WOTTON AND LEITH HILL
Denbies.--Tea veniente die.--A Temple of gloom.--Wotton House.--John
Evelyn.--A child of five.--The Crossways.--Dabchicks in the
Tillingbourne.--Friday Street.--A Swiss tarn.--Leith Hill.--The Day
of Days.--Forty-one spires unseen.--Anstiebury Camp.--The Black
Adder of Leith Hill.
North-west of Dorking, and overlooking the wide greenness of the Weald
away to Leith and Holmbury Hills, is Denbies, now the residence of the
Lord Lieutenant of the County, and once the property of Mr. Jonathan
Tyers. Jonathan Tyers was the Kiralfy of a less aspiring age. He was the
founder of Vauxhall Gardens, where, as Boswell puts it, you had a form
of entertainment "peculiarly adapted to the taste of the English nation;
there being a mixture of curious show--gay exhibition--music, vocal and
instrumental, not too refined for the general ear, for all which only a
shilling is paid; and, though last, not least, good eating and drinking
for those who choose to purchase that regale." The founder of Vauxhall
Gardens was also the father of Tom Tyers, the wit who parodied Virgil
over Dr. Johnson's tea-cups--
"Tea veniente die, tea decedente"
--a phrase which has been of incalculable service to tea-drinking
undergraduates. It was Tom Tyers who summed up Dr. Johnson, to the
Doctor's liking: "Tom Tyers described me the best: 'Sir,' said he, 'you
are like a ghost: you never speak till you are spoken to.'"
Jonathan Tyers reserved a private gloom for his own garden at Denbies.
He named one of his plantations _Il Penseroso_ and in it built a small
temple which he bespattered with dismal texts. A clock struck every
minute, to remind the visitor of the constant approach of death, and in
an alcove were two life-size paintings of a Christian and an Unbeliever
in their last moments. At the end of a walk stood a pair of pedestals,
one of which carried a "Gentleman's Scull" and the other a "Lady's
Scull" with appropriate verses; upon all of which melancholy properties
Mr. John Timbs in his _Picturesque Promenade Round Dorking_, printed in
1823, meditates thus:--
"Such eccentric imageries, making irrefragable appeals to the
feelings of the dissolute debauchee, might form a persuasive
penitentiary, and urge the necessity of amendment with better effect
than all the farcical frenzies of mere formalists and fanatics."
A later owner removed temple and all. Denbies of to-day offers the
traveller a kindlier welcome by allowing access to more than one private
roadway, from which the outlook over the country to the south is more
than worth the steady climb from Dorking.
The road runs on to Ranmer Common, where Mr. John Timbs was able to look
north to the dome and pinnacles of St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster
Abbey, but I was not lucky enough with the weather. Ranmer has a church
more finely placed, I think, than any in the county, except perhaps St.
Martha's; but St. Martha's has no spire like Ranmer. Ranmer spire is a
landmark: you take your bearings from that graceful needle for many
miles in central Surrey, as you may from Crooksbury Hill in the west.
East Surrey has no landmark quite so friendly.
Polesden Lacey, where Sheridan lived after his second marriage, is a
mile away to the north. To the south, below Ranmer, at the foot of the
Downs, is Westcott, once a small hamlet and now something more, with a
pretty little church set on a hill. Further on the road west, is Wotton
Hatch, and at Wotton House and in the church you are with John Evelyn.
Of all the great men who belong to Surrey history, John Evelyn is first.
He had not the religious exaltation, nor the ambition of a stern divine
like Archbishop Abbot; he had the dignity, but not the desire of public
service, of a politician such as Sir Arthur Onslow; he was not a fiery
reformer like William Cobbett, or a diplomatist like Sir William
Temple; he left behind him no such monument of stately learning as
Edward Gibbon, nor a record of military service like that of the great
Howard, the general of Queen Elizabeth's navy at sea against the navy of
Spain. But what he left will endure; the fame of an English gentleman
who was honest, surrounded by intrigue; unambitious of honours and
titles, a royalist who had the friendship of kings whom courtiers
flattered; a virtuoso of learning hardly equalled in his time, a diarist
whose jottings, never meant for printing, are a classic; a pious,
honourable, shrewd, country squire of deep family affections, and set in
a niche of his own by all who live and work in the country to-day, as
one of the greatest of English woodmen and gardeners. Upon his grave, on
the two hundredth anniversary of his death, February 27, 1906, the
Society of Antiquaries placed a wreath of bays--an honour, I think,
unique in the annals of Surrey churches.
