LEATHERHEAD TO DORKING
The Roman road over the hill.--The Swallows of the Mole.--An
imperial draught.--Mickleham.--Fanny Burney.--A Story of
letters.--Juniper Hall and its cedars.--Norbury Park.--How to
measure trout from the Mole.--Conversation Sharp.--Keats and
Endymion.--Mr. George Meredith's poems.--The best known hill in the
world.--A Soldier's Whim.
The best way from Leatherhead to Dorking is the longest, and hardly goes
by the high road at all. It begins at Ashtead; you can get to Ashtead
from Leatherhead or Epsom, but you must start from Ashtead out over
Ermyn Street, the old Roman road. One might begin the walk from Epsom;
but Epsom downs, with the great empty race-stand, can be depressing, and
the best of the old road lies south, nearer Mickleham.
Ashtead is growing towards the railway, but east of the main street
there is hardly a cottage. The church stands in Ashtead Park, and shows
that it once had Roman walls for neighbours by the quantity of Roman
brick and tiling mixed among its flints and stones. It has been
elaborately roofed with cedar, but otherwise contains little; the
prettiest part is the churchyard and the park beyond it, with its deer
which walk by the gates and gaze gently over the paths at strangers.
Ermyn Street or Stane Street of the maps, which English tongues here
have named Pebble Lane, skirts Ashtead Park by the south-east, at first
a wide green lane, afterwards a narrow path sometimes half-choked by
trees, sometimes, in wet weather, impassable with mud, but always
driving straight as the Roman roadmaker drove his pick towards the cap
of Mickleham Downs. The narrow lane to which the road has shrunk is less
than the Roman made it, but Mickleham Downs can look very little
different to-day from the downs which the legionary knew. He, too, like
the modern traveller tramping by the yews and box trees, saw the
sunlight on the dark, shining leaves, and watched the wind ruffle the
whitebeams on the shoulder of the hill.
[Illustration: _Mickleham Church._]
Below the downs lies Mickleham, halfway between Leatherhead and Dorking,
and famous in all the guide-books for the "swallows" of the Mole. The
"swallows" are described as deep, blue pools, into which the Mole
disappears underground, and, except from the most carefully written
accounts, you would imagine that the whole river dives completely into
the earth and jumps up again at Leatherhead. But if you ask at Mickleham
to be directed to the "Swallows," the chances are that you will have to
explain that you do not mean birds. The fact is that it is only in
seasons of great drought that they would be noticed. In summers when
there is very little rain the Mole is said to run dry between Burford
Bridge and Thorncroft Bridge near Leatherhead, but I have never happened
to see it do so, and had the greatest difficulty in discovering the
Swallows, which, when I saw them, were brimming with very muddy water;
the stream was as full as possible. The best comment on the legend of
the diving Mole is Thomas Fuller's in the _Worthies_:--
"I listen not to the country people telling it was experimented by a
goose, which was put in and came out again with _life_ (though
without feathers); but hearken seriously to those who judiciously
impute the _subsidency_ of the earth in the interstice aforesaid to
some underground hollowness made by that water in the passage
thereof."
The Swallows are really fissures in the chalk bed of the stream, which
runs as it were over the top of a long chalk sponge. In rainless summers
there is only enough water to fill the bottom of the sponge, and the top
channel runs dry. Brayley has some amusing calculations as to the amount
of water which the sponge drinks:--
"From calculations made on different days, after measuring the
height and velocity of the current received into these pools, it was
ascertained, when both were in activity, that the swallows of the
outer pool engulphed 72 imperial gallons per second, 4,320 per
minute, and 259,200 per hour; and those of the inner pool, 23
imperial gallons per second, 1,380 per minute, and 82,800 per hour."
Seventy-two gallons--a good-sized tankful--of water in a second is very
pretty swallowing; an early instance of thinking imperially. To Camden,
in the _Britannia_, the disappearing water suggests another image. The
inhabitants can boast, like the Spaniards, of having a bridge that
feeds several flocks of sheep.
