THE WEY VILLAGES
Old Woking.--Behind the Veil.--A Royal Palace.--Necropolis.--When
not to dig a grave.--"Lumpy" Stevens.--The Ripley Road.--The Anchor
and the Talbot Dog.--An Open Box.--Teal by Twilight.--Ockham.--Seven
Streams.--Newark.--Jackdaws two shillings the Dozen.--The Wisley
Garden.--Byfleet.--A Ghost in Velvet.
In whatever way you may choose to travel through Surrey, it is difficult
to avoid making Woking a centre and a rendezvous. All the trains stop
there; at least, I cannot remember ever passing through the station
without stopping, either to change trains, which generally takes three
quarters of an hour, or to wait in the station until it is time to go on
again, which usually takes eleven minutes. I never found anything else
to do at Woking, unless it were at night, when the railway lights up
wonderful vistas and avenues of coloured lamps. Then the platform can be
tolerable. Once when I had a long time to wait I walked out to the
church which stands rather finely on the ridge north of the railway. I
thought then it was Woking church: it belongs to Horsell. It was that
Woking, the Woking of the station, which for many years I imagined to be
the only Woking in Surrey. One did not wish for another.
But there is another Woking, and it is as pretty and quiet as the
railway Woking is noisy and tiresome. It stands with its old church on
the banks of the Wey two miles away, a huddle of tiled roofs and old
shops and poky little corners, as out-of-the-way and sleepy and
ill-served by rail as anyone could wish. I found it first on a day in
October, and walked out from the grinding machinery of the station by a
field-path running through broad acres of purple-brown loam, over which
plough-horses tramped and turned. It was a strange and arresting sight,
for over the dark rich mould there was drawn a veil of shimmering grey
light wider and less earthly than any mist or dew. The whole plough land
was alive with gossamer; and Old Woking lay beyond the gossamer as if
that magic veil were meant to shield it from the engines and the smoke.
Old Woking, indeed, lies in country deep enough to forget the railway
altogether, and to take to the water as the highway. The Wey wanders in
and out by the village, and half-a-mile away at Send the Navigation
canal joins the Wey proper, as the little river has come to be called to
distinguish it from the canal. The canal cuts businesslike corners and
straight lines when the Wey, having plenty of time to spare, wants to
wander an extra two or three miles about a field. From Send to Weybridge
or to Guildford, down stream or up, by the canal towing-path or by boat,
is a delightful journey in spring or summer. As good a round as can be
taken walking is from Woking through Send by Newark Priory, Pyrford and
Wisley to Byfleet, where the railway can be joined or the journey
continued to Weybridge or back to Woking. But there are, of course,
twenty ways of seeing the little villages that cluster round the Wey so
closely in this corner of Surrey, either on foot or by boat, or rowing
and walking both.
But Woking has not always been quiet and old-fashioned and sleepy. Once
it was a royal manor, and contained a royal residence. William the
Conqueror held Woking in demesne himself, and it passed through the
hands of every king until James I, who gave it to one of his foresters,
Sir Edward Zouch. Sir Edward had to pay something for his privilege. He
held the manor on condition that he was to bring to the king's table, on
the Feast of St. James each year, the first dish at dinner, and with the
dish the satisfactorily large rent of a hundred pounds in coined gold of
the realm. Perhaps he still made something out of his tenants; at all
events, a further token of gratitude, he was to wind a call in Woking
Forest on Coronation Day. He may have liked the rental, but he could not
have liked the old palace, for he knocked down every brick of it. The
strangest and most melancholy fate seems to wait on every palace in
Surrey built or lived in by an English king,--even by the friend of a
king. Of Oatlands, Guildford, Woking, Nonsuch, Sheen, each a king's
palace, scarcely a stone remains; Wolsey's palace by the Mole is nothing
but a gateway; the Archbishops' palace at Croydon has sunk as low as a
wash-house. Kingston owns the stone on which English kings have been
crowned; but elsewhere in Surrey the royal hand has touched only to
destroy.
