miles north of Hindhead on the edge of the
heather, and brings artists all the summer to paint its timbered
cottages and glowing hills. Mrs. Allingham sketched as charmingly on
Thursley common as by Haslemere; Birket Foster found a background of
purple for his cottage gardens. Mrs. Allingham's sketch of Hindhead from
Witley common, which runs up to Thursley from the north-east, is all the
wild of this part of Surrey on a few inches of paper.
Thursley is Thor's ley or field, and has memories of the Danes. They
left other names near: Tuesley, or Tuesco's field, lies towards
Godalming, and Thunder Hill, near Elstead, is Thor's or Thunor's. Thor
lives in local legends. Three strange conical hills, lying close
together two miles or so west of Thursley, have been known since his day
as the Devil's Jumps. Tradition draws a frightful picture of the Devil,
horns and tail and all, jumping from hill to hill to amuse himself,
until one day Thor caught him at it and knocked him over with an
enormous stone. You can see the stone on the Devil's Jumps to-day.
[Illustration: _Interior of Thursley Church._]
The Devil jumped up again when I was last looking at the Jumps. I had
climbed to the top of Kettlebury Hill, a mile away, and was looking out
over those strange little lumps of rock and crimson heather, which
puzzled Cobbett to the end of his days, when suddenly at my feet there
started up a rabbit as black as a cinder, leapt wildly about the
heather, and disappeared. There could have been very little doubt what
that meant long after Thor's time.
[Illustration: _Thursley._]
Cobbett, riding in from Hampshire or Sussex, used to make Thursley his
first stopping-place. But one thing he would not do, and that was to
come into Thursley over Hindhead. He detested turnpike roads, and he
detested Hindhead. He liked to ride through woods, or along lanes with
trees meeting overhead. When he rides from Chiddingford to Thursley, he
writes that "the great thing was to see the centre of these woods, to
see the stems of the trees as well as the tops of them." Otherwise, the
pleasure in riding was to pass fine turnip-fields, or bean-fields;
anything rather than waste land. The heather on the hills might glow to
crimson, and the bracken fade from emerald to bronze, without touching a
chord in that sturdy farmer's heart. Hindhead, you read, "is certainly
the most villainous spot that God ever made," and Cobbett will have
nothing to do with it.
The last fifty years have altered and enlarged Thursley church, but it
still retains the distinction, unique in Surrey, of its timber tower and
steeple rising from the centre of the nave. Other churches in the
county--Dunsfold and Alfold in the neighbourhood--carry their
bell-turrets on ingenious constructions of timber, but there is no such
collection in any other Surrey church of such superb beams as are to be
seen at Thursley. The effect of these dark and majestic pillars of oak,
some of them thirty inches square, with their great crossbeams, and
their arches springing from the pillars across the nave, is one of
astonishing splendour and power. Outside, the shingled turret tells the
time with, instead of a clock, a fine old sundial.
To the north of the church stands a thing of terror. The full story of
the murder of the "unknown sailor" belongs to Hindhead; but Thursley has
his grave. It lies apart, in the centre of a stretch of green grass;
above it, a stone too tall for quietness; no other grave shares that
lonely lawn. Here is the queer, mis-spelt epitaph:--
When pitying Eyes to see my Grave shall come,
And with a generous Tear bedew my Tomb;
Here shall they read my melancholy Fate,
With Murder and Barbarity complete.
In perfect Health, and in the Flower of Age,
I fell a Victim to three Ruffians Rage;
On bended Knees I mercy strove t' obtain,
Their Thirst of Blood made all Entreaties vain.
No dear Relation, or still dearer Friend,
Weeps my hard Lot, or miserable End;
Yet o'er my sad Remains, (my Name unknown,)
A generous Public have inscrib'd this Stone.
Above the epitaph a rough carving shows the sailor kneeling to his
murderers. Mr. Baring-Gould, in the _Broom Squire_ makes Iver Verstage,
the artist, laugh at the crudely drawn figures. But the horror of this
grave, from which all the other quieter graves are gathered apart, has
very little laughter in it.
Thursley Common once rang with the picks and hammers of an iron mine; it
was one of the centres of a great industry of the Weald. The surface of
the common is scarred with the pits from which the ironstone was dug;
the hammer ponds lie in a string along a tiny tributary of the Wey. John
Ray, in his _Collection of English Words not generally Used_, published
in 1672, and printed in the _Sussex Archaeological Collections_, gives an
account of the methods of the old iron smelters. A stream, or a pond
with a stream running through it, would be dammed, and the fall of water
at the lower end would then work two pairs of bellows for the blast for
the furnace and a wheel which raised and let fall a hammer. The fuel
used was charcoal. Before the ironstone was put into the furnace it was
"mollified" or broken up into small pieces by being burnt between layers
of charcoal. Then it was put into the furnace, and when melted drawn off
in long lumps, called pigs or sows. Then the sows were taken to the
forge or hammer, and beaten into square "blooms," two feet long; then
the blooms were beaten into "anconies," three feet long; then the
"anconies" had their ends nicely shaped, and the iron was ready for
market.