Mickleham is almost the centre of the Fanny Burney country. At Mickleham
church she was married to General d'Arblay; Juniper Hall is half-a-mile
from the church; Norbury Park lies west of the Mole; Camilla Lacey south
of Norbury Park at West Humble.
Fanny Burney, retired from her post of Maid of Honour and receiving a
pension of L100 a year, met M. d'Arblay in January, 1793, when she was
staying with her friends the Locks at Norbury Park. He was living at
Juniper Hall with other French _emigres_--a brilliant little colony;
Madame de Stael was there, and de Narbonne, and de Lally Tollendal, and
Talleyrand. The General began as tutor, and the course of Fanny Burney's
acquaintance with Juniperians, as her sister Mrs. Phillips used to call
them, and particularly with her French master, perhaps may be given in a
few extracts from her correspondence:--
MADAME DE STAEL HOLSTEIN TO MISS BURNEY,
_Written from_ JUNIPER HALL, DORKING, SURREY, 1793.
"When J learned to read english J begun by milton, to know all or
renounce all in once. J follow the same system in writing my first
english letter to Miss burney; after such an enterprize nothing can
affright me. J feel for her so tender a friendship that it melts my
admiration, inspires my heart with hope of her indulgence, and
impresses me with the idea that in a tongue even unknown J could
express sentiments so deeply felt.
"My servant will return for a french answer. J intreat miss burney
to correct the words but to preserve the sense of that card.
"Best compliments to my dear protectress, Madame Phillipe."
MISS BURNEY TO DR. BURNEY (her father).
"MICKLEHAM, _February 29, 1793_.
"There can be nothing imagined more charming, more fascinating than
this colony; between their sufferings and their _agremens_ they
occupy us almost wholly. M. de Narbonne, alas, has no L1000 a year!
he got over only L4000 at the beginning, from a most splendid
fortune; and, little foreseeing how all has turned out, he has
lived, we fear, upon the principal....
"M. d'Arblay is one of the most singularly interesting characters
that can ever have been formed. He has a sincerity, a frankness, an
ingenuous openness of nature, that I had been unjust enough to think
could not belong to a Frenchman. With all this, which is his
military portion, he is passionately fond of literature, a most
delicate critic in his own language, well versed in both Italian and
German, and a very elegant poet. He has just undertaken to become my
French master for pronunciation, and he gives me long daily lessons
in reading. Pray expect wonderful improvements! In return I hear him
in English."
MISS BURNEY TO MRS. LOCK.
"_Thursday_, MICKLEHAM.
"Madame de Stael has written me two English notes, quite beautiful
in ideas, and not very reprehensible in idiom. But English has
nothing to do with elegance such as theirs--at least, little and
rarely. I am always exposing myself to the wrath of John Bull, when
this coterie come into competition. It is inconceivable what a
convert M. de Talleyrand has made of me; I think him now one of the
first members, and one of the most charming, of this exquisite set."
DR. BURNEY TO MISS BURNEY.
"CHELSEA COLLEGE, _Tuesday Morning_, _February 19, 1793_.
"Why, Fanny, what are you about, and where are you? I shall write
_at_ you, not knowing how to write _to_ you, as Swift did to the
flying and romantic Lord Peterborough."
MISS BURNEY TO MRS. PHILLIPS.
"_Friday, May 31_, CHESSINGTON.
"My dearest Fredy, in the beginning of her knowledge of this
transaction, told me that Mr. Lock was of opinion that the L100 per
annum might do, as it does for many a curate. M. d'A. also most
solemnly and affectingly declares that _le simple necessaire_ is all
he requires, and here, in your vicinity, would unhesitatingly be
preferred by him to the most brilliant fortune in another _sejour_.
"If _he_ can say that, what must _I_ be not to echo it? I, who in
the bosom of my most chosen, most darling friends----"
DR. BURNEY TO MISS BURNEY.