[Illustration: _Wotton House._]
The Evelyns have their own chapel in Wotton Church, locked by the same
wooden gate which opened to John Aubrey. In the little square space lie
John Evelyn and his wife, in raised tombs, and on the walls are
elaborate memorials of other Evelyns. One tomb the chapel does not hold,
though John Evelyn intended it should. His son Richard, who lived to be
scarcely five years old, died at Sayes Court, John Evelyn's property in
Kent, and lies at Deptford. The father wrote nothing sadder than his
short record of his child's few years--a strange enough comment on the
life of the nursery (if it was a nursery) of Stuart days:--
"At two years and a-half old, he could perfectly read any of the
English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the three first
languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not
only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns,
conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned out
_Puerilis_, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of French
primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into
Latin, and _vice versa_, construe and prove what he read and did the
government, and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and
many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's
_Janua_; began himself to write legibly, and had a strong passion for
Greek.... He was all life, all prettiness, far from morose, sullen, or
childish in anything he said or did."
"Far from childish"--it is perverse enough. John Evelyn himself began
the dreary round of tropes and primitives almost as early. He was taught
in a little room above Wotton church porch, by one Frier, when he was
nearly four. The porch has been renewed, and the room has gone.
Wotton House stands in a dip of grassland under noble trees. It is
little like what it was in Evelyn's day, for fire has taken away part of
it, and much that is new is added. The result is partly imposing, partly
incongruous; but much of the best of the house has aged well, and the
red-brick court and walled carriage-drive stand finely from their
background. Behind the house is the terraced garden which Evelyn himself
made, and beyond it a streak of water running between wooded banks away
to the blue dimness of Leith Hill. John Evelyn shall describe Wotton as
he knew it:--
"The house is large and ancient, suitable to those hospitable times,
and so sweetly environed with those delicious streams and venerable
woods, as in the judgment of strangers as well as Englishmen it may
be compared to one of the most pleasant seats in the nation, and
most tempting for a great person and a wanton purse to make it
conspicuous. I will say nothing of the air, because the pre-eminence
is universally given to Surrey, the soil being dry and sandy; but I
should speak much of the gardens, fountains, and groves that adorn
it, were they not generally known to be amongst the most natural,
and (till this later and universal luxury of the whole nation, since
abounding in expenses) the most magnificent that England afforded."
Between Wotton and Westcott is The Rookery, once the home of David
Malthus, father of the historian and economist. The name of David
Malthus hides behind his more famous son's; but he was a translator of
the _Sorrows of Werther_ and of _Paul and Virginia_, who deserves
memories of his own. He lies in Wotton churchyard.
From Wotton one might go on by Abinger Hammer to Gomshall, but the
natural round, perhaps, and certainly one of the loveliest walks in the
county, is by Abinger Hatch and Friday Street to Leith Hill. But by
neither way must anyone walking by these roads miss the Crossways, a
mile west of Wotton Hatch, with its perfect little farmhouse and the
stream running through the fields past Abinger Mill. The Crossways
farmhouse--perhaps Mr. Meredith had the name in his mind when he
imagined the most gracious of his heroines--is of all the Surrey
farmhouses I know the most fascinating. It lies behind a high wall,
which runs round a square little garden; you peep through a gateway
covered with ivy, and find an old lichened, weatherworn house, with
ornamented brickwork and latticed windows, a house which Evelyn's
grandfather may have known, and would find to-day unaltered. Crossways
farm is most like Slyfields, the old Jacobean house near Bookham, but it
is smaller, and is, I think, perfect, whereas Slyfields is a fragment.
Crossways, besides its delightful front, has a fine chimney stack, and a
strange but most satisfying buttress which ties the house to the garden
wall.
The farm lies among pasture-lands through which rushes the prettiest
possible little brook. It is the Tillingbourne, here a stripling, and
never much bigger for that matter; but here it is the meadow-brook in
its ideal form. It runs from a broken mill-wheel below an old
hammerpond, past a cottage shaded by four noble yews, and then races
through two meadows faster, I think, than any brook anywhere else in
Surrey. The water runs with the deep sparkle of cut glass;
forget-me-nots grow about it, and reed mace, and figwort and
bittersweet; waterhens wander in the shaven grass of its brim, and
dabchicks go plump in the current like cricket-balls. There may be trout
in the stream here as there are by Albury, but I am sure it runs too
fast and round too many corners for anybody to catch them.
