THE FOLD COUNTRY
The Wild Garden of Surrey.--Birds and their
valentines.--Nightingales at Dunsfold.--Alfold Stocks.--Three yews
in a line.--The King's Evil.--Alfold industries.--A dry
canal.--Chiddingfold.--Red brick and Madonna lilies.--The
Enticknaps.--Hungry scholars.--The Crown Inn.--On Highdown Ball.--A
green ride in the woods.--The Chiddingfold Foxhounds.
The "Fold Country" is the wild garden of the Surrey weald, and the month
to walk in it is May. Alfold, Ifold, Durfold, Dunsfold, Chiddingfold,
and other "folds" lie among oakwoods and ploughlands that once were
oakwoods; the railway runs nowhere nearer than seven miles from the
heart of the woods, and in the woods the timbered cottages stand apart,
old and tranquil. To me, the associations of the "Fold Country" centre
round the memory of a First of May hotter and more glorious with flowers
than any I can remember. I had started to walk from Baynards Station
west among the woods, with the recollection of four days of north-east
winds and heavy snow that had brought April to a close. The change was
incredible. There, in the roads that ran through the oakwoods and hazel
copses, it was the heat of summer. The birds had drawn new valentines. A
cock chaffinch, gayest of suitors, danced round his demure hen in the
roadway, careless of any pedestrian in that deep country; wrens crept
like mice among the stubs of the hedge; the grass by the roadside and
the ditch was lighted with primroses. A narrow copse of cut hazel,
bordering the road on the Sussex boundary, was a carpet of primroses,
anemones, milkmaids, and dog violets; spires of purple orchids stood
above shining celandines; there could have been nothing more brilliant
in a garden. On the hedge-bank a hen pheasant rustled through the
undergrowth, caught sight of me, crept to a rabbit-scratch and crouched
on the brown earth within a yard of my hand; for the birds are tamer in
the Fold Country than beyond it. Above other hedge-banks, in other
copses, the cuckoos called all that morning, from Sussex to Surrey, over
the border road.
Two of the Fold Country farmhouses by that road, framed in that sunny
setting, belong to the memories of a Surrey May. One is a timbered house
twenty yards in Sussex, with white curtains and flower-pots behind its
diamond-paned lattices, and clumps of primroses growing about stone
causeways up to the very door. The other is Pallinghurst farm, a mile
further on the road, whose long, lichened roofs shelter red-tiled walls
and masses of ivy round a white doorway; the garden is a cluster of
gnarled apple-trees, and over it and about the tall farm chimneys, when
I saw it that morning, flew the first swallows of the year. But it was
not the swallows that made summer that May-day. Beyond Alfold, on the
road that runs out of Sidney Wood up to Dunsfold Common, there are
coppices of thick undergrowth, set about orchards of grey-lichened
fruit-trees and stretches of low cut hazel sheeted with primroses. There
I heard the first nightingale of the year, a single jet of song as the
brown tail flickered in the covert; a hundred yards further down the
road there were three singing together; Dunsfold Common came in a burst
of yellow gorse, and the song of a nightingale thrilled up from the
gorse; another bird, beyond Dunsfold, sang high in the hedgerow in full
sunlight. That is a Dunsfold lane, for me; a wild plum-tree branching
out of the hedge dressed with the whitest of delicate blossom, and in
the white blossom, with the hot blue of a May sky beyond and between, a
nightingale's throat throbbing with singing.
Alfold almost touches the Sussex boundary, and is perhaps the most
out-of-the-way little village in Surrey. I find Mr. Ralph Nevill,
writing in 1889, lamenting that it was once charmingly rural, but that
"the breath of the pestilence has passed over and vulgarised it." There
are new houses in it, and new generally means hideous; but the
pestilence has left some old work worth looking at. At the eastern end
of the village stands Alfold House, a sixteenth-century timbered
building; at the western end is the church, grey with its shingled
spire, built like Thursley and Elstead on massive oak beams. A broad
stone causeway leads to the door; in May, the springing grass shines
with daffodils.
Alfold, like Shalford, Abinger and Newdigate, still has its village
stocks. They stand at the churchyard gate, better worth sitting in, so
far as appearance goes, than the other three. Alfold, too, has a great
old yew-tree, one of a row of three in the Fold churchyards. Has it ever
been noticed that the Alfold, Dunsfold, and Hambledon yews stand almost
in a mathematically straight line? From Alfold to Hambledon is five
miles as the crow flies, and Dunsfold is almost exactly half way between
the two.
Three Alfold villagers, perhaps, made the journey to London, or to some
halting-place in the royal progress, to seek the grace of King James II.