A very extensive "collection of English words not generally used" is
contained in an inventory of tools supplied to William Yalden, when he
took over the Thursley ironworks. Perhaps an ironmaster of to-day might
recognise some of those I have chosen:--
Twoe fargons. A beame way anckrues. One turnsowe. One hurdgier. One
twewer trole; one twewer hook. Two hursts and brights to them. 2
eyron rackes. A hamer and ane bill and helfe and armes redy placed.
Twoe boyghts about the Chafery. One quas to stopp the fyer. A neew
locke.
Mr. Baring-Gould has described one of the natives of Thursley Common in
the _Broom Squire_:--
"The natterjack, so rare elsewhere, differing from a toad in that
it has a yellow band down its back, has here a paradise. It may be
seen at eve perched on a stalk of willow herb or running--it does
not hop--round the sundew, clearing the glutinous stamens of the
flies that have been caught by them, and calling in a tone like the
warning note of the nightingale."
[Illustration: _Elstead._]
I looked for the natterjack at eve, but did not find him. At Farnham, I
am told, he is called a jar-bob. Thursley children like to catch a
natterjack to sell.
Elstead is three miles away, on the northern edge of the belt of
heather; a happy little village standing round a green, with a mill, a
bridge, and a church with a wonderful ladder up to the belfry. This is
actually a single vast plank of oak, black and immoveable, sloped up
from a crossbeam and notched for steps. There are many magnificent beams
in Surrey churches, but this is the finest ladder of all of them. It
does not tempt ascent in days of more elaborate staircases; but it would
not break under the heaviest set of bellringers that ever rung a change.
[Illustration: _Witley._]
To the east is Milford, a good half mile from its station, and nothing
much besides. There is a good natural centre to the village, with four
cross roads and an inn, but no doubt Milford's future is to belong to
Godalming. A few half-timbered and weather-tiled cottages, which have
served as models for newer neighbours, some pollarded elms, a broad
smooth road and dusty jasmine--Milford is the first village on the
highway running south from Godalming, and on a summer Saturday is less a
village than a road.
[Illustration: _The White Hart, Witley._]
One of the four roads which branch off from Milford to the south runs to
Witley. Witley will look more tranquil and more seasoned fifty years
hence. To come into the village in the gathering dusk of a summer
evening, as I saw it first, is an enchantment; nothing could throw a
quieter spell than the brick and timber and tar and whitewash of the
cottages, the flowers climbing up the old inn, and the familiar noises
of a neighbouring game of cricket finishing in half darkness. But only
part of Witley will stand the full glare of sunlight. The new cottages
are finely designed, but they are too black-and-white and painty to
group easily with the older, mossier buildings and the White Hart Inn,
with its nobly ugly sign.
The church, bowered in ivy and roses, has some quaint inscriptions. One
commemorates a forgotten office:--
"Off yo^r charite pray for the soull^e of Thomas Jonys and his wyfe
Jane, which Thomas was one of the Sewers of the Chamber to oure
Soverayne lorde Kynge Henry VIII."
A Sewer of the Chamber waited at the table and brought water for the
hands of the guests--an office which suggests an obvious rhyme for poets
writing of water-jugs. Another epitaph is a shining example of the
proper manner of attributing to the dead an almost crushing superfluity
of virtues. Sara Holney, first in Latin, and then in English, thus is
lamented and extolled:--
"A better woman than here sleeps, there's none,
Sara, Rebecca, Rahel, three in one:
Religious, pious, thrifty, wise, fayre, and chast:
Soe many goods in one, who finds in hast?"
One more name attracts. Mehetabel, daughter of John Leech of Lea, died
in 1816. She was doubtless a friend of Cobbett, who often rode by Lea,
and greatly admired her father's trees. The first Mehetabel was the wife
of the king of Edom, and the last, possibly, is the heroine of the
_Broom Squire_.
Witley has perhaps been a little overshadowed by the tragedy of a late
owner of Lea Park. I have heard descriptions of the new features of Lea
Park, the lakes and fountains and a billiard-room, I believe, under
water, but I have not seen them.
Before Hindhead drew authors and artists up the hill, Witley had its own
settlement of workers living deep in Surrey country. George Eliot was at
Witley Heights; J.C. Hook, who could not bear to be watched while he was
painting, sketched Witley gorse and heather; Birket Foster long lived
among the Witley pines; and Mrs. Allingham, who was at Sandhills, a
house near by, has painted few more interesting pictures than her
_Lessons_, _Pat-a-cake_, and _The Children's Tea_. At Witley she
painted most of her studies of children indoors, in the nursery and the
schoolroom; after she left Witley, she liked to set her cottage girls
and boys among bluebells and apple-blossom out of doors.
[Illustration: _A corner in the White Hart, Witley, known as George
Eliot's corner._]