A persistent association hangs to the name of the town by the station,
undeserved but traditional. Woking, like the Duke of Plaza-toro, "likes
an interment." Much of the land near the town is owned by a company
which, while it builds villas for the living, especially those who find
advantages in a fast train service, has named itself Necropolis, which
is grim enough for anybody living or dead. But the Necropolis Company,
whether it knows it or not, did not found the tradition. That stands to
the record of an old grave-digger interviewed by Aubrey. He conversed
grimly and with authority on the places and seasons for the proper
digging of graves. He "had a rule from his father to know when not to
dig a grave." That was "when he found a certain plant about the bigness
of the middle of a tobacco-pipe, which came near the surface of the
earth, but never above it. It is very tough, and about a yard long; the
rind of it is almost black, and tender, so that when you pluck it, it
slips off and underneath is red; it hath a small button at the top, not
much unlike the top of an asparagus; of these he sometimes finds two or
three in a grave." He was "sure it was not a fern-root" and had with
diligence traced to its root; and since he had satisfied himself of its
grisly origin, he knew better than to dig a grave near where the root
grew.
[Illustration: _View from the Bridge, Woking._]
On the maps Send looks like a single tiny village, south of Woking by
half a mile. It is in reality a large parish, and since the name is
corrupted simply from Sand, it is natural enough to find it dotted all
round the neighbourhood with other names tacked on to it--Sendholme,
Sendgrove, Sendhurst, Send Heath, and Sendmarsh. The names are scattered
only less widely than the parish itself. The church stands a mile from
the little hamlet of Send, on the banks of the Wey, like the churches of
Pyrford and Woking, and the ruins of the great Priory of Newark, to
which Send Church and her chapel at Ripley both belonged. The three
villages with their churches are still, perhaps, not much larger than
they were two or three hundred years ago; the Priory is shattered; only
the village with the chapel has grown.
By Send churchyard stands the bole of a mighty elm, riven and
iron-bound. I like to imagine that it may have been climbed by one of
the great Surrey cricketers of the old days of the Hambledon Club.
Edward Stevens, the famous "Lumpy," was born at Send, and spent his
boyhood there till he went to Chertsey and became, as John Nyren
describes him, one of the two greatest bowlers he ever saw. "Lumpy" got
his queer name either because he was, in Nyren's words, "a short man,
round-shouldered and stout" or, according to another tradition, because
at one of the dinners of the Hambledon Club he ate an apple-pie whole.
Surely he must have been "Lumpy" before, besides after, that
achievement. Yet another story has it that he was given his name because
of some trick in his bowling. Certainly his methods were not what we
should call exactly orthodox to-day. It was the privilege of visiting
elevens in his day to choose the pitch on which the match should be
played, and that was "Lumpy's" opportunity. Nyren explains his plan:--
"He would invariably choose the ground where his balls would
_shoot_, instead of selecting a rising spot to bowl against, which
would materially have increased the difficulty to the hitter, seeing
that so many more would be caught out by the mounting of the ball.
As, however, nothing delighted the old man like bowling the wicket
down with a shooting ball, he would sacrifice the other chances to
the glory of that achievement. Many a time have I seen our General
twig this prejudice in the old man when matched against us, and
chuckle at it. But I believe it was almost the only mistake he ever
made, professional or even moral, for he was a most simple and
amiable creature."
There is an unkind legend which speaks of "Lumpy" as a bit of a smuggler
in his young days, but Nyren, at all events, never believed it, for he
ends by declaring handsomely that "he had no trick about him, but was
as plain as a pike-staff in all his dealings." "Lumpy," whether he
smuggled or not, certainly has his niche in cricket history. It was to
him that the wicket owes its third stump. In a match played in 1775 on
the Portsmouth Artillery Ground, between five of the Hambledon Club and
five of All England, "Lumpy" three times sent the ball between the last
Hambledon man's stumps without bowling him, and after the match, which
Hambledon won in consequence, the number of the stumps was increased
from two to three.
Send lies deep among the fields, counting itself fortunate, perhaps,
that it is not on the Ripley road, a mile away. Ripley itself, perhaps,
owes its fortune, even if it owes more besides, to the road which it has
named. The story belongs to all the villages of a great highway. The
coaches brought their heyday, the railway spoiled it, the bicycle
re-made it, and now the village is being re-decorated by the motor-car.
The Ripley road, for the two days in the week when it is most used, is a
place to avoid. Yet it can be beautiful, and there is an approach to it
hardly equalled near any other highway in the county. The late Mrs.