"_May 1793._
"Dear Fanny,--I have for some time seen very plainly that you are
_eprise_, and have been extremely uneasy at the discovery. You must
have observed my silent gravity, surpassing that of mere illness and
its consequent low spirits. I had some thoughts of writing to Susan
about it, and intended begging her to do what I must now do for
myself--that is, beg, warn, and admonish you not to entangle
yourself in a wild and romantic attachment which offers nothing in
prospect but poverty and distress, with future inconvenience and
unhappiness...."
FROM MADAME D'ARBLAY TO MRS. ----.
"_August 2, 1793._
"Last Sunday (July 28) M^r and M^rs Lock, my sister and Captain
Phillips, and my brother Captain Burney, accompanied us to the altar
in Mickleham Church; since which the ceremony has been repeated in
the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador, that if, by a
counter-revolution in France, M. d'Arblay recovers any of his
rights, his wife may not be excluded from their participation.
"You may be amazed not to see the name of my dear father upon this
solemn occasion; but his apprehensions from the smallness of our
income have made him cold and averse: and though he granted his
consent, I could not even solicit his presence."
FROM MADAME D'ARBLAY TO DR. BURNEY AFTER HIS FIRST VISIT TO HER AT
BOOKHAM.
"BOOKHAM, _August '94_.
It is just a week since I had the greatest gratification of its kind
I ever, I think, experienced:--so kind a thought, so sweet a
surprise as was my dearest father's visit! How softly and soothingly
it has rested upon my mind ever since!...
"How thankfully did I look back, the 28^th of last month, upon a
year that has not been blemished with one regretful moment!"
It was at Bookham that Madame d'Arblay wrote _Camilla_, and out of the
sale of the novel she built her cottage, Camilla Lacey, on a plot of
ground at West Humble leased to her by her friend Mr. Lock. _Camilla_,
which Horace Walpole thought deplorable, infinitely worse than
_Cecilia_, which was not so good as _Evelina_, was an instant success.
Within a month Madame d'Arblay had made L2,000, and Macaulay's estimate
of her whole profits was over three thousand guineas. There was never a
stranger climb down a ladder to fortune than Fanny Burney's. _Evelina_,
her first and incomparably her best novel, brought her L30; _Cecilia_,
her next, L250; then came _Camilla_; and her last novel, _The Wanderer_,
which she wrote after ten years' absence with her husband in France,
actually sold 3,600 copies in six months at two guineas a copy, and was
an absolute and hopeless failure.
Camilla Lacey, invisible from the road, has been enlarged and altered to
look like nothing the d'Arblays knew. Juniper Hall has also changed, but
the splendid cedars which stand round its lawns must have been familiar
to Talleyrand and Madame de Stael. They have grown curiously slowly;
they do not strike one as larger than many trees which are known to be
not more than a hundred and twenty years old--those, for instance, at
Farnham Castle; but John Timbs, in his _Promenade Round Dorking_,
written in 1823, speaks of them as "immense," and as "said to be of the
finest growth in England."
[Illustration: _Cedars at Juniper Hall._]
Norbury Park also has its famous trees. The Druids' Walk, a path running
under enormous yews, is no longer open to the public. But Louis
Jennings, thirty years ago, saw the trees and preserved a memory of
them in _Field Paths and Green Lanes_:--
"As the path descends the shadows deepen, and you arrive at a spot
where a mass of yews of great size and vast age stretch up the hill,
and beyond to the left as far as the eye can penetrate through the
obscurity. The trees in their long and slow growth have assumed many
wild forms, and the visitor who stands there towards evening, and
peers into that sombre grove, will sometimes yield to the spell
which the scene is sure to exercise on imaginative natures; he will
half fancy that these ghostly trees are conscious creatures, and
that they have marked with mingled pity and scorn the long
processions of mankind come and go like the insects of a day,
through the centuries during which they have been stretching out
their distorted limbs nearer and nearer to each other. Thick fibrous
shoots spring out from their trunks, awakening in the memory
long-forgotten stories of huge hairy giants, enemies of mankind even
as the "double-fatal" yew itself was supposed to be in other days.