[Illustration: _Crossways Farmhouse, Abinger._]
The road leads south and up hill from the Crossways to Abinger Hatch,
bordering deep woods of oak and beech. In July and August the glades of
the Abinger woods, like the woods about Byfleet and Woking, gleam with
the pinks and purples of rosebay. Abinger Hatch is no more a village
than Wotton Hatch: both are wayside inns, and Abinger Hatch one of the
best country inns to be found in a walk. Saturdays and Sundays in the
summer fill it with guests from almost everywhere, who sit down to a
long table; my own first visit to the inn was on an ordinary weekday,
and the surprise was to discover that there was a hot lunch ready. Such
surprises are rare. But Abinger has everything worth keeping of the old
customs. The stocks stand at the churchyard gate, mouldering, but they
are there. The inn has the old name, and the little old bar, and the
old-fashioned custom of hanging the squire's portrait in the
dining-room. Only the church is a difficulty. It is kept locked, and it
takes ten minutes to walk to the rectory to get the key--too far for the
patience of those who would merely wish for rest and refreshment in the
cool and sacredness of a country church. I was fortunate in my day, for
I found the vestry door accidentally open, and a kindly countrywoman
cleaning the church; she let me in. The nave, with its hugely thick
walls and lancet windows, is unlike any other Surrey church; Mr. Philip
Johnston, who perhaps knows more about Surrey churches than anyone else,
dates it at 1080.
Nobody should go straight from Abinger Hatch to Leith Hill. You should
turn aside to the left and let the road take you eastwards into the
woods. Then you may come upon the tiny gathering of cottages called
Friday Street with a suddenness which is a delight. You turn a corner of
the road and you are in Switzerland. A little tarn, unruffled by any
wind, mirroring a hill of pine-trees, lies below you; beyond the water
is the blue reek of wood-fires; open grass runs to the edge of the lake,
a light green rim to the dark of the pines. So do the little emerald
tarns lie like saucers full of sky and trees in pockets of the Alps. The
illusion wants but the tinkle of cowbells: it would be pleasant to
present bells to straying goats.
From Friday Street to the tower on Leith Hill is a walk through the very
depths of the wood. Heather glows in the openings of the pines, bracken
brushes rain on your sleeve, bilberries ripen in the scented heat, and
almost any path--though not the road--runs higher and higher to the open
ground at the very top. At the top, nine hundred and sixty-five feet up,
you are on the highest hill in the south-east of England.
Leith Hill is not for the multitude which climbs Box Hill. It is further
from London, and further from a railway station. But it calls its own
companies of travellers, and they are often large; the roads from
Holmwood, which is the nearest station, are lined with notices
indicating the right direction. When brakes carry excursionists from
Holmwood, the brakes halt at the foot, and the visitors climb. The
climb ends in a tower with a story. It was built by Richard Hull, eldest
bencher of the Inner Temple and member of several Irish Parliaments. He
built it, his Latin inscription informs you, for the enjoyment of
himself and his neighbours, and six years later, in 1772, he was buried
under it. Gratefully enough, the neighbourhood rifled the dead man's
tower of its doors and windows; then, by way of compensation, to prevent
more robbery, filled it half full of cement. It was left to the late
owner of Wotton, Mr. W.J. Evelyn, in 1863 to restore the building and to
add a staircase, and I believe the platform of the roof stands now
exactly a thousand feet above sea level.
[Illustration: _Friday Street._]
The full view from Leith Hill has been described by a number of very
fortunate persons. Aubrey was one of the first, and he estimated that
the whole circumference of the horizon could not be less than two
hundred miles. It is probably more. But did Aubrey ever see the full
vision? If he did, he climbed the hill on a lucky day. English weather
sends few days clear enough of mist to set a sharp outline on the
Kentish downs, the Buckinghamshire hills and the slopes of Wiltshire,
and the combination of transparent air and presence in the neighbourhood
of a great height must be rare for ordinary men. Yet Leith Hill, even on
the mistiest day, can give the true notion of height. The first day I
climbed it was after a night of July rain. A wind had sprung up and
seemed from the lower roads about the hill to have blown the distance
clear. Then came an hour of hot sunshine, and the sudden view of the
weald was of a sea of cloud. For two or three miles, perhaps, near the
hill the oaks and elms, the roofs and the roads were plain enough.
Beyond swam an infinite veil. But the sense of height, of detachment,
remained.
