The Mole justifies its name in seeming shyer than the Wey, keeping

clearer of towns, and being not made familiar to wayfarers by a

tow-path. Much of its stealthy course, indeed, is imprisoned in private

grounds, whose owners may be jealous of angling rights; the Mole has

even been chained and brought into law courts. In following it upwards,

we must often be content to keep near its bed, sometimes only to be

stuck to by ordeals upon muddy banks, in thorny gaps, over barbed wire

fences, or in face of threatening notices to trespassers; and even the

footpaths that lead from church to church, or cut off angles of

high-roads, are seldom so far left to themselves as to follow the

windings of this vagrant river.

If, like the author of "The Farmer's Boy," he would spend--

One dear delicious day

On thy wild banks, romantic Mole--

I do not advise my reader to track the river from its mouth through

East Molesey, though the police station here stands near such an

Arcadian feature as a ford across the eastern branch. But behind the

Hurst Park racecourse, opposite Hampton, he may take a road by West

Molesey Church, that, straggling off southwards, soon ends in a fairly

straight footpath, a mile on touching the left bank of the Mole at its

old paper-mills. So far the path may seem not very attractive unless to

lovers or philosophers; but beyond the railway it is enlivened by a

prospect of the grounds of Esher Place on the farther bank. The gateway

of ivied brick, so conspicuous here, is known as "Wolsey's Tower," a

sturdy remnant of the Episcopal residence to which that proud Cardinal

retreated after his disgrace, but found himself so unwell, perhaps from

the dampness of an abode near the river, where "he wanted even the most

ordinary parts of household stuff," that he got leave to remove to

Richmond for a time before being sent northward by the unrelenting king.

The modern mansion has been built higher up, out of the way of floods

and footpath starers.

Behind Esher Place is Sandown racecourse, which also has memories of

ecclesiastical state and of the transitoriness of worldly things that

might serve as a text to its pleasure-seeking frequenters, if they

cared for texts "worth following." This was once the seat of a Priory

and Hospital, whose brethren were all swept away by the Black Death, and

every trace of its buildings has long disappeared. By its enclosure

ascends the high-road, passing near Esher station, almost a mile away

from Esher; but that seems close proximity in this part of the county,

where some places lie twice as far from the stations deceivingly named

after them for want of a nearer title.

From the river bank let us turn up into Esher, on the high ground above

it. If this be styled a village, it is a village of much dignity, beset

by mansions and villas, and looking conscious of courtly patronage, for

at the farther end it has the park of Claremont, residence of more than

one royal family, and now occupied by the widowed Duchess of Albany.

Here died the lamented Princess Charlotte, whose husband afterwards

became the first king of the Belgians. Here ended the eventful life of

Louis Philippe. In the Church, that raises its graceful spire beside the

cross-road leading up from the river, there is a monument to King

Leopold, also a bust of the late Duke of Albany. The old church, by the

main road, was disused more than half a century ago; and the graveyard

of the new one has had time to gather a good show of memorials, among

them the tomb with recumbent effigies erected for himself in his

lifetime by Lord Esher, Master of the Rolls. Samuel Warren, author of

_Ten Thousand a Year_, is also buried here, as may be seen by any

cycling Tittlebat Titmouse. The sisters Jane and Maria Porter lived for

a time at Esher, as did William and Mary Howitt.

But the literary fame of Esher should rest on its identification with

the Highbury of Jane Austen's _Emma_, a matter which I am prepared to

prove against those inconsiderate and presumptuous theorists who vainly

put forward Leatherhead for such honour. The only scrap of evidence they

have is the occurrence of the name "Randalls Park" near Leatherhead. It

is a note of this beloved author--caviare as she may be to the

general--that she did not put herself out of the way in christening her

characters and scenes. Some of the names in _Emma_ seem to have been

suggested to her by tombstones opposite her seat in Chawton Church. At

Esher _Weston Green_ may well have prompted her "Mr. Weston"; and

_Weylands_ would easily become "Hartlands." It might be thought

far-fetched to connect _Sandown_ with "Donwell Abbey," if one did not

know that there is a well of old note beside the racecourse, and that

Sandown was originally a priory. Now for more positive marks of

identity. "Highbury" is in Surrey, and on a hill. The description of the

Donwell grounds (chap, xlii.) exactly fits the banks of the Mole, which

lies a Georgian lady's "twenty minutes' walk" below the place. This is

introduced as being a large village, almost a small town. The market

town (iv.) is Kingston; and Cobham is spoken of as within a walk. It is

sixteen miles from London (_passim_), where Frank Churchill rode to get

his hair cut; nine miles from Richmond (xxxvii.); and seven miles from

Box Hill (xliii.). The only one of these distances that does not quite

suit Esher is the last; but then the mileage would no doubt be minimised

to soothe Mr. Woodhouse's fidgety concern for his horses; and who can

say that they were not to be put up at the "Running Horse" of Mickleham,

a mile or two short of the scene which Mrs. Elton desired to explore?

But Box Hill is only three miles from Leatherhead; and if Frank

Churchill sojourned there, he could surely have had his hair cut at

Dorking, where, for all we know, Mr. Stiggins's grandfather carried on a

barber's business in the High Street. By this demonstration, I claim to

have for ever settled a controversy that has vexed generations of

painful students, and seems to me too lightly passed over in Mr. W. H.

Pollock's book on the "immortal Jane."

Had Miss Burney been the author of _Emma_, she would no doubt have made

loyal mention of Claremont. This is a house with a history, even before

it became a royal demesne. It was originally built by Sir John Vanbrugh,

that playwright and architect of Queen Anne's reign, who had such an

unkind epitaph--

Lie heavy on him, earth, for he

Laid many a heavy load on thee!

He sold the place to the Earl of Clare, from whom came the name

Claremont. The improvements begun under this peer were carried out on a

larger scale by the famous Lord Clive, who rebuilt the house and had the

grounds laid out by "Capability Brown" at enormous expense. Macaulay

tells us how Surrey peasants whispered that the wicked lord had the

walls made so thick to keep himself from being carried away by the

devil; and Clive's unhappy death would not go to silence such rumours.

After passing through the hands of successive owners, this classical

mansion was bought by the Crown about a century ago, and has served, as

we saw, to house royal and princely families.

Though blocked up on one side by the Claremont enclosure, Esher has

beautiful country open to it in most directions. The least pleasing

scene is the upward course of the Mole, which recalls a Middlesex stream

as it curves round by the big village of Hersham. It might now be

followed viâ the high-road, the Ripley road of cyclists, that runs by

the park wall, and below a pine-clad knoll on the other side, from which

there is a good view over the river's bends. Here the park ends, and one

may turn off through the woods to the left, among which lies hidden the

Black Pond, a characteristic specimen of Surrey "lochans." About the

road and eastward to the direct Guildford line, there opens some two

miles breadth of woods and heaths, through which one may stray at will,

Esher Common, Abrook Common, Oxshott Heath, and Fair Mile Common, all

running into each other, with the park cut out of their expanse at the

north end. Among the winding tracks and swelling pine banks of this fine

wilderness it is easy to get lost, but the road and the railway on

either hand will keep the wanderer not far out of his way for Cobham,

the next place on the Mole, whereabouts Pepys, travelling south, went

astray for two or three hours, before these roads were so well equipped

with guide-posts.

Cobham is a two-fold, indeed, a three-fold place: Street Cobham, on the

road, as its name denotes, and Church Cobham, a mile or so east, towards

the railway station of this name, that lies a mile beyond, where the

village has broken out afresh in our time. The road takes us over the

bridge of the Mole, successor of one said to have been originally built

by Queen Maud, when one of her maids was drowned in crossing the ford,

"for the repose of her soul," which probably implies a chapel at the

bridge end, taking toll of Christian charity. To the left-hand side of

the road, near the bridge, is Pains Hill Cottage, where Matthew Arnold

spent his last years; there is a brass to him in Cobham Church. On the

farther bank the road mounts by Pains Hill, a demesne once celebrated

for its grounds, laid out in the landscape garden style of such

"improvements" as delighted the Mrs. Eltons of Jane Austen's day. But

this is not our road, for the Mole now takes a curving course east to

west, and to keep near it we must turn aside for Church Cobham. Here it

comes nearest to the Wey, at Pains Hill there

[Illustration: A CORNER OF ESHER COMMON.]

being only a mile or so between the crooks of the two rivers.

Cobham Park now stands in the way of our tracking the Mole's meanders

freely. From near Cobham station I have held the bank round a great loop

to the south, and along that mill-pond opening which makes such a show

from the railway; but, to tell the truth, this vagary is hardly worth

trespassing for. Anglers are understood to be well off for time and

temper; but the pedestrian will save both by keeping on the road across

the railway, which takes him down to Stoke D'Abernon Church and

manor-house, forming a picturesque group by the riverside. The relics of

this church are of no small interest, for besides its Vincent and

Norbury tombs, it contains what is believed to be the oldest brass in

England, to Sir John D'Abernon (1277), and another to his son (1327),

with some old glass as well as modern memorial windows. From the

station, shared between Cobham and Stoke D'Abernon, or from Oxshott, the

next one towards London, we might make for D'Abernon Chase, only one

name in a long stretch of woods and commons lying between the railway

and the Kingston-Leatherhead road, across which are gained the slopes of

Ashstead and Epsom Commons. But alas! in the heart of these woodlands

Pachesham Park is turned into a golf ground, about which bristle

warnings to trespassers, beside placards of "magnificent building

plots." Anyhow, this would be a divagation from the valley of the Mole,

on either side of which a road, made devious by its bends, goes round

about to Leatherhead.

A little beyond Stoke D'Abernon Church, one of these roads crosses the

river, presently on its banks coming by another of Surrey's antiquities,

Slyfield manor-house, now a farm, notable for its carved staircase and

fine ceilings and panelling. The road goes on southwards, swerving east

over Great Bookham Common for Leatherhead. The Mole for its part makes

another provoking loop to the north. I have nothing to say against the

road, a very pleasant one as roads go. But the pedestrian may now take a

_via media_ across country by turning down the left bank of the river

beside Slyfield, and presently bearing off right across fields, on a

mounting path that leads pretty straight into a lane, growing into a

road before it passes under the Leatherhead-Guildford line, which points

straight to Leatherhead. From the road bending in this direction, one

can gain the town along the bank of a mill-pond that might claim rank as

a lake; or holding on to the embankment of the Brighton line, one there

finds a path leading by a cricket-field up the course of the Mole.

But it would be a pity not to turn aside into the ancient town of

Leatherhead, displayed in full to wayfarers from Epsom to Guildford, its

chief thoroughfare guiding them to the bridge at which stands the old

"Running Horse." This is taken to be the very tavern which Skelton,

Henry VIII.'s learned tutor and doggerel poet, hoarsely sang of as

keeping an open door--

To travellers, to tinkers,

To sweaters, to swinkers,

And all good ale drinkers.

But Skelton's hostess is more than once said to dwell "on a hill" beside

Leatherhead, and so to describe the riverside situation of this house

seems a license not to be granted even by poetic sessions. A little way

down the stream the cyclist might wash off his dust in a mill turned

into a quaint swimming-bath. Leatherhead has fewer signs of antiquity

than of prosperity, surrounded as it is by large houses, one of them St.

John's School for the sons of the clergy, a former headmaster of which

had a son of his own known to novel readers as "Anthony Hope." The two

stations are close together on the east side of the town, where a path

leads down the bank of the Mole. On the other side is the Church, a

mainly fourteenth-century one, with some noticeable coloured glass,

lying beneath the yew-dappled slopes of Leatherhead Downs, which we

shall presently come to by the Roman Road across them.

The high-road to Dorking goes out under the Church, to hold up the Mole

valley. But the traveller not bound, Ixion-like, to a wheel, should by

all means leave it by a lane just beyond the town, crossing the Mole and

striking into the path above mentioned as turning off the Guildford road

beside the railway. This path takes him near the river for a couple of

miles, by the lower edge of Norbury Park, between its heights and those

of Leatherhead Downs, a valley that becomes the finest stretch of the

Mole's scenery about Mickleham, judged by some the fairest spot in

Surrey.