The parish register-book contains the entry of their names on the
title-page:--
2 May } { I gave certificates to Jane Puttock, Henry
4 -- } 1687 { Manfield, Elizabeth Saker, to be touched
19 July } { for the [King's] Evil.
Whether Jane Puttock, Henry Manfield and Elizabeth Saker were cured of
the scrofula by the highly medicinal contact of the royal hands does not
appear; but in 1710 another patient, James Napper, was certified to be
"a legal inhabitant of our parish of Alfold in the county of Surrey
aforesaid and is supposed to have the disease commonly called the Evil."
Perhaps not one of the four had much more than the country bumpkin's
natural desire to see the King and be able to talk about it afterwards;
perhaps they coveted the little gold tokens which royal physicking hung
round the sufferer's neck. Not all those who were touched for the Evil
were languishing with a fell disease. Charles II operated on nearly a
hundred thousand of his lieges, with instant success when there was
nothing the matter with them. But Anne, the divines held, did not
succeed directly to the throne, and therefore did not succeed to the
miraculous powers of the Jameses and Charleses. It was very little good
for James Napper to go to London, for, practically speaking, the queen
could cure nobody.
[Illustration: _A Surrey Byway._]
Alfold, which in Aubrey's day was Awfold--variant spellings of "old
fold"--was not always purely rustic and agricultural. There is a slab of
Sussex marble in the churchyard which is declared to cover the remains
of the last of the Surrey glass manufacturers--the "French glass men"
who are supposed to have carried on an illicit factory in the depths of
Sidney Wood. Another Alfold industry was smuggling, or assistant-smuggling.
"The gentlemen" ran their tobacco and brandy by way of some of the Alfold
farmhouses; the farmer left out "bread and beef" for the gentlemen, and the
gentlemen left kegs behind for the farmer.
Sidney Wood lies between Alfold and Dunsfold, and grows hazel and oak
for various industries, besides acres of the purest and palest
primroses. Through it runs a curious trackway, marked "disused" on the
Ordnance maps. It is a section of the Wey and Arun Junction Canal, now a
dry bed studded with hazel stubs and clumps of flowers. Dunsfold Common
joins the wood, and beyond it, round a wide green, stand the Dunsfold
cottages, seventeenth century mixed with twentieth. In the churchyard,
when I was there in May, I once saw a curious sight. From inside the
church the great yew seemed to be alive with bees; the noise was of
twenty swarms. I went out to find that they were not bees, but flies.
The western wall of the tower was black with them; so were the
gravestones and the gravel. There must have been millions, hatched, no
doubt, in the heat of the wooden belfry.
Dunsfold is too far from the railway to be crowded, but it is building
busily. The twentieth century is not as frightened of deep country as
Manning and Bray, who remark that "the common before coming to the
church is wide, and over it a road has been thrown up in a regular way,
and is tolerable, and a part near to Hascombe Hill has been done in the
same manner, but between them is a dreadful gulph." Dunsfold would
probably be thankful if to-day the "gulph" were wider.
From Dunsfold one may push on through Hascombe to rejoin the railway at
Milford or Godalming, or one may turn west to Chiddingfold. But Hascombe
is better seen from Godalming, and the natural way is to group
Chiddingfold with the other "fold" villages.
Of the three, Alfold has hardly begun to grow, Dunsfold straggles, and
Chiddingfold sits compact about its sunny green. Red-roofed, tranquil,
and uneven the little cottages stand behind their glowing flower
gardens. Here a long low brick wall edges the road, mellow and lichened;
here a double-gabled, weather-tiled building stands next to a patch of
old brick painted the newest possible yellow. Somehow the effect is not
hideous, and fits with the haphazard, sunlit tiles and whitewash.
Chiddingfold is at its best and sleepiest in high summer--a village of
weatherworn red brick and Madonna lilies.
In the church, which stands among trees, with an air of large solidity a
little graver than the small, shingle-spired churches of the other two
villages, are tablets to the memory of a number of Enticknaps, described
sturdily as "yeomen," of Upper Dunce, Pockford, and Gorbage Green, which
appears on the maps in the plainer form of Garbage Green. Enticknap is a
good Surrey name to-day, and there were Enticknaps in Chiddingfold at
the Conquest. The parish registers are full of Enticknaps; in one
century there were fifty burials in the family in Chiddingfold
churchyard.