I have never been on Leith Hill on the day of days, nor seen the spires
of forty-one churches in London, which the Ordnance Surveyors counted in
1844, nor watched a sail on the sea through Shoreham Gap. But I was once
there on an August day of sunshine and cold rain and wind, and saw all
the southern view in a way I should like to see it again. I came to the
hill from the west by Coldharbour, and black rain brooded over all the
distance to the east. To the south-east the air was clear to the Kent
horizon; north-east the glass of the Crystal Palace winked in the sun.
Then the rain came down over the weald to the south and the west, and
the cloud rode over the fields and dotted trees like the shower of rain
in Struwelpeter, blotting out the villages and the Sussex downs one by
one. Then behind the cloud drove up blank blue air, and to the west
Hindhead and Blackdown and hills beyond them came clean cut in a cold
wind that made my eyes water; Hascombe Hill stood up dark and far, and
the Hog's Back to the north of it, edged like grey paper; I was lucky to
see the Hog's Back so plainly, the vendor of tea and melons at the tower
told me; she had seen the sea by Shoreham Gap that morning, but often
went a week without seeing the Hog's Back. Below, to the south-west,
Vachery Pond lay a gold mirror; Chanctonbury Ring faithfully marked the
south as the rain drew past, and I left Leith Hill with the rain cloud
riding down wind like night over the weald of Kent.
[Illustration: _Among the Pines._]
The unsatisfactory result of climbing a hill for a view is that you must
come down again. Leith Hill is better than other hills for the reason
that if you come down the best way, which is eastwards, you can climb up
almost as high again on the other side of the dip and walk nearly a mile
in the wind at the edge of a ridge overlooking half Kent and Sussex, and
then come to the prettiest village of all the Downs. Friday Street is
less a village than a handful of cottages, but Coldharbour has its
church and its inn, the Plough, and its scattered roofs lie on the side
of a valley of green brake and red sand. Coldharbour is almost as Swiss
as Friday Street, and the paint of its inn as bright white as any in the
sun of the Engadine. If Friday Street lacks the cowbells, Coldharbour
would be complete with the grey turbulence of snow-water.
Left and right of Leith Hill are two great camps, both of them firmly
linked in local legend with Caesar and the Danes, and both of them
connected by history with neither. Like the camp on St. George's Hill,
the camps on Anstiebury and Holmbury Hills were ancient British
settlements; places of refuge where the men of the tribe left their
women and children and cattle while they themselves went out with their
stone-tipped arrows to find the men of other tribes. Anstiebury Camp is
the larger, and covers eleven acres or so of what is now deep beechwood.
Anstiebury has an easy and certain derivation. Hean Stige Byrig is early
English for the Bury of the High-way. Mr. H.E. Malden, in the _Surrey
Archaeological Collections_, points out that this may be the Roman Stone
Street, which passes half a mile left of the hill, or it may be the
ancient British road which runs from Coldharbour to Dorking; the latter
he thinks most likely. Certainly a native with proper pride would hardly
refer to the newly engineered road in the distance in preference to the
wonderful highway close at hand. It runs from the hilltop north and
south, cut deep in the yellow sandstone as the ancient Briton liked his
pathways cut. A man twenty feet high could walk invisible between the
banks of that sheltering trackway.
Anstiebury camp came near to harbouring a modern garrison early in the
last century, when the Napoleon scare was at its wildest heights, and
good citizens went to bed praying that the next day "Boney" might not be
thundering at the town gates; it was actually proposed that the old
British Camp should be used to shelter the women and children of
Dorking. Another battle, an extra rumour or two, might have filled the
breaches with the dauntless subjects of King George. Happily, that cloud
vanished.
Round the camps and the battlefields of the heights of Leith Hill and
Holmbury cluster the names of wilder enemies than man. Bearhurst, Boars'
Hill and Wolf's Hill belong to the neighbourhood, and members of the
Surrey Archaeological Society have heard Mr. Malden discourse incisively
on the scavengers' work after the battle of Ockley, when the West Saxons
buried their dead, and there were no Danes left alive to bury theirs.
Leith Hill has another curious record of an animal. On July 27, 1876, a
tourist walking over the hill trod upon a snake, which bit him; he
managed to get to Ockley, but died in two days. The interest of the
record is that Mr. J.S. Bright, the historian of Dorking, says that the
snake was a black adder, _Coronella laevis_, while Mr. Boulenger, in his
list of Surrey snakes does not admit that the _Coronella laevis_ has
ever occurred in the county.
From Anstiebury the old high road runs steep to Dorking--a road of later
memories of sudden death than British battles. On a gallows at the foot
of the hill three highwaymen once hung in chains. A house has been built
upon the very spot.
[Illustration: _Looking towards Dorking from Westcott._]