Here, too, come the renowned "Swallows" of the Mole, with which its name

was rashly connected. This phenomenon is so much insisted on by old

writers that one must take it to have been more frequent and on a larger

scale in former days. Camden speaks of the river as disappearing for two

miles near Mickleham so completely that flocks of sheep could feed over

it. In our time it sinks only at points, or is reduced to a chain of

pools, after a continuance of dry weather, its current being swallowed

up in subterranean recesses, as happens notably in Derbyshire, and most

markedly in the Karst region of Austria, taken as the typical stage for

this freak performance of nature. An eminent geologist tells us how the

chasm which lets the Mole through the Downs is honeycombed beneath by a

mixture of broken masses of chalk, interspersed with looser drifts. "The

Swallows are evidently nothing more than the gullies which lead to the

fissures and channels in the chalk rock beneath. When the supply of

water in the river is copious, these hollows will be filled from above

faster than the water is discharged below, and the phenomenon

disappears. But when the quantity sent down by the river is small, the

subterranean channels drain off the water, and the bed of the river is

left dry."

Above the pretty village of Mickleham comes the most glorious _bouquet_

of the Mole, where it makes a grand curve below an amphitheatre of

woods, shown from the railway in a tantalising glimpse. The lofty and

leafy bank to the west is one face of Norbury Park, that so well

displays its noble timber on slopes both gentle and abrupt. Its most

celebrated feature is the "Druids' Grove" of yews, thus described by Mr.

L. Jennings:--

The Druids' walk is long and narrow, with a declivity, in some

places rather steep, to the left hand, and rising ground to the

right, all densely covered with trees. The yew begins to make its

appearance soon after the little gate is passed, like the

advance-guard of an army. In certain spots it seems to have

successfully driven out all other trees. 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. At the foot

of the deepest part of the grove there is a seat beneath a stern

old king of the wood, but the _genius loci_ seems to warn the

intruder to depart--ancient superstitions are rekindled, and the

haggard trees themselves seem to threaten that from a sleep beneath

the "baleful yew" the weary mortal will wake no more.

Norbury, like other Surrey parks, had once a special renown also for

walnut trees, among which an eighteenth-century owner saw reason to make

havoc. At the end of that century the place belonged to Mr. W. Lock,

friend and patron of famous artists, by whom the famous "picture room"

had its walls and ceiling disguised with fictitious landscape scenes.

This paradise is not accessible without permission; but there are rights

of way through the park that open some of its sylvan treasures. One, as

we have seen, leads above the Mole from Leatherhead. Another from the

lodge and bridge at Mickleham runs up the slopes, in front of the house,

and through a wood to the hollow below Fetcham Scrubbs, a down on which

one can hold south by a path, becoming a road as it passes Polesden

Lacy, then beyond winding as a leafy lane on to the thickets and swards

of Ranmore Common.

But this beautiful digression would take one out of sight of the Mole

and its wide prospects. Fortunate is he who from the brow of Norbury

Park can with conscience clear of trespassing look down upon the Mole

valley, now ringed in by the richest heights of Surrey--Ranmore, the

outskirts of Leith Hill, the woods of Deepdene, Box Hill, and Juniper

Hill, among which the river has cleft its way through the ridge of the

Downs. Box, juniper, and yew all flourish on the chalk soil; and the

lordly parks on these hillsides have fostered a profusion of beeches,

chestnuts, cedars, and rarer timber that in the flush of spring or the

gorgeous decay of autumn hang like rich tapestry round the green

meadows, through which the straight line of the railway makes a chord

for the arcs of the river.

The highway leads along the east side of the valley, passing the hollow

between Juniper Hill and Box Hill, for which latter goes off a winding

road, but on foot it is more directly gained by the arduous path behind

the Burford Bridge Hotel. Just outside of Mickleham a path turns to the

right which would take one through the Fredley meadows, across the Mole,

and on to West Humble, where is the Box Hill station of the Brighton

line. On a slope near this station is conspicuous the long front of

Camilla Lacey, a house that hangs by a tale, for it grew out of Camilla

Cottage, built from the proceeds of Miss Burney's _Camilla_, the most

lucrative of her novels in its day, though not so well remembered as

_Evelina_. By this time she had married M. D'Arblay, one of a colony of

French _émigrés_ belonging to the constitutional

[Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF BETCHWORTH, NEAR DORKING.]

party, who from the excesses of their Revolution found refuge at Juniper

Hall, on the other side of the valley.

Juniper Hall, behind its grand cedars, stands back from the high-road a

short mile beyond Mickleham. It lies in the hollow, so as to have been

nicknamed Juniper _Hole_ by the lively novelist, and must not be

confused with the mansion of Juniper Hill above Mickleham. The Hall in

1792 was let to a party of refugee nobles, who had such distinguished

guests as Talleyrand and Madame de Staël, the latter making here what

she calls a "delicious sojourn." The Locks of Norbury Park were kind to

those exiles; and so, as she could, was Fanny Burney's sister, Mrs.

Phillips, then occupying a cottage at Mickleham. Fanny became intimate

with her sister's friends, especially with the handsome General

D'Arblay, with whom she exchanged lessons in their respective languages;

then soon it came to exchanging the speech of the eyes. Dr. Burney was

against the engagement from prudential considerations; but he did not

play the stern father after the young couple, without his presence, had

got married in Mickleham Church. Their only fixed income was the pension

of a hundred pounds given by Queen Charlotte to her ex-slave. She now

set about writing _Camilla_, which was so well subscribed for, that

after living in a small cottage at Bookham the ingenious husband could

build one for himself in the Mole valley. But here they spent only a few

years of happiness. After the peace of Amiens General D'Arblay went back

to France, where his wife had her turn of exile when the war broke out

again.

This nook of Surrey is rich in literary associations. Polesden Lacy, on

the heights behind Camilla Lacey, was at one time occupied by Sheridan,

as Dorking tradesmen had sore reason to know. Dr. Aikin and Mrs.

Barbauld of _Evenings at Home_ stayed at Dorking for a season. At his

house in the Fredley meadows "Conversation Sharpe" was often visited by

writers and thinkers like Francis Homer and Sir James Mackintosh, who

from his Indian exile looked back fondly on what he called the "Happy

Valley." The two Mills, James and John, were also familiar with

Mickleham as a summer retreat; during half the year they went down by

coach for week ends; and it seems odd to find the zealous utilitarian

writing in 1836 how the railway is not yet decided on, "but we are still

in danger." Sharpe's house was afterwards occupied by the popular poet

Charles Mackay, father by adoption of the successful novelist Miss

Marie Corelli. Among many illustrious guests of the "Hare and Hounds" at

Burford Bridge have been Nelson and Hazlitt; and here Keats finished his

_Endymion_, perhaps getting a hint or two from "thorny-green

entanglement of underwood" on Box Hill, when "the good-night blush of

eve was waning slow." I am much mistaken if William Black also had not

at one time the chance of making copy from such fine scenery. Matthew

Arnold spent more than one summer at West Humble, where he mentions the

Miss Thackerays as rusticating near him, also Herman Merivale, who "says

it is the most enchanting country in England, and I am not sure but he

is right"; only this critical poet, though privileged to fish in Wotton

Park, is found sighing for stonier streams than the quiet Mole, which

here indeed seems the antipodes of lakeland _ghylls_ and _forces_. Grant

Allen tenanted "The Nook" near Dorking, when he helped to bring up out

of long neglect by the reading public the name of his neighbour, Mr.

George Meredith, who then lived at Burford Bridge, beneath the Downs he

has described so lovingly,--"springy turf bordered on a long line, clear

as a racecourse, by golden gorse covers, and leftward over the gorse

the dark ridge of the fir and heath country ran companionably to the

south-west, the valley between, with undulations of wood and meadow

sunned or shaded, clumps, mounds, promontories, away to broad spaces of

tillage banked by wooded hills, and dimmer beyond, and farther the

faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil to the illimitable."

That view was over the Holmesdale Valley, into which we are coming round

a corner of the Downs. To this part of the Mole's basin we shall return

in tracking the Pilgrims' Way and the Roman Road, that crossed each

other between Mickleham and Dorking. The Mole does not touch Dorking,

but turns towards Box Hill, its old name White Hill, which has been

somewhat denuded of box trees since the days when it made a favourite

excursion for Epsom Spa visitors and for picnic parties from so far off

as Emma's "Highbury." But it is a grandly wooded face under which the

river crosses the Holmesdale Valley, on the other side winding round the

avenues of Betchworth Park, where stand the so-called castle ruins that

represent rather a tumble-down mansion. Above the park it passes by the

trim village green of Brockham, then opposite a huge chalk scar on the

Downs crooks up the valley to Betchworth Church, at the east end of

which is buried Captain Morris, that convivial lyrist of "the sweet

shady side of Pall Mall," who died near Brockham at the good old age of

ninety-four, and the interior has a memorial to another unforgotten

neighbour, Sir Benjamin Brodie, the surgeon.

One might now expect the Mole to be found running down the Holmesdale

Valley, between the chalk and the greensand; but it seems seldom this

river's way to do what might be expected of it. Over a dip in the sand

heights, it comes from the south, draining the wet Wealden clays beyond,

where it is fed by more tributaries than there are forks of the

Missouri. The main stream passes by Horley, and between the two arms of

the Brighton road. But all the peaceful expanse of meadows, fields and

woods stretching westward to the Horsham road, is seamed by its

branching brooks, one of the largest the Deanoak, a name recalling the

fame of this soil for oaks.

Among the vagaries of these modest streams, roads almost as crooked, or

reaches of green path, would take us to secluded villages lying within a

square of a few miles--Leigh (the way to which must be asked for as

_Lie_, as Flanchford Bridge near it is Flanchet in the vernacular),

sought out for its church brasses and weathered mansions come down to

farmhouses, one of them in tradition a haunt of Ben Jonson--Charlwood,

with its fine old church, distinguished by a noble screen and decayed

frescoes--Newdigate, so "far from the madding crowd"--Capel, that has

not so much to show, unless the adjacent station of Ockley, where under

the face of Leith Hill we get into oftener sought scenes. All this edge

of the county makes a pleasant rambling ground, with many picturesque

spots that lie out of the way of guide-books. Were we bent on tracking

up the various head-waters of the Mole, we must follow them over into

Sussex, what seems the most direct stream trickling north near Three

Bridges station, and the longest affluent rising in St. Leonard's

Forest, not far from Horsham.

V

THE PILGRIMS' WAY

Among Surrey's manifold roads, the _doyen_ is one now little traversed

by the whirligigs of time, but of immemorial antiquity and mediæval

fame. This is believed to be part of a British trackway stretching from

Kent to Cornwall, perhaps the road by which the metals of the west were

forwarded towards distant lands, where ancient bronze implements have

been unearthed thousands of miles from a tin mine. It is said that

ingots of tin have turned up on the eastern stretches of this way.

Tradition traces it at least from the straits of Calais to Stonehenge,

that Canterbury of heathendom reared on a plain which, as the Pamirs

knot together the great Asian mountain chains, is meeting-place of

several chalk ridges, offering natural roads above the marshy and jungly

bottoms. The road indeed may be older than Stonehenge, that might rise

upon it, as churches and chapels came to be built along a section of it

revived by Christian devotion. When its western end fell out of use,

lost in wanderings across wide downs, the eastern stretch seems to have

taken a new lease by throwing out a branch south, so as to join

Winchester and Canterbury, respectively capitals of the throne and the

altar in early Norman England.

Mr. H. Belloc, in his sumptuous volume, _The Old Road_, insists on the

inevitable importance of these cities, each a fixed point of repair

behind a group of bad ports, for one or other of which the seafarer must

make as wind and tide served him to come to land about the Isle of

Thanet or in the Solent. Each of the two cities stands up a river, where

the tide formerly flowed higher than it does now, and anyhow is within

easy reach of the open sea, while not too open to piratical attack, a

situation paralleled in the case of Exeter and Norwich, Rouen and Caen,

Lima and New York, Canton and Calcutta, not to mention a hundred other

instances. The curved road passing along the Downs between these

prosperous cities would have no lack of traffic; then, when Winchester

ceased to be a royal abode, the murder of

[Illustration: A STREAM NEAR SHALFORD.]

Thomas à Becket consecrated Canterbury as a famous shrine, that for

centuries drew devotees and idlers from the Continent, as well as from

all over England. Many of these would be our erstwhile fellow-subjects

in Western France, who conveniently landed at or about Southampton. By

their feet was beaten hard the track now broken to the eye, but well

preserved in memory as the "Pilgrims' Way." There would also be a stream

of pilgrimage in the other direction, to the watery halo of Winchester's

older St. Swithin; and foreigners who had trusted themselves in our

island might well make assurance doubly sure by visiting two "ferne

hallowes" whilst in the way with them, all such spiritual spas being

held good for the soul's health.