It was by Chiddingfold churchyard that Cobbett made a discovery in the
peerage. He was riding through the village with his son Richard on a
fine frosty November morning, and saw a carriage and pair conveying an
old gentleman and some ladies to the churchyard steps. "Upon inquiry we
found that this was Lord Winterton, whose name, they told us, was
Turnour. I thought I had heard of all the Lords, first or last; but, if
ever I had heard of this one before, I had forgotten him." A little
further on, he came across some less wealthy churchgoers, a school of
poor boys in uniform:--
"There were about twenty of them, without one single tinge of red in
their whole twenty faces. In short, I never saw more deplorable
objects since I was born. And can it be of any use to expend money
in this sort of way upon poor creatures that have not half a
bellyful of food? We had not breakfasted when we passed them. We
felt, at that moment, what hunger was. We had some bits of bread and
meat in our pockets, however; and these, which were merely intended
as stay-stomachs, amounted, I dare say, to the allowance of any half
dozen of these poor boys for the day. I could, with all my heart,
have pulled the victuals out of my pocket and given it to them: but
I did not like to do that which would have interrupted the march,
and might have been construed into a sort of insult. To quiet my
conscience, however, I gave a poor man that I met soon afterwards
sixpence, under pretence of rewarding him for telling me the way to
Thursley, which I knew as well as he, and which I had determined, in
my own mind, not to follow."
[Illustration: _The Crown Inn, Chiddingfold._]
Chiddingfold's old inn is the Crown, which claims to have been standing
for more than five centuries. According to a copy of a deed dated March
22, 1383, which hangs in the coffee-room, Peter Pokeford, of the parish
of Chudyngfold, gave and granted to Richard Gofayre, "the said
tenement, namely, the Hall and the Chamber with a solar, and also the
kitchen with a small house with their appurtenances for the term of
fifty years for four shillings of yearly rent payable to the said
Peter." The inn is pleasant and solid, and dark with enormous wooden
beams. Above a fine old open hearth hang three engaging pictures--or
used to hang--of actresses of days gone by. Madame Vestris, in a feather
hat and a red cloak, plays Don Giovanni; Miss Paton, spangled, trousered
and red-slippered, would appeal to any Turk as Mandane; Belvidera, in a
sober grey gown, is an actress who knew Surrey well, Fanny Kemble.
[Illustration: _Rock Hill, Hambledon._]
To the Fold Country belong two other villages, Hascombe, two miles north
of Dunsfold, and Hambledon, a little more than two miles west of
Hascombe. The Hascombe yews, which make an arched gateway to the
churchyard, will some day be famous; the church lacks something of the
quiet of plainer, whiter walls. Half-a-mile south of the church,
Hascombe Hill once lit a beacon, and looks out over many miles of the
Fold Country. At the White Horse in the village I was told of a great
old beech-tree standing on the hill, and learned that if you went up the
hill it was impossible to miss it; however, I followed all the
directions and achieved the impossible. Once Hascombe was the home of a
divine whom the biographers briefly describe as "controversialist." He
was Doctor Conyers Middleton, the author of a famous _Life of Cicero_,
for which he stole the materials from a Scottish professor's work, _De
Tribus Luminibus Romanorum_, and for some time was not found out. His
controversies were chiefly with Bentley, who perhaps was as arrogant as
Middleton was greedy.
Hascombe Hill is the eastern of three hills which stand in a triangle
round the north of the Fold Country. Highdown Ball is the centre of the
three, fifty feet lower than Hascombe Hill, which is 644 feet; but
Highdown Ball somehow seems the higher of the two. A strange little
rhyme, or riddle, belongs to the hill:--
"On Hydon's top there is a cup,
And in that cup there is a drop:
Take up the cup and drink the drop,
And place the cup on Hydon's top."
The third hill is Hambledon's. The village is dotted over the hill and
at its foot; the church is perched on the very top, and it is worth
climbing the hill to look at the pair of yew trees in the churchyard.
One of them cannot be much smaller than the Crowhurst yew itself. Like
that monarch of trees, it is hollow; unlike it, it has not yet been
damaged by man in order to protect it from the weather.
Hambledon is best approached from Chiddingfold through Hambledon Hurst,
a stretch of cool woodland. A tiny path leaves the main road over a
strip of grass and brambles, dives into an oakwood and emerges at the
end of a long straight open ride of grass, edged and shaded by oak
trees, green, smooth and silent. Into such open glades dark fallow deer
should come, and roedeer dancing out from the shadows to listen and
snuff. If bearded men with jewelled feathers and crimson cloaks rode
across the patches of sunlight, it would be nothing strange in that deep
wood. The illusion of virgin solitude is perfect. Yet the green ride was
once the main road south from Godalming through Hambledon to Chichester.
I ought not to leave the Fold Country without mentioning the
Chiddingfold foxhounds, a pack which hunts the country south of
Guildford to the borders of Lord Leconfield's Hunt in Sussex. It is poor
riding, for there is too much woodland, and on the heather there is
hardly any jumping. "The prettier the country the poorer the hunting,"
Mr. Charles Richardson quotes in writing of the Chiddingfold foxhounds:
perhaps one might add that in a poor country there can be some pretty
hunting.
[Illustration: _Black Down, from Hambledon._]