Buxton, of Foxwarren Park, above Wisley Common, for years permitted the
public to walk and drive through her private grounds away from the high
road, and that generous lady's permission has been continued by her
successor. The carriage drive runs by oaks and bracken through which
pheasants rustle, past a strange, tall column of black wood--a
totem-pole brought from Queen Charlotte's Islands; then it rises to the
edge of a ridge overlooking a wide and level stretch of pinewood and
heather. In August, when the ling is out with the bell-heather, and the
pines stand deep in fern and rushes, no lovelier carpet spreads under
any Surrey hill. The road runs a white thread through it--a road best
viewed from afar. The weight of wheels has ground the surface to powder.
Ripley itself, but for the traffic, would be the prettiest village on
the road. A long string of low-roofed houses lines the highway; little
white gabled cottages offer tea and refreshment; two old inns share
most, I suppose, of the custom of fasting travellers. The Anchor, an inn
of many gables, has fixed itself in the affections of bicyclists since
the days when they rode velocipedes, and its black-beamed walls and
passages hold drawings of strange souls mounted on wheels which would
have scared Ixion. The Talbot, which was once the Dog (but a talbot is a
dog always), is a house of imposing squareness. You may see the dog
painted above the door, a liver-and-white fox-terrier, all proper.
Opposite the inns stretches Ripley green, a broad and shining level with
many memories of Surrey cricket, and in particular of "Lumpy" Stevens,
of Send.
[Illustration: _The Village Street, Ripley._]
The motor-car has brought prosperity, even if it is a prosperity that
can soil. But the tarnish washes off in night and rain. Ripley may look
its best early on a Saturday morning, before the flood rushes down the
road. When the little village lies clean and fresh in the sun, and the
inns are busy with white tablecloths and cooking potatoes, and the
children sit on the edge of the green before the dust comes, there is a
sense of orderly bustle and of waiting for a day of hard work and good
money that is pleasant enough.
One building only has suffered from the business of the road. The little
church stands behind arches and canopies of clipped yew, its walls
almost touching the highway. It is an interesting little building,
though much altered from its oldest form; the chancel has the remains of
clustered pillars, and a beautiful string-course of Caen stone running
round it. But those have not been the only attractions to visitors. When
I was there I noticed that the oak collection-box by the door stood with
its lid propped open. The caretaker happened to be in the church, and I
showed it to her. "Oh yes," she said in a matter-of-fact tone, "we have
to keep it like that. It has been robbed so often that we prop it open,
so as to prevent people putting anything in." The church door still
remains as wide open as the box. It would be a pious act for some
passing motor-car--or a collection from many--to present the little
church with a stronger box. Such continued hospitality, so vilely
abused, deserves a return.
[Illustration: _Trees on the Green, Ripley._]
Two miles up the road lies the Hut Pond, opposite an inn that serves
many tables. There is no quiet on the pond in the business of the day,
but I was once on it on an October evening, and as the sun went down the
sky filled suddenly with teal. Bunches of teal wheeled and circled in
the cold twilight, whizzed down among the rushes, darted up again and
round over the pines, then shot down again and settled, splashing
quietly in the sedge.
[Illustration: _Priest's door and Norman Chancel Ripley Church._]
Ockham village, with its church and park, is south-east of Ripley by a
mile or so. The charm of Ockham church lies in its tower, its east
window, and its deep and happy site among the oaks and elms of Ockham
Park. The church lies some hundred yards from the road, under the
windows of the manor-house, a building which cannot be said to owe
anything to the taste or consistency of successive architects. The
tower is thirteenth century, buttressed, mottled into cool greys and
pinks, and heavy with ivy. But the chief decoration of Ockham Church is
its thirteenth century, seven-lancet east window, and in the carving of
the capitals of its slender columns of black Sussex marble. There is
some quaint Flemish glass in one of the south windows; but the church is
spoiled by an extraordinarily ugly little chapel built on the north side
as a mausoleum for the family of the Kings. The first of the line of
these Kings was one Peter, the son of an Exeter grocer. He came up to
London, soon made his mark as a lawyer, and died Lord Chancellor. There
are several of his descendants buried with him, and their coronets hang
above the arch of the chapel. They add a peculiar tawdriness; but the
chapel itself, with its dull blue paint, and the strange, bath-like
sarcophagus below Rysbrach's statues of the first Lord King and his
lady, is the main offence.
[Illustration: _Ockham Church._]
Ockham itself, even with that humming white highway not a mile distant,
is untouched and unspoiled: nothing more than a half-dozen or so of
half-timbered or brick cottages and farm-buildings, rain-bleached and
creeper-veiled, and fronted with some of the prettiest and brightest
gardens in Surrey. One of the sleepy little buildings bears the legend
"County Police," forbidding in new blue enamel. What should anyone do
with police in Ockham?