At each end this road finishes in a river valley, where the pilgrims had

their goal clear before them, and might halt, giving way to such a

passion of penitent devotion as moved the Crusaders at the first sight

of Jerusalem. But most of their track passes along the face of the

Downs, commonly keeping on the sunny and dry south side, and some little

way above the bottom, into which it may drop to seek a ford or other

convenience, or again, with less apparent reason, ascends to the top,

even crossing here and there to the other side. From shrine to shrine

which were its stations, but avoiding the worldliness of towns, it may

be traced with more or less clearness, as has been lovingly done by Mr.

Belloc and Mrs. Ady, and in less minute fashion by the reader's humble

servant. Sometimes it is disguised as a modern road or absorbed in a

park; sometimes its exact course is matter of conjecture or controversy;

but short and long reaches of it are still plainly marked, thanks to the

chalk, that has been easily trodden into half-natural terraces seldom

inviting the plough on their steep contours. Often it is bordered by

hedges of ancient yews, which, thriving on this chalk soil, seem

associated with pilgrimage memories in their local _alias_ of "palms,"

probably _palmer's tree_, a name grown so familiar that branches of yew

are, or were, used in the county for Palm-Sunday decorations. There are

fruit trees, also, growing wildly beside it, that may have sprung up

from stones thrown away by mediæval pilgrims on their thirsty march.

Another relic of them, in popular prejudice, is the large edible snail

_Helix pomatia_, found on this line, said to have been introduced by

French pilgrims, but more credibly attributed to a modern experiment at

acclimatisation.

It was not only in fine weather that folk longed to go on pilgrimage.

The day of St. Thomas's martyrdom fell at the very end of December, when

the gloom of our climate must have made a pious mortification to the

spirit, like peas in a pilgrim's shoes. But we know how the carnal man

was moved to such jaunts rather--

When Zephyrus eke with his swoote breath

Inspired hath in every holt and heath

The tender crops.

Later on, the chief celebration was the Feast of the Translation in

July, when came the largest gatherings about the saint's tomb--100,000

on one Jubilee occasion, it is said--while at all seasons there would be

bands of impatient or belated pilgrims passing to and fro on their

soul-saving or time-killing errand. Of no austere mood for the most part

were these wayfarers, who went along with singing, revelry, and the

telling of tales, less or more edifying; sometimes with roisterings that

won them an ill name among scandalised rustics, always apt to be

attended by a camp following of pedlars, minstrels, beggars, and knavish

tramps. Pilgrimage was the tourist travel of the Middle Ages, undertaken

with an eye to making the best of both worlds, to seeing life as well as

preparing for death. One who set out for Rome got to be called a

_roamer_, as a _saunterer_ took his name from the _sainte terre_; then

both these adventurers came to bear not the best of characters in the

quiet countrysides through which they might spread plague and pox, as do

the votaries of Juggernaut or Benares at this day. That very fleshly

personage the Wife of Bath had been thrice so far as Jerusalem; and

among her companions to Canterbury were such as could be styled

"Epicurus' own son," or "a good fellow"; one who had no concern about

"nice conscience," and another whose "study was but little on the

Bible," besides rascally parasites of the Church. Chaucer's company, of

course, came from London by Watling Street, while this southern road

would be the way from the west country, as well as for numerous troops

landing at Southampton from France. But, indeed, the fame of St. Thomas

shone far over Latin Christendom, in days when British pilgrims crossed

the sea to the Spanish shrine of St. James at Compostella.

From Winchester to Farnham, the Pilgrims' Way runs through Hants in the

valleys of the Itchen and the Wey, and seems roughly represented by the

present high-road. Let us take it up where it enters Surrey, soon

reaching the long main street of Farnham, in which the "Bush" and the

"Lion and Lamb" make halting-places for modern pilgrims to Winchester.

At a humbler inn some way outside of the town I have found the Pilgrims'

Way quite an unknown name, mention of it being received with blank

stares, and on the part of one elderly rustic with muttered comment on

persons that "come poll-prying after other people's business." Yet it is

to be seen from that house, and can be followed in a pretty straight

line all along the side of the Hog's Back.

Between Farnham and Guildford rises this block of Downs, which Polonius

might well have judged "very like a whale," a bold eight-mile ridge of

sand crowned by chalk, along whose top, 400 to 500 feet high, goes an

airy high-road dear to cyclists and pedestrians once they have mounted

the long or steep ascents at either end. Taking the high-road from

Farnham, just beyond the second milestone one finds a byroad forking on

the right below the house called Whiteway's End and the conspicuous red

mansion of Downs End, on the butt of the bare ridge here dropping to the

hop-fields beneath. This lower road, running level beside the fir-woods

that swell up towards Crooksbury Hill, seems to have been the pilgrims'

beaten track, indicated to our generation by a post-office box at the

corner where it leaves the present highway. There is no need to quarrel

with the supposition that some troops may have chosen the higher road

along the top of the Hog's Back. I would have it understood as not my

purpose to enter upon byways of controversy, but merely to lead the

reader along the general line taken by the pilgrims, perhaps turning

aside here and there for the sake of a better view.

The Pilgrims' Way keeps down upon the sand, passing by the villages that

edge a sweep of woods, parks, and commons gently sloping to the

meandering Wey; and at several points one can mount steeply to the

high-road on the chine, where telegraph posts are more apparent than

houses. On the lower level this reach of the Way goes by or near three

parish churches. The first of these is Seale, prettily perched in a

wooded hollow beside the Hog's Back, about a mile on. The next mile or

so is marked by the manor of Shoelands, its name interpreted as taken

from the _shoolers_ or beggars that beset pious wayfarers, to whom

indiscriminate charity counted as a means of salvation. Then another

mile brings us to Puttenham, with its much restored Norman church. At

the lower edge of a wood above, by which a lane goes up to a white

lodge in the high-road, open some remarkable sand caves, believed to

extend as a labyrinth of secret passages under the chalk, now inhabited

by bats, as once by smugglers and outlaws like that Wild Man of

Puttenham that makes such a grim appearance in Sir A. Conan Doyle's

local romance; but at present the only peril here seems to be from golf

balls shot across the heath, where a flagstaff on a tumulus beacons our

way onwards.

We have now taken leave of the hop poles that, as we came from Farnham,

showed dwindling patches of gault beside the chalk. The sandy lane by

which we reached Puttenham is an undoubted part of the Way, that passes

half a mile to the north of the next church, being indeed far older than

parishes or churches, which, however, might well be built on such a

frequented thoroughfare. This church of Compton, older than À Becket's

martyrdom, is to archæologists one of the most interesting in the county

through its puzzling peculiarities, notably the two-storied chancel,

with a screen or arcade thought to be the oldest piece of woodwork in

England. The situation is pretty, and the village worth a ramble among

its bits of weather-worn antiquity. Such were the attractions that have

always brought a sprinkling of visitors to Compton, now endowed with a

new group of rare sights that on a fine summer day fill its byroads with

cycles and vehicles. On the pilgrims' track, the late G. F. Watts, R.A.,

made for himself a home named Limnerslease, and beside it set up

Artistic Pottery works, with a hostel for the youths trained here, in no

mere commercial spirit. In the same block of buildings, shortly before

his death, he opened a Gallery containing many of his most important

works, and a remarkable show of portraits, shut Thursday, free on three

days in the week, a small fee being charged on the others: this

exhibition is to be kept up as a monument of the artist who thus

illustrated such a pleasant spot. A little farther down the road is the

new village cemetery, which he enriched with a mortuary chapel,

decorated mainly, it is understood, by the handiwork of Mrs. Watts. This

structure, so prominent on a green knoll, is externally notable for its

terra-cotta mouldings, and inside it glows with colour in relief, the

walls being covered with figures, making a show of symbolic art such as

no other village in England can boast.

The wanderer who here ascends the ridge has the choice of coming down to

Guildford either by

[Illustration: VALE OF ALBURY, FROM ST. MARTHA'S HILL.]

the steep old road past the cemetery, or by the more winding gradients

of the new turnpike to the left. He who has descended as far as Compton

Church may hold on by a pleasant path through Loseley Park and past the

gabled house lying about half a mile south of the pilgrims' course. This

Elizabethan seat of the More family is, Sutton Place excepted, the

noblest mansion in Surrey, even in its incompleted state; and its hall,

the carvings of the drawing-room, its collection of valuable manuscripts

and royal portraits, its moated terrace, its mullioned windows, yew

hedges, pigeon-houses, and other old-time features, have their due fame

in guide-books and photographs. The house had a romance told in letters

preserved here, relating the secret love and marriage of its daughter

and the poet Donne. Such a connoisseur in ghosts as the late Mr.

Augustus Hare assures us that Loseley keeps no less than three of

them,--"a green-coated hunter, a sallow lady, and a warrior in plate

armour," of whom the last ought surely to feel himself rather an

anachronism, yet he once appeared most inconsiderately to scare "the

kitchen-maid as she was drawing some beer in the cellar."

From the footpath through Loseley Park one must mount a little to

regain the Pilgrims' Way before it passes along a bold bluff overlooking

the valley of the river, that now runs north into Guildford through a

gap in the Downs. This height bears up the sturdy ruin of St.

Catherine's Chapel, which, built early in the fourteenth century, became

a main station of the pilgrimage. Here, as at Shalford on the opposite

bank, and at other points along their route, was the scene of a great

fair, gathering together the parasites of these idle and not always

impecunious travellers. General James, in his _Notes on the Pilgrims'

Way_, has suggested with some show of reason that Bunyan here got hints

for his great work, such Vanity Fairs being kept up long after that

earlier pilgrim's progress had become a memory. It is believed that the

inspired tinker found a refuge both at Guildford and at Shalford, where

low marshy ground might well have been a "Slough of Despond"; and the

actual name "Dowding (Doubting?) Castle" appears on the map of Surrey

about a mile south of Tadworth. As for Delectable Hills, there is no

want of them in the prospect from St. Catherine's, where we see the

course of our route leading by St. Martha's Chapel up the Tillingbourne

valley, between the bold chalk slopes and the broken crests of the sand

ridge to the south.

Some question arises as to the next stage of the Way. The original road

would naturally have turned up to Shalford, the _Shallow ford_, whose

church spire, village stocks, and picturesque old mill invite wayfarers

of this generation to a slight diversion. But the convenience of a ferry

almost opposite St. Catherine's must have straightened out the pilgrims'

track, that from this ferry runs on over a park sward, then across the

high-road up to an avenue under whose shade path, lane, and overgrown

roadway go side by side. It is necessary to insist on these details, as

here for a space the track does not as usual cling to the side of the

chalk range. Its line is continued by a lane along the north side of a

wooded ridge called the Chantries, till it reaches an opening of broken

knolls, among which one might go wrong. But after falling into the path

over the Downs from Guildford, and crossing a sandy descending lane, one

should look out on the left for a marked "Bridle road to Albury," which

leads straight up by St. Martha's Chapel.

This chapel, such a prominent landmark on a 500 feet swell of heath and

copse, seems to have had its name corrupted from "Martyrs' Hill,"

perhaps from _Sancti Martyris_, and to be really a shrine of St. Thomas,

which would claim the special devotion of his votaries. The date of its

building is unknown, but it contains an ancient coffin lid, supposed to

be that of Cardinal Stephen Langton. At Tyting Farm below is an oratory

of the twelfth or thirteenth century, taken to have been the residence

of the priest in charge. The chapel itself, after long standing in

ruins, was restored in the middle of last century, and Sunday services

are held here. The week-day pilgrim will halt to enjoy the prospect of

the Tillingbourne valley before him, edged to his left by the Downs,

which a little way farther on have their famous view-point at Newlands

Corner, said to be named from Abraham Newland, the most popular author

of England in his time, as signing the Bank of England notes, then made

at Chilworth in the valley below St. Martha's, as Cobbett indignantly

records. The Bank-note factory has gone; but still stand here the

gunpowder mills which also excited Cobbett's wrath; and here too was a

well-known printing establishment, ruined by a fire. On the south side

of St. Martha's the view ranges over a hollow filled with commons,

woods, and lakelets, like the Mere at Great Tangley, a timbered

manor-house which tradition makes one of King John's many

hunting-lodges. Beyond this valley bristling heights run westward till

they rise to the conspicuous point of Ewhurst Windmill, between which

and St. Martha's might be steered a six or seven miles' course over one

of the wildest and most lovely tracts in Surrey.