The bark stands in distinct layers, the outer ridges mouldering
away, like the fragments of a wall of some ruined castle. The tops
are fresh and green, but all below in that sunless recess seems
dead."
In another respect Norbury Park has changed--in the opportunities the
Mole running through the park offers to anglers wishing to catch large
trout. Mr. C.J. Swete, writing in his _Handbook of Epsom_, not longer
ago than 1853, is pleased to take his reader with him by the banks of
the Mole, in which he has obtained "permission from the proprietor to
gather some of the finny treasures of its liquid mines." Quite
unwarrantably, he assumes that his reader is no fisherman:--
"Well, now, cast out your line, you have a respectable cast, for
here the river is broad, you can scarce cast your line across it.
Well, you must be a little patient,--You cannot expect to catch a
fish the moment you throw in.... I see you are not a great
proficient at the piscatory science. Cast out very little line at
first, perhaps about the length of your rod, and then increasing by
degrees, you will soon be able to throw full across and with
precision. Ah! now you have a fine fish; let him down the stream a
little. Now bring him close to the shore. Stay! It is safer to land
him with the net. For this stream it is a very excellent fish,
exactly three pounds weight, I find. How do I know it is just three
pounds? I will tell you."
He proceeds to do so. He knows because he has measured the fish and
finds him nineteen inches long by ten in girth, and if you do the sum
his way, it works out at three pounds. "This is in accordance, as you
suppose, with the mathematical law that similar solids are to each other
in the triplicate ratio of one of their dimensions." That is the way to
measure trout in Norbury Park.
Two quaintly spelt epitaphs can be read on the black marble tombstones
in Mickleham Church. Under one lies the body of Peter de la Hay, "Eldest
Yeoman of his Majesties Confectionary Office, who Departed this Liee" in
1684, and under the other Thomas Tooth, "Yeaman of his Ma^ties Sculery,
who deceased this Life" a year later.
Almost opposite Juniper Hall is Fredley Farm, once the home of
"Conversation" Sharp, hat-maker, poet and member of Parliament. Fredley
Farm, in the years between 1797 and 1835, when Sharp lived there, must
have been visited by more distinguished poets, authors, politicians,
wits, scholars and artists than any other house in Surrey. Wordsworth
came there, and Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey and Moore; he talked
painting with Lawrence, and sculpture with Chantrey; Macaulay talked
with him "about everything and everybody," and so did Grote and Mill and
Lockhart and Jeffrey; Porson was there, and perhaps had his favourite
porter for breakfast; and the politicians were without number--Brougham,
Sheridan, Grattan, Talleyrand, Huskisson, and almost a link with to-day,
Lord John Russell. Macaulay has left a few sentences which greater men
than Sharp might not deserve as an epitaph: "One thing I have observed
in Sharp, which is quite peculiar to him among town-wits and diners-out.
He never talks scandal. If he can say nothing good of a man, he holds
his tongue." Yet with all his virtues and all his conversation, Sharp
lacks his Boswell.
A little further towards Dorking the road crosses the Mole at Burford
Bridge. The inn at Burford Bridge, a sort of Swindon of the Dorking
Road, where everybody stops to have lunch or dinner, perhaps will again
welcome a great admiral and finish a great poem. Nelson stayed there
before leaving to command at Trafalgar; Keats came there to finish
_Endymion_. His visit, he writes to his friend Benjamin Bailey, is "to
change the scene--change the air, and give me a spur to wind up my poem,
of which there are wanting about 500 lines." Night on the hill inspired
him; in another letter he shows the way for other poets: "I went up Box
Hill this evening after the moon--'you a' seen the moon'--came down and
wrote some lines." And it is of the inn at Burford Bridge that the story
is told, by Mortimer Collins, in his "Walk through Surrey," of Keats and
the waiter. Keats was reciting _Endymion_:--
"For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath and yellow brooms,
And cold mushrooms;"
The waiter heard, and obeyed, bringing mushrooms uncooked on a plate and
a decanter of sherry. But that story is a little too artificial.