But Ockham, perhaps, lies a little too far from the old waterway to join
the group of villages and churches which cluster along this winding
stretch of Wey. Still it belongs to Ripley, if not to Ripley's group
along the river. Rivers, here, would be the better word, for the Wey has
hardly yet made up its mind as to its right channel north of Woking, and
by Ripley runs actually in seven streams almost parallel with one
another, some of them cut artificially, but others tiny remnants of the
broad watercourse which once rolled through Surrey to the sea. No doubt
it was this abundance of water which first attracted the founder of
Newark Priory, whose ruins stand almost in the centre of the seven
streams. The monks must have had plenty of choice of fishing.
Newark Priory is generally supposed to have been founded as a house of
Black Canons by Ruald de Calva and his wife Beatrice de Sandes in the
reign of Richard I. But Ruald de Calva as a fact only re-founded or
endowed the house, which was founded long before, probably by a Bishop
of Winchester. Its older name was Aldbury, and Newark--or Newsted, as it
was once called--which for us is an aged ruin, was Aldbury rebuilt with
a new church and a new name. It is in some ways a rather uninteresting
ruin. Of the tracery of the windows, or any of the lighter and more
delicate architectural work, not a stone remains. I believe much of the
more easily used stone-work found its way into the building of
neighbouring houses, perhaps into the paving of the roads. But it has a
certain bluntness and gauntness of its own, standing solid and stark in
the plain meadowland of the Wey. Perhaps if one were to "visit it by the
pale moonlight" it would take on darker graces and dignities. As it is,
there is somewhere about it an air of protest; it is like a ghost that
cannot get back before daylight. Horses gallop about the rough field
under its walls; boating parties wonder why it should be thought worth
while to fence it off with wire. Once I caught an echo of the real
Newark, late on a dark and stormy afternoon, when a sudden snipe rose at
my feet out of one of the half-dry Priory stewponds. That wild cry must
have been familiar enough to the old monks wandering by the stream in
search of a likely run for perch or pike.
The "very old castle" which Frank Buckland, the naturalist, mentions in
the following note, taken from his edition of White's _Selborne_, must
surely be Newark Priory, which is now a happy (and I think unmolested)
home of jackdaws:--
[Illustration: _Newark Priory._]
"At Whistley, near Weybridge, the people go in May, when the birds
are about a fortnight old, to the ruins of a very old castle. Men
carry long ladders, and with blunt iron hooks take out the young
jackdaws, and if there are no buyers they throw them to the ground.
Bird dealers take hampers down to Whistley and bring up all the
birds caught, as many as ten dozen of young jackdaws. They cost on
the spot 2s. per dozen. The reason why they are taken is to stop the
increase of jackdaws in the neighbourhood. If the young jackdaws are
taken when about a fortnight old, the old ones will not 'go to nest'
again that season. If the eggs only were taken, the birds would lay
again immediately."
The Canal and the Wey by Newark lie in some of the quietest and wildest
country in Surrey. It is not the wildness of Thursley Common, or the
quiet of the pinewoods; but it is the sunny peace of a waterway almost
deserted, of unploughed, rushy meadows, of waterside paths and thickets
that fill in April and May with a tide of bird life which stays here,
and elsewhere passes or is hardly seen. A May morning on the Wey Canal
rings with singing. You can count scores of cuckoos gliding in the sun
and calling from the budding branches; woodpeckers laugh from oak to
oak; plovers tumble in the wind; herons flap up lazily at a bend in the
stream, and flap lazily down again; snipe cut high arcs in the blue and
drum down from the sailing clouds; perhaps from the very heart of the
thicket the nightingale bursts into a pulsing riot of song. Surrey
varies extraordinarily widely as a shelter and a nesting ground for
birds, but most of its birds, I think, know the Wey Canal.