Here indeed a conscientious guide must hesitate how to counsel the

pilgrim of the picturesque as to his progress among an embarrassment of

scenic riches. There is hardly such another walk in England as that

dozen miles or so along the top of the Downs between Guildford and

Dorking. From St. Martha's Hill, one ascends to the stretch named the

Roughs, a beautiful wilderness of beeches, yews, thorns, holly and other

chalk-loving copsewood tangled in bracken and bramble. On the further

side of this ridge there is a straight way up from Clandon station,

coming out at Newlands Corner (567 feet). Thence, keeping eastwards

along the wooded edge, one might in a mile or so drop down again into

the valley by a deep coombe leading to Shere. But all along one can hold

on by what is often a broad turf-way set in woods, with tracks going off

south to the Tillingbourne villages and the Dorking line, north to the

stations of the railway between Guildford and Leatherhead, each of them

base for rare rambles. One has only to keep the crest of the ridge,

taking the successive names of Netley Heath, Hackhurst Downs, and White

Downs, till the way opens out on the expanse of Ranmore Common,

stretching over the end of this block of the Downs above the gap made by

the Mole. Here, by Denbies Park, there is a charming descent to Dorking;

or northwards one finds a network of grassy and leafy lanes leading

across the ridge towards Leatherhead. But ridge has ceased to be the

fittest term for a table-land of chalk opening out beyond Guildford to a

belt several miles broad, dotted here and there by islands of other

formation, and often roughened by patches of the wildest ground within a

couple of hours' walk of London tramway lines. As to the rutted

sward-way along the Downs, usually a little back from the edge, its

merit is romantic loneliness, hardly a house coming to view between

Newlands Corner and Ranmore Common, where the crash of a woodman's axe

may recall American backwoods; but it has the defect of a want of

prospects, shut out by lush greenery that suggests a valley rather than

a height of several hundred feet.

The pilgrims of old days seldom took more trouble than they could help,

and their way lay below, near the foot of the Downs, where, after

Chilworth, Albury is the next village in the Tillingbourne valley. There

is much to be said, and something to be seen, at this old _bury_ on the

heath, to the south of which is the site of an ancient camp occupied by

the Romans. The Way, after running along the north of a wooded swell in

the valley, on the other side of which lies the village, enters Albury

Park at an ornate pinnacled fane popularly known as the Irvingite

Cathedral. For Albury was the cradle of the sect known to itself as the

Catholic Apostolic Church, of which the eloquent enthusiast Edward

Irving was not the only or the chief begetter. That distinction rather

belonged to Henry Drummond, banker, squire, and Tory M.P., a curious

amalgam of business ability and fanatical fancies. At his Albury mansion

he was in the way of gathering like-minded friends for study of the

Scriptures, and among them, by much brooding over the prophecies, was

hatched the new communion that claimed to be a return to gifts and hopes

of the Primitive Church. The parson of Albury in those days was the Rev.

Hugh McNeile, afterwards well known at Liverpool as a champion of sound

Evangelical teaching, who sympathised with the early efforts of the

movement, but withdrew from it when it began to take shape apart from

the Church as by law established; and poor Irving was deposed by his own

Presbyterian Church, while he fell into some suspicion even among his

brother sectaries. Through the marriage of his daughter, Drummond came

to be represented by the Duke of Northumberland, a family that inherited

his part as patron of the body, gathering humbler adherents in a

neighbourhood where Cobbett had found fault with the number of its

"meeting-houses" and the proportion of its people gone crazy through

religion. The elaborate services of the "Cathedral" are said to be still

well attended. The parish church, near the mansion, was turned into a

mortuary chapel and mausoleum by Mr. Drummond, who built a new one on a

site more convenient for the village, itself mainly transplanted by him

to a site more aloof from his house. Through the groves of the park,

past the house, with its famous yew hedge, terrace, and the gardens,

originally laid out by John Evelyn, ran the Pilgrims' track, here losing

its common character as a lonely hillside lane.

[Illustration: AUTUMN WEEDS, CHILWORTH.]

Another notable resident of Albury was Martin Tupper, that once

widely-read proverbial philosopher whose fame enacted the tragi-comedy

of the rocket and the stick. His name hardly got fair-play in a

generation when to sneer at it became a commonplace with every

criticaster, a kind of gentry apt to follow Mr. Pickwick's advice as to

shouting with the crowd. But to this much-bleating rhymester, thus shorn

of his glory, the wind of criticism was tempered by most robust

self-applause, as amusingly appears in his literary memoirs, illustrated

by rills of the torrents of prose and verse flowing from a truly

fountain pen. Some of his verses, indeed, as John Bull's address to

Jonathan, deserve not to be forgotten; and, while he had no patience

with his neighbours the Irvingites, he is always warmly on the side of

Protestantism, patriotism, and heart-of-oak sentiments. He claims, with

reason, to have been a precursor of the volunteer movement, not only by

his dithyrambic tootlings but by the practical foundation of an Albury

rifle club. He especially "fancied himself" as trumpeter of this

Holmesdale Valley and its history, as set forth in his romance, _Stephen

Langton_; and he was the _vates sacer_ of Albury's "Silent Pool," as he

christened the Sherbourne Pond of rustics, haunted by the spirit of a

bathing maiden to whom King John played Actæon, with the effect of

drowning that scared Diana.

This deep chalk basin of crystal water prettily set in a wooded dingle

is now one of the lions of the place, yet so secluded that many seekers

pass it by unseen. It lies at the foot of the Downs beside Sherbourne

Farm, to the left of the road coming down from Newlands Corner and

forking on the right for the Irvingite Church; just short of the fork a

lane turns left to a cottage where the key of the enclosure may be had.

It has been lately stated in the newspapers that the Silent Pool was

being sucked dry by water-works on the Downs; but since then I found it

deep and clear and cool as ever. Can it be that all we read in

newspapers is not always true?

Past the Silent Pool, the road leads between the Downs and Albury Park

to beautiful Shere, with its lime-tree avenue, its quaint cottages,

whose gables, brackets, and barge-boards make such tempting "bits" for

the sketcher, its good old "White Horse" inn, and its picturesque church

on the bank of the Tillingbourne, which offers here the unusual village

luxury of a small swimming-bath. This village is associated with

memories of the county historian, Bray, and of Grote, the more famous

historian of Greece. Its charming environs have been so attractive to

artists that a "Shere School" is noted among them. There is a house

hereabouts that made the home of three R.A.'s successively. Vicat Cole

was one of the early discoverers, also Mr. B. W. Leader, who still lives

at Burrows' Cross a little way towards the sand ridge.

A short mile on from Shere is Gomshall, whose "Black Horse" stands close

to the station for both villages, as for the more distant charms of

Abinger and Holmbury St. Mary. From the Tillingbourne, here harnessed to

industry, also giving a subject to art in an often-painted mill, the

Pilgrims' Way now mounted on to the Downs, looking across to the park of

Wotton and the sloping woodlands of Leith Hill. I have usually left the

reader to imagine for himself the views from these heights; but here I

may quote the description by that expert Mr. Baddeley, which figures in

more than one guide-book.

Take the lane going off from the mill (near the _Black Horse_) up

the hill. When the lane expands take path on left through the wood

to a field with path going right up its steep incline. At top of

field, before again entering the woods, a superb view eastward is

obtained. Through a gap in the hills, between Box Hill and

Deepdene, we look far away over the Weald of Kent. The crowning

height of Leith Hill with its tower lies south-east, then the eye

ranges over the valley between the Chalk and Greensand ranges to

Holmbury and Ewhurst Mill. The South Downs appear in the blue

distance to the left of the Hambledon Hills, and the irregular

crest of Hindhead west of them. The whole is framed by the woods on

either side of the field in which we stand. Entering the wood at

top of this field, the path soon rejoins the cart-track from the

lane that we left, and we reach the open meadows on the hill-top.

Here the woods shut out any view. Proceeding westward along two

meadows, at some farm buildings we take a path leading left into

the woods over Shere, and in a few yards after entering these,

obtain a view south and west that is even more beautiful than the

one just described. From no point does the Vale of Chilworth appear

to such advantage. Albury Park and the village of Shere are

immediately below us, and far away we trace the vale past Chilworth

to Shalford. Ewhurst Mill is again prominent due south, and the

sweep round to Hindhead, already described, is continued to the

Hog's Back, seen stretching westward like a long green gable roof.

The prominent feature is St. Martha's Hill, with its chapel

standing out as a lonely beacon in the distance. Charter House is

seen to the south-west, the Devil's Jumps being to the right of it,

and the hills of Hants beyond.

Without troubling oneself why the pilgrims now sought a more airy road,

one may get on to the Downs and follow the crest. Or a little farther

along the Dorking road, opposite a pond, goes off a pleasant way behind

Abinger Hall and across the stretch of wild common known as Evershed

Rough, at the edge of which a cross marks the spot where Bishop

Wilberforce of Winchester, riding across the Downs, was killed by a fall

from his horse. Farther on, past the Deerleap Wood and Wotton Church,

there is a rough scramble up the wooded coombe of Pickett's Hole, or a

more gradual road leads through Denbies Park, the drives of which are

formally closed on the last day of the year, else open to pilgrims on

horse or foot, but not to cyclists.

Thus we come to the final lofty expanse of Ranmore Common, where a

graceful spire makes a far-seen beacon beside the upper edge of Denbies

Park, whose mansion was the home of Mr. Cubitt, builder of Belgravia.

Beyond this, the Downs are cut by the Mole valley, across which rises

the bold promontory of Box Hill. How the Pilgrims' Way crossed this gap

makes again matter of question. Mr. Belloc is positive that the old road

must have gone straight over the mouth of the valley, perhaps by that

very lane in which the narrator of the "Battle of Dorking" had his

baptism of fire. But tradition, supported by such names as Pray Meadow

and Paternoster Lane, and by the ruins of a chapel in West Humble Lane

behind the Box Hill station, avers that here the pilgrims turned to the

north side of the Downs, making thus for Burford Bridge, a mile down

the river.

By Burford at all events is our best way up to the top of that Cockney

paradise, Box Hill. Lucky are the citizens with such a scene within

reach of their picnic excursions, and luckiest those sound enough in

wind and limb to make the straight ascent from the hotel up the steep

chalk slope, reached also by a zigzag road from Juniper Hall. The face

towards Dorking is covered by an enclosure of rich wood, open to any one

taking refreshment at the Swiss Cottage just within its gate. Beyond

this one is free to roam over turf slopes and among the groves, where

indeed of late years part of the land has been acquired by the War

Office for fortifications to figure in any future Battle of Dorking; so

here and there the forbidding initials W. D. remind us not to trespass

upon the demesne of a power that is master of twenty legions. It

appears, indeed, that this plan of fortification is not to be carried

out. Keeping as near the edge as possible, one comes round to a brow

looking over the next stretch of the Holmesdale Valley, where the Downs

are cut by an enormous chalk pit, the largest I know in the county,

taking its name from the village of Betchworth below.

This yawning mouth has swallowed up the Pilgrims' Way. To keep along the

Downs, curving as an amphitheatre of some half-dozen miles on to

Reigate, is no easy task. I have done it, and again I have failed to

find a practicable path, since "W. D." has in part closed the woods. A

friend of mine who repeatedly achieved the adventure, reports that he

never twice took quite the same line. Perhaps the stranger would save

himself time and trouble if, at the "Hand in Hand," he struck into the

road that runs behind the ridge to fall into the London highway piercing

its height through Pebble Coombe; then, from the edge of Walton Heath

beyond, he may get back on to the Downs, in front of their coronet of

woods. The Way, beyond that coombe, is traced by Mr. Belloc on rough

high ground; but a line of yews slanting up from the picturesque village

of Buckland with its church and court, a mile on in the valley, has been

taken to mark its ascent to Colley Hill and the lofty park of Margery

Grove. A mile farther on, it comes behind a beech wood on the brow

overlooking Reigate, the view from which was dubbed by Cobbett's dogged

patriotism the finest in the world. This is now a public demesne of

Reigate, a town lying just off the Way, though no doubt intimately

connected with it, as shown by the Chapel of St. Thomas, once to be

visited where now stands its old Town Hall. A little farther,

immediately above Reigate, among the copses of the height lurks a new

fort, inconspicuous as is the nature of such latter-day strongholds; and

where the Way passes through War Office property as a shady lane, it has

been clearly labelled by name so as to point it out to the meanest

topographical capacity. It crosses the Brighton road by another modern

feature, a suspension bridge, from the seats beside which the prospect

is most often enjoyed by cyclists.