Still, _Endymion_ owes a good deal to the trees and the solitude of the
hill above Burford Bridge. It was with the woods in his memory that
Keats wrote something very like a description of Box Hill, with the Mole
below it:--
"Where shall our dwelling be? Under the brow
Of some steep mossy hill, where ivy dun
Would hide us up, although spring leaves were none;
And where dark yew trees as we rustle through,
Will drop their scarlet berry cups of dew?
O thou wouldst joy to live in such a place;
Dusk for our loves, yet light enough to grace
Those gentle limbs on mossy bed reclin'd:
For by one step the blue sky should'st thou find,
And by another in deep dell below,
See, through the trees, a little river go
All in its midday gold and glimmering."
But the great poet and novelist of Box Hill came later. Mr. George
Meredith lived his long life and died at last, on May 18, 1909, at his
house, Flint Cottage, near Burford Bridge. It was by Box Hill that he
imagined the gayest and wisest of novels and some of the most glorious
of all English poetry. Here, in his chalet looking out over the Surrey
hills, he wrote _The Thrush in February_:--
"I know him, February's thrush,
And loud at eve he valentines
On sprays that paw the naked bush
Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.
Now ere the foreign singer thrills
Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours
A herald of the million bills;
And heed him not, the loss is yours.
My study, flanked with ivied fir
And budded beech with dry leaves curled,
Perched over yew and juniper,
He neighbours, piping to the world:--
The wooded pathways dank on brown,
The branches on grey cloud a web,
The long green roller of the down,
An image of the deluge-ebb:"--
The lines ring with the bird's song; the light of all February evenings
is on the hill. But if you are to take the heart of the poem, you must
choose the last eight lines:--
"For love we Earth, then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.
Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire."
The noblest philosophy of poetry belongs to this Surrey hill, and so
does the most wonderful love-song of its century, the long, enchanted
cadences of _Love in the Valley_:--
"Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled."
Box Hill must be pretty nearly the best-known hill in the world. It has
all the advantages. It is within easy reach of London for school treats,
excursions, choir outings, week-ends, and all other journeys in open
air; it has a railway station at its foot, and several inns, and a
tea-garden at the top, and a hundred Bank holidays have left it
unspoiled. The box-trees that name the hill are the finest in England.
Box-trees love chalk, and here they drive their roots into the crown and
scar of a cliff of chalk, so steep on one side down to the Mole that a
stone could almost be thrown from the path round the ridge into the
water. On the grass outside the box-grove the distance to the level
valley below deceives even more strangely. It looks as if you could
drive a golf ball straight from the hill on to the green; you may
speculate as to the beauty of the arc curved in the sunlight, and the
deadness with which the ball would lie after an absolutely perpendicular
drop--to the extreme danger of those disinterested in the experiment.
But the hill is not really steep enough. The contours crowd on the map,
but they show that you would have to drive nearly a quarter of a mile.
At a distance, in spring and summer, the trees which mark Box Hill are
not box or juniper, but the whitebeams that patch the deeper green of
the oaks and beeches with glaucous grey. The box-trees, though their
thick, snaky stems look as if they might be any age, are not all of them
old. The trees have more than once been cut and sold. Sir Henry Mildmay
put them up for auction for L12,000 in 1795 and apparently sold them for
L10,000 two years later, with twelve years to cut the wood in. In later
days, the wisdom of a War Office cleared a wide space of trees and built
a fort there; the wisdom of another War Office abandoned the fort as
useless. There it remains, behind spiked railings, the idlest monument
of a whim.
[Illustration: _View of Box Hill, Misty Day._]
[Illustration: _Dorking._]