Of the seven streams which surround Newark Abbey the northernmost runs
under the little hill on which stands Pyrford Church. Pyrford itself, on
its outskirts, unhappily, is beginning to hear Woking. The Woking
builder's hammer is already ringing under its trees. But the heart of
Pyrford hitherto remains untouched. A cluster of red-brick
farm-buildings, a footpath over meadows of buttercups, a score of
arching elms, and a little shingle-spired Norman church on a knoll above
the stream--Pyrford is one of the smallest and sweetest of Weyside
villages. Few churches have so strong an impression of an untouched
past. In plan it is scarcely altered from its Norman design of the
twelfth century; and it stands on its knoll overlooking the meadows away
to the great Priory of which it was a chapel, the Priory in ruins, and
itself with hardly a stone loosened for nearly eight centuries. The roof
is later than the walls, but there is a fascination in staring up at the
old oak timber. It was the same vista of retreating beams of mighty wood
on which the eye of the Newark priest droning from the altar must have
rested; perhaps for his sleepy congregation there was the same glimpse
of ivy tendrils creeping in under the eaves, and on drowsy afternoons in
May the same chatter and hiss of nesting starlings. From the scanty
scraps of the paintings on the wall you can only guess vaguely at the
texts of the old Sunday sermons: manna falls in the wilderness; Moses
brings water out of the rock; probably the congregation listened with
most eagerness to the third, the death of Jezebel.
[Illustration: _Mill on the Wey, between Pyrford and Ripley._]
Donne, the poet, perhaps knew the paintings well. In the days when he
was still unforgiven by Sir George More of Loseley for having run away
with his daughter Anne, he and his bride lived for some years as the
guests of Sir John Wolley, Queen Elizabeth's secretary, at Pyrford Park.
May it not have been the seven-streamed Wey by Pyrford which gave him
his stanzas for _The Bait_, his parody of Marlowe?
Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.
Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset
With strangling snare, or windowy net.
Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest;
Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies,
Bewitch poor fishes' wandering eyes.
For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,
For thou thyself art thine own bait;
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas! is wiser far than I.
[Illustration: _Pyrford Church._]
Two miles further down the Canal--perhaps nearly four by the Wey
itself--stands another little church, almost, like Pyrford and Woking,
on the edge of the stream. Wisley church is the tiniest of the little
group between Send and the Thames, but is not otherwise remarkable. The
village is not much more than a farmhouse and a noble barn; perhaps
Wisley is better known for its pond and its garden. The garden,
unhappily, is almost a thing of the past. Experiment and officialdom
have settled heavily on its sandy soil, and the wilder charm of the old
pleasance has left it. A few years ago, when its late owner, Mr. Wilson
of Weybridge, was alive, it was a delight to many hundreds of visitors,
whom the owner generously allowed to share in his pleasure in rare and
beautiful flowers. He had collected into a few acres of ground,
protected by ingeniously laid out plantations, an almost incredible
variety of plants, especially flowering bulbs, and in his woods and
ponds, besides, had tried to establish other curious and interesting
wild life. Bird-boxes fastened to the trees were to tempt tits and
nuthatches; in the reeds of the ponds great bull-frogs used to squat
croaking, and little green frogs climbed the leaves above them. To-day
that is hardly more than a memory. When the owner died the garden was
bought by Sir Thomas Hanbury and presented to the Royal Horticultural
Society. The society came down from Kew upon the fold; and on the open
ground beside the old garden, tangled and unhappy, set down a row of
superb glasshouses, planted a number of specimen fruit trees, and
devoted itself forthwith to up-to-date research and education on the
most approved lines of modern scientific arboriculture and hybridisation
in hothouses.
[Illustration: _Wisley Church._]
Last of the little bunch of Weyside churches is Byfleet, with a belfry
built on some magnificent oak beams. Byfleet Manor House used to be a
royal hunting lodge, and was given with the right of free warren by
Edward II to Piers Gaveston. Its last royal owner was James the First's
queen, Anne of Denmark, and it was probably she who built the massive
walls and the forecourt of the garden of the present home. But the manor
house itself is early Georgian; and though it has had some ugly
additions, it still stands square and strong behind its fine old
gateway. James is supposed to have planted the Scotch firs in the
garden, to remind Queen Anne of the home she left behind her in the
north.
Such a building would be sure to have some quaint traditions. It is
known locally as the King's House, and there is a legend that Henry VIII
was nursed there. He may have been, but not in the present building. It
has no regular ghosts, but Miss Frances Mitchell, writing on the history
of the Manor in the _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, tells us that
Anne of Denmark is said to have been seen moving through the lower
rooms; and there is a very dim tradition of a dwarf in purple velvet who
wanders in the forecourt. A third legend, in which the rustic historian
apparently confuses Anne of Denmark with the last Stuart Queen, relates
that Queen Anne came to Byfleet and from a neighbouring hill watched
Marlborough win the battle of Blenheim.