Here is reached Gatton Park, where the Way, after rising to 700 feet,

betakes itself to the north slope of the ridge. Tradition and the O. S.

map make it coincide with the byroad leading beside the north edge of

the park; but Mr. Belloc maintains that it must have presently run

through this enclosure. One may enter at the lodge gate and walk among

its lakelets and timbered knolls to the east side, where are the

mansion, the church, and the "Town Hall," a sort of garden temple on a

little mound, in which till 1832 one person proceeded to the election of

two members of parliament. This notorious rotten borough, as

[Illustration: A SUMMER'S EVE, MILFORD COMMON.]

Mr. Belloc suggests, may have owed its privilege to former importance as

crossing-place of roads north and south. The small church is a museum of

ecclesiastical decoration, collected from far and wide by a former

owner, Lord Monson, buried in the mausoleum adjoining the house. His

mansion was designed on a lavish scale, carried out so far as the hall

goes, which makes a rich show of coloured marbles, terra-cotta reliefs

and frescoes, in imitation of a chapel at Rome; but it looks to be an

artistic Tower of Babel, as if the builder's ambitious plans had been

nipped by the Reform Bill when it took away the special value of what

Cobbett styled a "very rascally spot of earth." A successor of this peer

unfortunately lent his name to a too well-known financier; with the

result that Gatton passed into the hands of a gentleman who boasts how

he made his money from the mustard people superfluously leave on their

plates, and of whom his Redhill neighbours have cause to think that he

spends it with like liberality.

Beyond Gatton comes a descent into another gap of the Downs, filled by

the pretty and prosperous village of Merstham, with its "Feathers" Inn,

and its old Church on a knoll. In the valley, the high-road of Redhill

and two railway lines have obliterated the crossing of the Pilgrims'

Way on to the next face of the Downs, which now sweep back a little

farther north. For a short mile, we may be content to take a road along

the foot; then a path slanting up the slope brings us back to the crest,

where the Pilgrims' track has been transformed as approach to new

houses. Near these turns north a byway to the Church of Chaldon, lying a

mile or so behind our route.

This secluded Church is notable for the best of such fresco

wall-paintings as were a feature of other churches in Surrey. The work

seems to date from the generation after Becket, but became overlaid by

plaster and white washing, under which it was discovered on the Church

being restored a generation ago. Since their exposure, the colours have

somewhat faded, so the short-sighted visitor, unversed in mediæval

symbolism, may be told how the lower part displays the torments of the

wicked at the hands of hideous devils, beside a serpent writhing among

the fruit:--

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world and all our woe.

From this grotesquely dismal scene, happier souls struggle up the Ladder

of Salvation to where on one side Christ is seen triumphing over the

powers of Evil, and on the other St. Michael weighing souls in his

balance. One of the figures below, holding a bottle, is interpreted as a

temperance lesson, no doubt needed by some of the pilgrims, who must

often have turned aside to profit by this pictorial sermon. The worst

torment seems to be that of a millionaire of the period, who had perhaps

not opened his money bags to relieve poor pilgrims.

For the Pilgrims' Way we have only to keep the brow of White Hill,

looking over to the southern ridge on which Bletchingley stands. After

crossing the road from Caterham to Bletchingley, it is continued by a

lane turning off beside a tower and past the mansion called Arthur's

Seat, to the War Coppice, once an ancient camp, but now, like the

Cardinal's Cap on White Hill, offered as a too eligible building site.

Except by peeps, the view to the south becomes obstructed; and we look

over the Harestone Valley, down which a pleasant path runs northward to

Caterham. At Gravelly Hill and its Water Tower, new road-making seems to

transmogrify the Way, that on the slope beyond must have taken a

scramble into the deep hollow through which runs the high-road to

Godstone. Perhaps the original track is represented by a narrow lane

descending on the south face of the Downs.

Across that quarried hollow, we again ascend the Downs for their last

half-dozen miles in Surrey. A little below the milestone goes off a

charmingly devious lane up Winder's Hill and along the south side of

Marden Park, past its white shooting "Castle" so conspicuous on the

brow, then the lodge gate, through which there is a bridle-way running

to Caterham or on to the farther end of the park, two miles north.

Evelyn tells us how this fine demesne was made from a "barren warren"

and a poor farm in a hardly populated parish, by that "prodigious rich

scrivener" of his own time, Sir Robert Clayton, a Lord Mayor of London,

whose virtues, or at least his fortunes, are attested by the monstrous

monument covering a whole chancel wall of Bletchingley Church on the

ridge to the south. Here, admiringly says our authority on such matters,

the wealthy citizen so changed the face of hill, valley, and "solitary

mountain," that before long Marden looked like "some foreign country"

which would "produce spontaneously pines, firs, cypress, yew, holly, and

juniper," not to mention "an infinite store of the best fruit."

The sylvan riches of Marden Park may be sampled from a lovely lane

winding round the outside of its enclosure to gain the open edge of the

heights. The Pilgrims' Way here dropped to a lower level, passing by

what is still called Palmer's Wood and another wood on the face of the

Downs, again hugely scarred by chalk cuttings. It next runs right

through the middle of Titsey Park, where a Roman villa was discovered

near its course. Titsey Place was the old seat of the Greshams, a name

well known in City annals, whose monuments are preserved in the new

church on the east side of the park. From this point eastwards the Way

is a modern lane easily followed for miles.

The modern pilgrim may as well leave this lower road to be looked down

on from the edge, along which he can hold on from Marden Park, by hints

of War Office possession, and some lonely houses that mark an attempt at

a new London settlement meant to take its name from Woldingham on the

lower ground behind. Thus is gained the inconspicuous swell of Botley

Hill, which appears to be the highest ground on the Surrey Downs (882

feet) but has no markedly prominent point to command a view, looking

north across a somewhat featureless table-land to the towers of the

Crystal Palace, and south over a more pleasing expanse of hills, dales,

woods, and villages. Presently this prospect is interrupted by woods,

behind which five roads meet to make the perilous descent by Titsey, as

other arduous lanes and paths have been seen dropping down towards Oxted

and Limpsfield. Still we may keep the edge, taking the Westerham road,

almost half a mile along which, at Cold Harbour Green, the highest face

of the Surrey Downs (880 feet) is marked by a clump of beech trees above

a farm named Pilgrims' Lodge. A little farther along the high ground

stands the last Surrey Church, Tatsfield, looking far over the vale by

which the Way now enters Kent.

Many a weary league had the pilgrims yet to tramp or trot, up and down,

along or above the Kentish Downs. Little thought had they to spare for

the beauties of their long road, unless when some poetic soul was

half-unconsciously moved by the freshness of a flowery mead or the

coolness of the good greenwood where "smalle fowles maken melody." Least

of all did they admire the arduous steeps and the patches of wilderness

on which a generation free from the fear of robbers and bogeys best

loves to linger. In this too short account of some forty miles as the

bird flies, which might well be doubled by turning here and there among

varied scenes and sites, I have been able only to outline one of the

most alluring ways in England, which threads together nearly all

Surrey's fairest charms. If the gentle reader do not believe my report,

let him make this pilgrimage for himself, as he may do, day after day,

in stretches of some dozen miles, by striking into its road from

Farnham, Guildford, Dorking, Redhill, or Caterham, each giving access to

a fresh block of the Downs.

VI

THE ROMAN ROAD

An improvement on the British trackways, comparable almost to railways

in relation to turnpikes, must have been the paved and embanked Roman

roads, with their milestones and stations. Several of them are known,

either as straight stretches of modern highway, or fallen into miry and

grassy desuetude, or only guessed at as having shaped parish boundaries.

Least forgotten are the main roads connecting London with provincial

towns and camps. Our long and nearly straight Edgware Road was Watling

Street, with its branches making the Midland or London and North-Western

system of Roman travel. John Gilpin's road out by Tottenham and Edmonton

for several miles followed Ermyn Street, the Great Northern line of the

Romans. They had a Great Western road also, running by Staines to

Silchester, which has

[Illustration: EASHING, NEAR GODALMING.]

preserved no familiar name. Watling Street, which originally, till

diverted to London Bridge, came down by our west-end parks to cross the

Thames at Westminster, in Surrey turned eastward into Kent as their

Chatham and Dover route. From either this or from Ermyn Street, or

rather as a continuation of both, "Stane" Street went south towards

Chichester, the Roman Regnum, with a branch that might be styled the

Brighton line of the period, when indeed Pevensey was the important

terminus on this coast. From earliest days of commerce, Surrey could not

but be crossed by ways from London to the southern ports; and perhaps

here, as elsewhere, the Romans only adapted older tracks, as our

generation may turn a canal into a railway.

More than one Roman road was made here, but what has been remembered as

_the_ Roman road, is the ancient Stone Street that ran right through the

centre of the county. This name, still in parts familiar, is borne out

by excavations made at different times, when flints and other stones

laid alternately, to a thickness of four or five feet, were found bedded

in sand and gravel or cement. As in the case of the Pilgrims' Way, part

of its line has been more or less closely followed by an actual road;

part has become obliterated, the course only to be guessed by the rule

of general straightness, unless where turned askew by insurmountable

obstacles; but one stretch still remains clearly marked out, buried

beneath a turf track that makes the joy of pedestrians. It begins just

beyond the racecourse of Epsom, to which the Romans marched by much the

same line as the cyclists' road through Kennington, Clapham,--or

Streatham,--Tooting, Morden, and Ewell. The name Newington _Causeway_ is

taken as a hint of Stone Street's connection with London Bridge.

Before it gets clear of the suburbs, this road passes the remains of the

once great Priory of Merton, hidden away behind a mill on the banks of

the Wandle, and shut in by what may now be called a purlieu of

Wimbledon, but could be described by Lackington, the autobiographical

bookseller, as "the most rural village of the most beautiful county."

Here were educated Thomas à Becket, and the founder of Merton College;

and here in 1236 a council of barons let their king know how they were

unwilling to change the laws of England. What the Merton folk remember

more clearly and proudly is the residence here of Nelson with his too

intimate friends the Hamiltons, in a house the identification of which

was made matter of recent newspaper controversy, so blurred are the

records of a century back. Confusion seems to have arisen from the fact

that the Hamiltons temporarily occupied Merton Abbey House; but their

fixed home was Merton Place, to the south of the Abbey, which has

disappeared along with the stream in the grounds, by Lady Hamilton

christened the Nile, in honour of her hero. The "Nelson's Arms" and

Nelson Grove Road preserve his memory here. Close to Merton Abbey

station there is a gateway to be seen as the finest fragment of the old

monastery, reached from the high-road by a path up the Wandle. To our

generation the Abbey has perhaps been best known as site of William

Morris's factory of artistic decorations. Merton has grown so fast that

a manorial mansion might well seem an anachronism here, as was

recognised by its squire, Mr. John Innes, bequeathing his property in

generous endowment for local amenities and benefactions to what is now a

London suburb, yet not without some rustic features.

The next village, Morden, looks still not unfit to have a squire in its

park; then two or three miles farther on, the cyclist spins unsuspecting

by another name fallen from high estate. He approaches Ewell and the

springs of the Hogsmill River, along the wall of Nonsuch Park, in which

once stood a stately palace built by Henry VIII.; and on the other side

of the road the name of Worcester Park recalls how this outlying

residential suburb also made part of a royal demesne, the neighbourhood

of which fostered Epsom in Tudor and Stuart days. Nonsuch Palace became

a favourite residence of Elizabeth and James I., and seems to have set a

fashion of the day in names. The Virginian colonists christened

Powhattan's lodge _Nonsuch_, as "the strongest and most pleasant place

in the country," when John Smith also complimented Pocahontas with the

title "Nonpareil of Virginia." The present mansion keeps no more than

the name of Nonsuch, the site of which was near the modern mock

antiquity styled Ewell Castle and the ivied tower of the old church,

that makes such a picturesque monument beside its successor. Pictures

and Camden's description preserve the grandeur of that vanished palace,

still standing in the plague year, to be used as a government office,

when Pepys hints how it was falling into decay, but Evelyn could admire

the manner in which its walls "were all so covered with scales of slate,

that it seemed carved in the wood and painted, the slate fastened on

the timber in pretty figures, that has, like a coat of armour, preserved

it from rotting."

So much for the high-road to Epsom. But if I were going there in no

hurry and in dry weather, I once could walk almost all the way from

Richmond Park or from Putney Heath over grass or green lanes, with only

two bits of road tramping, one at Coombe, and one through the houses of

Worcester Park: there has, indeed, been so much building hereabouts of

late, that I should fear now to find the paths turning to streets. This

way is mainly up the course of the Hogsmill River to Chessington, the

parish where Fanny Burney visited the retreat of her "Daddy" Crispe.

From the hillock on which the little church stands, more than one path

leads on by the tower of the asylum at Horton and beneath the railway

line into Epsom's main thoroughfare.

Few able-bodied Londoners of our generation have not by one route or

other visited Epsom, which has four railway lines from the capital, two

of them indeed not taking the trouble to come beyond the famous

racecourse on the Downs. The smart little town lies mainly along the

Dorking high-road, in a dip between the Downs and the expanse of Epsom

Common, which imperceptibly merges with the wooded swell of Ashstead

Common, named Leatherhead Common on a map of a century ago, before it

became a resort of school-feasting Londoners. A conspicuous building on

the Downs side is Epsom College, founded for the sons of medical men.

That tall tower at Horton makes a landmark on the flat to the other

side. The London end of the town is more commonplace, but farther on,

about the Clock Tower that replaces the old watch-house, roomy openings,

venerable inns, solid dwelling-houses, and shaded walks hint at the

amenities of Epsom in its days of watering-place fame. Beyond this south

end are the notable mansions of the Durdans and Woodcote Park, each in

their well-wooded grounds. Above all, shining on the top of the Downs,

the Grand Stand, more than once enlarged since its building in 1829,

makes the Capitol or Acropolis of this Surrey Olympia.

Racing upon Banstead Downs, as the name then was, is first heard of

under patronage of James I. on his visits at Nonsuch. A horse-race here

is said to have been the excuse for that gathering of Cavaliers that

ended so ill outside of Kingston, when they would have revived the Civil

War. Foot- as well as horse-races, with cudgelling and wrestling

matches, drew spectators in simple days whereof Herrick tells us how--

Naked younglings, handsome striplings run

Their goals for virgins' kisses; which when done,

Then unto dancing forth the learned round

Commixt they meet.

The running footmen of the quality were in a manner professionals at the

sport that made their duty. Pepys notes how one summer day the town talk

among such quidnuncs as himself was "of nothing but the great foot-race

run this day on Banstead Downs between Lee, the Duke of Richmond's

footman, and a tyler, a famous runner," and how the athletic flunkey

won, though the betting was three to four against him. Charles II. and

his brother of York both lost money on this "event," and let us hope

they paid up.

These princes helped to make horse-racing fashionable, Newmarket being

the chief scene of it, where the horses were ridden by noble sportsmen

in person, our merry monarch himself acting the jockey. The Banstead

gatherings were as yet not so celebrated, still Defoe in his _Tour_ is

quite enthusiastic about the spectacle on the Downs when "they are

covered with Coaches and Ladies, and an innumerable Company of Horsemen,

as well Gentlemen as Citizens, attending the Sport; and then, adding to

the Beauty of the Sight, the Racers flying over the Course, as if they

neither touched not nor felt not the Ground they run upon: I think no

sight except that of a Victorious Army, under a Protestant King of

_Great Britain_, could exceed it." That unlamented Prince Fred, "who was

alive and is dead," lived for a time at the Durdans, and then gave a cup

to be run for at Epsom, which brought its course into more note. But its

real fame and fortune date from about 1778, when a sporting Earl of

Derby and his friends founded the Oaks and the Derby stakes, to be run

for at what ought to be the brightest time of our year, yet the "blue

ribbon of the turf" has been won in a snow-storm.

Before the height of its racing renown, Epsom had, we know, had a spell

of prosperity as a spa. The mineral water, charged with sulphate of

magnesia, is said to have been discovered early in the seventeenth

century, through a countryman noticing how his cows--or his ass in a

variant story--would not drink it, a reversal of the usual legend, as

shown in the leading case of Bladud's pigs at Bath. In Fuller's day

"Ebsham" was a resort of citizens coming from what even then

[Illustration: SPRING BLOSSOMS NEAR DORKING.]

might be styled "the worst of smokes into the purest of airs." By the

middle of the century the waters had won a name; and a little later

Pepys found the place so full that he could not get a lodging. Nell

Gwynne was another patron at this period. The height of its vogue seems

to have been under Queen Anne, whose husband came to drink the waters.

Nearness to London must have helped Epsom's favour; and its people were

not backward in laying themselves out to accommodate strangers, for

whose entertainment were provided the usual gaieties of a

watering-place, set off by its situation in what seemed "a great Park

filled with little Groves, Lodges, and Retreats for coolness of Air and

Shade from the Sun." But it is only in summer, says Defoe, that visitors

can be expected, the clays of the lowlands making ill roads for winter

jaunts.

Defoe declares Tunbridge Wells then the more fashionable place, favoured

by "the Nobility and Gentry, as Epsom rather by Merchants and Rich

Citizens"; both frequented rather for "the Mirth and Company, for Gaming

or Intriguing or the like," than for "meer Physick"; and he states that

Londoners of a lower class who sought serious treatment found it by

walking out to the wells of Dulwich and Streatham, so much beset on

holidays by "an unruly and unmannerly" crowd that the "better sort" kept

aloof from such Cockney haunts. One notes how a contemporary French

_Guide du Baigneur_ advertises Dulwich and Streatham as well as Epsom

among our spas, though other more famous British resorts have not yet

swum into the ken of this authority. The sulphur water of Streatham,

indeed, may still be tasted, pumped up behind the counter of a dairy by

a dispenser who has informed me that he finds it excellent as "supper

beer"--_de gustibus_, etc.

John Toland in 1711 gives the wordiest account of Epsom spa and its

company, lodged in a group of hamlets about the main street, with the

paved Terrace, Assembly Room, and two rival bowling-greens as centres of

intercourse. The writer himself had a "Hermitage" at Woodcote Green,

from which he thus describes, is his _Letter to Eudoxa_:--

By the Conversation of those who walk there, you would fancy

yourself to be this Minute on the _Exchange_, and the next Minute

at St. _James's_; one while in an _East-India_ Factory, or a

_West-India_ Plantation, and another while with the _Army_ in

_Flanders_, or on Board the _Fleet_ in the _Ocean_.... A fairer

Circle was never seen at _Baiae_, or _Cumae_ of old, nor of late at

_Carelsbad_, or _Aix-la-Chapelle_, than is to be admir'd on the

High-Green and in the Long-Room, on a publick Day. If the _German_

Baths out-number us in Princesses, we out-shine them in Nymphs and

Goddesses, to whom their Princes wou'd be proud to pay Adoration.

But not to dissemble any Thing, bountiful Nature has likewise

provided us with many other Faces and Shapes, I may add, with

another Sett of Dress, Speech, and Behaviour (not to mention Age)

ordain'd to quench the cruel Flames, or to damp the inordinate

Desires, which the Young, the Handsom, and the Accomplish'd, might

undesignedly kindle.... The Rude, the Sullen, the Noisy, and the

Affected, the Peevish, the Covetous, the Litigious, and the

Sharping, the Proud, the Prodigal, the Impatient, and the

Impertinent, become visible foils to the Well-bred, Prudent,

Modest, and Good-humour'd, in the Eyes of all impartial Beholders.

Our Doctors, instead of prescribing the Waters for the Vapours, or

the Spleen, order their Patients to be assiduous at all publick

Meetings, knowing that (if they be not themselves of the Number)

they'll find abundant Occasion to laugh at bankrupt

Fortune-Hunters, crazy or superannuated Beaus, marry'd Coquets,

intriguing Prudes, richly-dress'd Waiting-Maids and complimenting

Footmen.... The Judicious EUDOXA will naturally conclude, that such

a Concourse of all Ranks of People, must needs fill the Shops with

most Sorts of useful and substantial Wares, as well as with finer

Goods, Fancies, and Toys. The Taverns, the Inns, and the

Coffee-houses answer the Resort of the Place. And I must do our

Coffee-houses the Justice to affirm, that for social Virtue they

are unequal'd by few, and exceeded by none; tho' I wish they may be

imitated by all. A _Tory_ does not stare and leer when a _Whig_

comes in, nor a _Whig_ look sour and whisper at the Sight of a

_Tory_. These distinctions are laid by with the Winter Suit at

_London_, and a gayer, easier Habit worn in the Country.

Epsom's credit appears to have been lost through the trickery of a

certain apothecary, who set up "New Wells" with Assembly and

gambling-rooms, which took for a time, till it leaked out how the virtue

of this rival spring was only matter of imagination. That humbug had

bought up the original well, and went so far as to close it by way of

protecting his own dishonest enterprise. Then Epsom fell off as a

resort; and though attempts were made to galvanise its repute, it never

got back those throngs of visitors, while the artificial Epsom salts

came to be a popular remedy. The once famous well is now obscurely

enclosed in the grounds of a private mansion on the Common, to be seen

above a row of cottages beside the railway, just outside the town. Among

the Ashstead oaks, higher up on the Common, there is a still more

neglected spring known as the "Roman Well," the highest point of this

open woodland having apparently been the site of a Roman camp.

The Roman Road is on the other side of the town, beginning at the

south-west corner of the racecourse, to be followed in a nearly straight

line from an inn below the Grand Stand. On the Ordnance Maps it is

marked _Ermyn Street_, but Stone Street is the traditional name, though

it seems anything but stony in our macadamising days. An easy and

pleasant way of striking into it from the town is to turn up left at the

"Spread Eagle," then presently right by a flagged path and a lane

forking to the right, which brings one below Lord Rosebery's seat, the

Durdans, where a road goes straight up-hill to the inn above mentioned.

One might, however, keep another in the same direction as the lane,

presently bending up left round Woodcote Park, and past Ashstead Park on

the right, till at the top of the ascent is struck the Roman Road.

There is no mistaking this deserted highway, here a broad stretch of

turf, on which practical farmers must cast a covetous eye. At a height

of about 400 feet, it makes a delightful walk, crossed by tempting

pathways, on one side to the Dorking road through Ashstead and

Leatherhead, on the other to Headley and Walton, by which one might cut

across to the Reigate road. Pebble Lane is a local name, suggested by

traces of the Roman construction that have been exposed to view; and

there are hints of the old embankment, where to the careless eye nothing

may appear but a swathe of waste land. The Church in Ashstead Park is

believed to occupy the site of a Roman villa, such as often stood a

little way off these roads, like a modern gentleman's house behind its

avenue.

Among the divagations suggested by guide-posts, one might choose the

mile or so's walk behind Ashstead to the church of Headley-on-the-Hill,

whose spire is a far seen landmark and a focus of several such footways,

another of which would lead back to the Roman Road farther on. If one

keep straight along it, after half an hour's soft walking it grows

narrower, rougher, and shadier, crooking its way through a wood as it

comes upon the yew-dotted and tumulus-swollen slopes of the Downs above

Leatherhead. All this part of Surrey is particularly rich in yews, such

as we saw in the Druid's Grove of Norbury across the Mole, which our

road now approaches. Beneath it, beside the valley high-road, the

grounds of Cherkley Court contain a mass of yews packed together over

some ninety acres, some of the trees very large and beautiful in form.

Dr. John Lowe, in his monograph on the _Yew-trees of Great Britain and

Ireland_, speaks of this as "perhaps the finest collection of yews in

existence."

Leatherhead Downs run into the neighbour name of Mickleham Downs, which

in part are still much as they were described by Aubrey, but their

clumps of ancient yews and thorn-trees are relieved by more artificial

parks and woods, below which opens the lovely valley of the Mole, with

Norbury Park on its opposite slope. The Roman Road seems to have dropped

down into the hollow below Juniper Hill before crossing the Mole; but

then its line becomes lost, though fragments of it are said to have been

made out in living memory. Let us be content to take two or three miles

of turnpike by Burford Bridge to Dorking, whose tall spire, reared in

memory of Bishop Wilberforce, marks the traditional course of Stone

Street by its churchyard.

As it left the chalk formation to mount upon the greensand, this old

road must have crossed the central scene of that "Battle of Dorking"

that has escaped mention by grave historians, who might indeed note the

national characteristic which turns such a fable into the form of a

wholesome warning, whereas the prophets of foreign fiction are more in

the way of tickling their readers with glorious victories of

imagination. The name thus used to point a moral and adorn a tale from

_Blackwood_, was suggested by the position of Dorking at the foot of the

steep Downs, making a natural line of defence for the south side of

London. In Domesday the town figures as _Dorkinges_, a name

authentically famed through a breed of fowls said to have been

introduced by the Romans. There can be no doubt about its antiquity, and

its importance in good old days is vouched for by the size and number of

its inns, the "White Horse" and "Red Lion" still flourishing, and others

turned into shops in our own time. The curious stranger searches in vain

for the sign of the "Marquis of Granby," for the tomb of Mrs. S. Weller,

sen., or for the chapel at which Mr. Stiggins ministered; but an actual

coachman named Weller is said to have lived at Dorking in Mr. Pickwick's

time, and his chronicler seems to have had in view the "Old King's

Head," which became the Post Office.

A peculiar custom of Dorking must probably be spoken of in the past

tense, now that staid citizens have been resolute in putting it down, as

happened earlier at Kingston and other towns. Here lasted longest in

Surrey what seems a survival of Carnival roistering, a triple game of

football played through the main streets on Shrove Tuesday, between

sides living east and west of the church. On this afternoon, all shops

being closed, three balls,

[Illustration: THE VALE OF DORKING.]

red, white, and blue, were carried out in procession to the music of a

traditional tune, to be kicked off by the town crier at the Church

passage. The red ball having been first worried by the boys, at 3 P.M.

the blue ball was taken in foot by the men; and at 4 P.M. a grand final

struggle, hundreds strong, began with the white ball, going on till the

chimes rang at 6 P.M. These Saturnalian scrimmages proved as hard to

extinguish as the bonfire-revels at Lewes on Guy Fawkes Day; but this

year a dozen extra policemen appear to have been too many for young

Dorking's half-hearted conservatism; and for an illustration of the old

Shrove Tuesday sports, one must go all the way to St. Colomb in

Cornwall, where the ceremonial Hurling Match between "Town" and

"Country" is still honoured in the observance.

These footballs were inscribed with the legend, "Wind and water is

Dorking's glory." From some winds Dorking is well sheltered; but the

lower part of the town has only too much water in the ponds filled by

the Pipp Brook, at one time an attraction of the place, being stocked

with perch, carp, and tench, that supplied the dish called "water

souchy," a stew of fish in esteem with London citizens. Sanitarians now

shake their heads over this damp and misty flat, and Dorking's recent

growth is rather upon the high ground behind the long, spacious main

street. In point of picturesqueness its situation is most admirable,

shut in among such heights as Ranmore Common, Box Hill, and the broken

swell of parks and woods rising southwards to Leith Hill.

Much of this beautiful country is enclosed in renowned demesnes; most

famous of them Deepdene, lying close behind the town. That paradise of

almost European reputation takes in the adjoining Betchworth and Chart

Parks; and the wood on the opposite face of Box Hill also belongs to the

property, that in a circumference of a dozen miles makes a magnificent

collection of English and exotic timber. The nucleus of it was the deep

hollow or "Long Hope," which Mr. Charles Howard, in Cromwell's time,

laid out as an amphitheatre of garden terraces, an open-air conservatory

of flowers and rare plants, visited with due admiration by his neighbour

John Evelyn, and also by Aubrey, who declared the sight "worthy of

Cowley's Muse." At the beginning of last century the estate was bought

and extended by "Anastasius" Hope, author of a celebrated Eastern

romance, and liberal patron of such artists as Flaxman and Thorwaldsen,

with whose works he stored the mansion begun by him. As a guest here,

Disraeli is understood to have written _Coningsby_. Another owner of

note was Mr. Beresford Hope, the proprietor of the _Saturday Review_. In

the hands of his heirs the estate fell among the Philistines, and after

a succession of tenancies this lordly demesne has been turned into an

_hôtel de luxe_. But if strangers cannot gain the lofty beech terrace,

commanding such a rich woodland prospect, and from a lane outside must

be content with a tantalising peep of the rhododendron show within, they

may take a public path to the Glory Wood behind the town; or, on its

east side, in the valley of the Mole, they find the avenues of

Betchworth Park open as a way to Brockham; while the grounds of Box

Hill, and some of the finest outskirts of Leith Hill, such as the Nower

park-slopes, offer free rambles.

To follow the Roman Road's course southwards from Dorking, one takes the

Horsham Road over Holmwood Common below the eastern flanks of Leith

Hill. On the right hand of this highway, a straight line under the

Redland Woods is marked on the O.S. map as Stone Street, which here,

indeed, needs an antiquary's eye to trace it over private enclosures.

Above it, by lanes winding through the woods, is reached the lofty

village of Coldharbour. This name, often occurring on or near an old

road, is believed to denote an inn, like the caravanserais of the East,

that supplied only bare walls. Evelyn reviles a poor Alpine inn as a

"cold harbour, though the house had a stove in every room." It is not

improbable that a deserted Roman villa or military station would be

turned to account as such a place of more or less imperfect shelter.

Ruskin, in one of his rashest excursions _ultra crepidam_, opined that

the Camberwell Coldharbour Lane might have been called after _coluber_,

from its snake-like windings; but he seems not to know how many

Coldharbours there are in England, and that several of them stand near

Roman roads, whose character was anything but serpentine. Beside this

lofty village is the Camp of Anstiebury, traditional harbour for an

invading force of Danes, who sallied forth to be slaughtered on the

slopes of Leith Hill or on Ockley Green below.

On the south side of Leith Hill, showing such a bold face to the flats

of Ockley, the line of the Roman Road coincides with the modern one,

still known as "Stone Street causeway," that had been ascribed by

country-folk in Aubrey's time to the work of the Devil. This road runs

straight for about three miles, then, beyond its forks, the line of the

old way is marked on maps as leading about as far ahead, across the

Sussex border, into the valley of the Arun. As a practicable path,

however, it seems to have fallen much out of use, overlaid by the woods

and grounds of this generation. In the fork one can see no trace of it

now, but, if one here take the right-hand road crooking up to the hamlet

of Oakwood Hill, below this an inscription, _Shut the Gate_, shows the

bridle-way preserved as drive of a modern mansion. Beside this house it

passes as a green lane to be almost choked as it tunnels the copses that

soon obscure its line for a stranger, though local wayfarers make out a

right-of-way to Rowhook. Mr. Malden, the Surrey historian, who has

patiently explored part of its lost course, finds that some ancient

lanes take no heed of that older track, which he supposes to have been

early abandoned as leading into the Wealden wilds, almost uninhabited at

the date of Domesday.

Ockley itself is one of the pleasantest of Surrey villages, clustered

about a broad green, beside which Stone Street has grown into a lordly

avenue, shadowing what seems a Roman-like massiveness of paving. About

it, within the bounds of Surrey, green byways wind among swelling ridges

and clumps of timber thick-set on the edge of the Weald. Two or three

miles southward, on the right hand of Stone Street's line, woodland

paths lead to the sequestered chapel of Oakwood and on to Oakwood Hill,

whence, half a dozen miles south-west, might be reached in Sussex the

Baynards or the Rudgwick station of a line from Guildford, near the new

quarters of the Bluecoat School converging with that other from Dorking,

on which Warnham, the home of Shelley's youth, has a station about as

far to the south-east of Ockley. Eastward, one can seek the secluded

Wealden villages caught in a network of the Mole's branches, through

which the free foot or wheel can thread a devious way to the Brighton

road, or bend round into the Holmesdale valley. Westward, zigzag roads

under the wooded crests of the sand-hills take one to Ewhurst, to

Cranleigh, and on to Godalming, or by Bramley or Wonersh to Guildford.

To the north rises the stiff ascent of Leith Hill, from which let us

survey its choice surroundings.

VII

LEITH HILL

The reader is now to be conducted on and about what, to my mind, makes

the bouquet of the county's scenery. Leith Hill is the highest point not

only of Surrey, but in this corner of England, the topmost knoll on its

southern brow being 965 feet above the sea, crowned by a tower that adds

nearly 100 feet to the natural elevation. The tower was built in the

eighteenth century by a local squire named Hull, apparently a

"character," who had himself buried in it, to the scandal of his

neighbours. It has since been restored and opened by the present

proprietors, the Evelyns of Wotton. Till lately it was garrisoned by an

old dame who tramped up daily in tourist weather, and kept a supply of

rudimentary refreshments, grateful to those who had made a hot ascent.

But such a simple _Brockenhaus_ is now supplemented by a small and snug

hotel on the shelf below, which may be reached by wheels; then from it

there is one stiff tug up the steep bank, the approaches from behind

being less arduous.

It is only on the southern side that Leith Hill makes a clear show of

its height. The northern slopes are gentle, falling gradually for three

or four miles into the Holmesdale valley. The broken contours of the

sand show richly clad with woods, parks, commons, heather, bracken,

patched too with quagmires and ragged gravel pits, seamed with lanes and

hedgerows, so that all the most shaggily picturesque features of Surrey

come here mixed together, in contrast with the smoother and barer

outlines of the chalk Downs, like a mastiff lying side by side with a

collie. The native wildness of this hill has been a good deal cut and

polished, indeed; and a thick setting of private grounds, while throwing

its rough facets into relief, has the fault of barring access by certain

enviable nooks. But the upper part is left free; and by right-of-way or

the liberality of owners, several lines of approach are open from

different sides.

What may be termed the standard way up, the plainest and easiest, is the

road from Dorking, a mainly gentle rising of some five miles to the

[Illustration: FRIDAY STREET, ON THE WAY TO LEITH HILL.]

tower. At the west end of Dorking's High Street, one turns up the

Horsham Road, then at the fork on the right a board beacons the course

to Leith Hill by a line of deep lanes along its east side, after a time

skirting the edge of the Redland Woods, inside of which a footway may be

taken. Had the pedestrian kept further along the Horsham Road, from

Holmwood Common a couple of miles out, he might strike up through those

woods to reach the upper way as it comes near the village of

Coldharbour. Two or three miles of walking would be saved by taking the

train on to Holmwood station, from which pleasant avenues mount through

private grounds to Coldharbour.

This village stands 800 feet high, on a shoulder of the hill, about a

mile from the tower, not yet in sight on its rugged head. Opposite the

inn turns up a sandy lane, on which cyclists will have to push, winding

to the bare knoll crowned by the tower. A better road, edged by the

amenities of a park drive, leads round the southern face to the hotel.

But those who depend on vehicles sit in no need of guidance. Henceforth

I address myself to the amateur or miniature Alpinist, who does not

shirk a walk of some dozen miles or so. To him the road above mentioned

may be suggested as best for coming down, perhaps by failing light and

with stiff limbs.

The way I should choose for walking up Leith Hill from Dorking is by a

valley opening about two miles west of the town, at which end is the

Dorking station of the South-Eastern line. From the Box Hill station of

this railway and the Dorking of the Brighton line, which puzzlingly

adjoin one another beyond the other end, an omnibus plies to Westcott,

by a pretty road past Bury Hill and Milton Heath, above that most

picturesque old mansion, Milton Court.[A] From the Church on Westcott's

sloping Green one holds on pretty straight by a lane joining the

high-road near the gate of the Rookery, a mansion known as the home of

Malthus, that reverend bogey of sentimentalists like Cobbett. His father

before him was also a literary notability, and author of the

"improvements" which made this demesne celebrated. One need not be shy

of turning into the lordly avenue and by the rhododendron walks that

lead up the ornamental waters of the Pipp Brook, for boards show a

permitted way past the house, while, alas! on my last visit a placard at

the gate bore the warning _Mene_, _Mene_, _Tekel_, _Upharsin_, a notice,

to wit, that these choice grounds are destined to go the way of all

eligible building sites within reach of infection by Cobbett's "wen."

Above the house, one gets out of the park over a high bank, beyond which

comes a change both of estate and watershed, for the Pipp Brook flows to

the Mole, whereas the slopes westward drain into the Tillingbourne,

tributary of the Wey.

[A] Not to confuse the reader with too many routes, I throw a very

pleasant one into a footnote. Just before he reaches Westcott, from

the road into it leads off, left, "Milton Street," a charming hybrid

between park avenue and cottaged lane. Passing through an iron

turnstile at the top of this, then presently, turning right over a

plank bridge, he finds a long reach of meadow path which, in the same

general direction, with a trend left, leads him over two stiles and up

a slope to a fork of lanes. Across the road here, a stile marks the

continuation of the path winding on to a lonely farm. Through the yard

of this, he turns left on a track soon entering the woods, where its

left branch in half an hour or so leads shadily to Coldharbour, while

divergences a little to the right might (or might not) bring him in

view of the tower.

The way thenceforth is not quite so plain; but one cannot go far wrong

by taking a green lane to the left and keeping pretty straight south up

a central ridge-way till a glimpse of the tower is gained in the wood.

Did one hold rather too much to the left, the worst of it would be

wandering into the road at Coldharbour. Holding more to the right, one

comes into a deep hollow above Wotton, where the ponds and cascades of

the Tillingbourne lead up to Broadmoor, a model village among meadows

opening out in the woods. The narrowing hollow takes one straight to

the tower by a beautiful and gradual ascent; but this route is not the

best in wet weather. It properly belongs to the next line to be

indicated, the base of which is Wotton, lying about midway between

Dorking and Gomshall station.

Wotton is famous as the seat of John Evelyn, the diarist, and author of

_Sylva_, who put his knowledge of trees so well in practice, that his

hand is still seen not only about this _Wood town_ but in other garden

grounds of the county. Blackheath was an _alias_ of the parish, which it

perhaps better deserved before he set an example of planting the hill

with his favourite firs; yet the estate must have been already well

timbered, according to the account he gives of its sylvan wealth. On the

high-road, up a stiff ascent beyond the Rookery, comes the inn called

"Wotton Hatch," beside the Park gate. Opposite this a way turns down to

the Church, which lies below the north side of the road, beautifully

embowered on a knoll, with the Deerleap Wood beyond it, and the coombe

of Pickett's Hole as invitation for a steep climb on the Downs.

In the Evelyn chapel of this church, "the dormitory of my ancestors,

near to that of my father and pious mother," is the coffin-shaped tomb

of John Evelyn, of whom his epitaph may tell without falsehood how,

"Living in an age of Events and Revolutions, he learnt (as himself

asserted) this Truth which, pursuant to his Intention, is here

declared--That all is Vanity which is not Honest, and that there is no

solid Wisdom but in real Piety." Of the other family monuments the most

noticeable is Westmacott's memorial to Captain George Evelyn, with an

inscription by Arnold of Rugby. In the churchyard stands the tomb of

William Glanville, on which is still performed a ceremony devised by

this kinsman of the Evelyns, to keep his memory green among successive

rising generations. Dying 1718, by his will he directed forty shillings

apiece to be paid to five poor boys of Wotton, below sixteen, who on the

anniversary of his death should repeat by heart, with their hands laid

on his gravestone, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Decalogue, also

as a further proof of scholarship reading 1 Corinthians xv., and writing

legibly the first two verses. The Church porch in John Evelyn's time was

a school where, he tells us, he himself got the elements of learning,

before _not_ going to Eton, from which he was scared away by fear of the

rod.

The Park of Wotton, with "its rising grounds, meadows, woods, and water

in abundance," might well be styled by its best known owner "one of the

most pleasant seats in the nation." The mansion, still belonging to his

descendants, a good deal enlarged and altered since he made it "the

raree-show of the whole neighbourhood," contains part of his

collections, portraits, manuscripts, and other memorials of him, and

such a treasured relic as the prayer-book used by Charles I. on the

scaffold; but there is no admission to strangers, except occasionally in

summer by tickets issued at a Dorking library. One has, however, a

right-of-way through the lodge gate, presently leaving the drive by a

path passing close beside the house and up into the woods for Friday

Street. A little to the east of this line, reached by a lane behind the

inn, is the already mentioned way up the ornamental waters of the

Tillingbourne hollow. But the untired wanderer, who can steer a course

without beacons, will do well to make for Friday Street, a little hamlet

so ancient that it is supposed to have had the Saxon goddess Friga as a

godmother: the name occurs again some nine miles to the south, across

the Sussex border. This group of hermitages lies charmingly in a deep

glen half filled by a sheet of water, from the top of which goes up

another way to the tower; but in case of doubt it would be well to bear

left into the Tillingbourne's course.

The shortest way from Gomshall station to Friday Street, about three

miles, is by Abinger Church, standing above the west side of this

hollow. On the main road, half a mile east of the station, one reaches

Abinger Hammer, a name left by the now extinct iron working. On the

green here, take the right-hand byroad for Felday, then at the top of

its first slight rise, a path to the left running pretty straight over

fields to a solitary farm, behind which a lane leads on to the

churchyard of the high and dry hamlet styled Abinger Hatch. The church

of Abinger has been well restored, but preserves some ancient features.

On the Green beyond are the parish stocks, said to have been used almost

within living memory. The inn here has been smartened and enlarged of

late years, a hint how strangers appreciate the charms of a seclusion

that begins to be broken in on by building. Hence one turns left to

descend into the hollow of Friday Street. The road to the right is for

Felday, whence, on the west side of Leith Hill, mounts one of its most

lovely approaches.

Thus, by one way or other, has been gained the crest, through woods

among which it is often hid till one be close upon it. Standing on that

craggy knoll, one at last has a clear view to the south, and from the

top of the tower can overlook, it is said, a baker's dozen of counties,

spread out all round as on a map, shaded and dotted and streaked with

heights, woods, streams, villages, churches and farms, melting away or

running together in the distance like the smoke from a myriad of English

homes. In the foreground lie the leafy lowlands of the Weald, bounded by

the line of the South Downs, through a gap in which the sea might come

into view, weather permitting. Points that may be made out in the

circular panorama are Ditchling Beacon and other crests of the South

Downs; Crowborough Beacon and Frant Church on the Forest Ridge of

Sussex; the Kentish Downs; the Crystal Palace; the huge ant-hill of

London; the Chiltern Hills in Bucks; Windsor Castle at one end of Berks,

and at the other Inkpen Beacon, highest point of the chalk Downs;

Highclere and Butser Hill in Hants, and Blackdown and Hindhead on the

edge of Surrey. The travelled Evelyn calls this the best prospect he

ever beheld; and if he may be

[Illustration: ABINGER HAMMER.]

suspected of local prejudice, John Dennis, that gibbeted victim of Pope

and Swift, is found breaking out into enthusiasm over a scene which he

declares to surpass the finest in Italy. All the stranger, in Hone's

_Table Book_, reads a complaint of such a scene remaining in obscurity,

"unknown to the very visitors of Epsom and Box Hill." That reproach is

certainly out of date in our active generation. Here one ought to

produce a poetical description; but, so far as I know, the bards who

must have often looked from Leith Hill seem to have been struck dumb by

admiration of a landscape in which are lost so many--

Happy hamlets crowned in apple-bloom,

And ivy-muffled churches still with graves.

Should it be the reader's fortune to stand here by the light of the

setting sun, he may presently have to consider how to get off this

eminence. The steep road southwards falls to Ockley, which has a station

two or three miles away; and there is another on the same line about as

far off at Holmwood, the path to which is indicated beside the inn at

Coldharbour. The road by Coldharbour to the more frequent trains of

Dorking is plain. The tracks down the Tillingbourne to the

Gomshall-Dorking valley road were better not be attempted in the dark.

But if a refreshed climber had still half a day before him, good shoe

leather under him, and a stout heart for stiff ups and downs, I would

invite him to follow other crests of the sand ridge westwards; or at

least to visit Leith Hill's neighbour, Holmbury Hill, about two miles in

that direction.

Let us descend, then, into the valley between, bearing a little

northward to strike the choice village that now knows itself as Holmbury

St. Mary, but for country-folk around is more familiar under the old

name of Felday, and part of it on the O.S. map is belittled as Pitland

Street. This out-of-the-way place has raised its head since such a good

judge of scenery as Mr. Louis Jennings could speak of it as a "wretched,

half-deserted spot," a "group of depressing habitations," "very like a

Hindoo village in Bengal," with a "mean sort of house" for church, and

"a melancholy roadside inn called the 'Royal Oak.'" But other eyes took

a more sympathetic view of poor Felday, whose "few scattered cottages"

have come to be lodgings sought after by such æsthetic Londoners as will

pay fancy rents for hovels on Arran or Dartmoor, while the slopes around

this Cinderella of Surrey hamlets have been but too much encroached on

by smart new mansions. Among early settlers here was the architect G. E.

Street, R.A., who, as a shrine for his wife's tomb, replaced that humble

house of prayer by what, at the height of his powers, he put forth as a

model village church, beautifully adorned inside with coloured windows

from his own designs, and with shows of Italian sacred art that do not

please strict Protestantism.

Here opens a new fan of woodland walks. The road southwards leads to

Gomshall station in about three miles. The best way from Felday to the

top of Leith Hill is through a park gate beyond the "Hollybush," then

diverging on the right of the drive as an embowered lane where boards

marked "private" keep one from straying till a road is reached, across

which an open slope leads to the tower. Up the glade behind the village

the footway splits into several tracks, and the middle one, trending

right, passes a lonely umbrella-shaped fir, round which a path, now

bearing left, runs along the ridge to the camp at the end of Holmbury

Hill, that, only a hundred feet lower, has almost as fine a view as

Leith Hill itself.

On the west side of the Holmbury hollow, paths take one over into a

larger valley, through which runs another road from Gomshall. Beyond

this road rise the steep grassy sides of Pitch Hill (844 feet), then the

adjoining height westward is marked by the far-seen and far-seeing

Ewhurst windmill. The village of Ewhurst lies about two miles to the

south, on the Weald edge; and about as far again, south-west, is

Cranleigh, growing round its railway station and its old Church, behind

which a path runs up to the heaths and woods of the ridge. Northwards

one looks across the Tillingbourne valley to the Downs, for once

surpassed in height by that grand group of sand tops to the south of

Gomshall and Dorking.

The tramp who is in no hurry, and has an eye for country, may walk the

ten or twelve miles to Guildford by keeping round the heights of the

sand ridge above Cranleigh, bearing north-west for Wonersh, where a

high-road and a pretty byroad drop into the valley of the Wey. If he

turn down too soon on this side, he will be brought up by the line of

the Guildford-Brighton railway. On the other side--where the

Guildford-Redhill line, the course of the Tillingbourne, and the

high-road below the Downs bound his wanderings to the north--he might

lose himself among the beautifully broken ground of Hurtwood, Farley

Heath, and Blackheath, but with glimpses now and then of St. Martha's

Chapel on its hill as beacon of the straightest route to Guildford, for

which he can hardly go far wrong, when he remembers how it lies in a gap

of the Downs beyond the sand formation. Had the stranger begun his walk

from Leatherhead, following the valley of the Mole to Dorking, and ended

it thus at Guildford, this half-circle would have taken him through the

cream of Surrey in one stride of seven-leagued boots.

But to the unwearied wayfarer, I have yet another hint to give for a

divagation on which a free wheel will serve him better than on the sandy

heaths. Across the Guildford-Brighton line he might turn into what is

called the "Fold country," a corner of the Surrey Weald bordered south

by the north-west edge of Sussex, and west by the L. & S.W. line to

Portsmouth. This is one of the most unsophisticated parts of the county,

in which runs the abandoned Wey and Arun Canal, besides streams unknown

to fame. The affix of its quiet villages, Al_fold_, Duns_fold_,

Chidding_fold_, is said, not without question, to mean _felled_; but

there can be no doubt about the Fern_hurst_, Sidding_hurst_,

Killing_hurst_ and other _hursts_ that mark clearings in the woodland,

with old farmhouses and scattered cottages, which often show quaint

fire-dogs and grate-backs as relics of the iron-working once busily

plied around these quiet nooks. From Cranleigh to Haslemere station will

be nine or ten miles as the crow flies; where one can't be very

confident of not losing one's way a little in the lanes that tack

through the woods from hamlet to hamlet, but may steer towards the long,

dark cliff of Blackdown for Haslemere, lying beneath its west end.

Guide-books and roadbooks are apt to shirk the mazes of this secluded

district, through which, by one help or other, a course can be laid past

many _folds_ and _hursts_ to the Zermatt or Chamouni of Surrey's rival

Alplet, Hindhead.

VIII

HINDHEAD