I have confessed to Leith Hill as the corner of Surrey that smiles for

me above all others; but there are those who will call out on one for

not preferring the severer beauties of Hindhead. This is, of course, a

matter of taste, to some extent of upbringing. I was mainly reared in a

country where stern and wild aspects of nature are cheaper than the lush

charms of the South, that to my countrymen may appeal with a certain

attraction of rarity. One has heard of a Swiss guide whose admiration

was excited by a wide prospect of London chimney pots. A Corsican

gentleman once undertook to show me what he called one of the finest

scenes in his island, which I found too much like a market-garden.

Cobbett, for his part, roundly abused Hindhead as "the most villainous

spot God ever made," by which he seems to mean that the roads were

rough and the soil not suited for growing the "Cobbett corn" or the

acacias which, with different degrees of success, he was trying to

naturalise in his native country, when he carried on the trade of a

nursery-gardener along with that of an uprooting journalist. For once,

he has a laugh against himself in his _Rural Rides_, with the story of

how he tried to get from Liphook--or was it Liss?--to Thursley without

crossing the abhorred moor, yet after all blundered in the dark on to

the top of it, though he had taken a local guide, as Pepys was fain to

do for the passage of that Surrey St. Bernard.

Our age has a new heart for such open heights as border the Portsmouth

road between Thursley and Liphook. At its highest point, about 900 feet,

the road passes along the brow of a wide and deep depression known as

the Devil's Punch Bowl, round which stretches of bracken, gorse and

heath, broken dells, ponds and pine-crested ridges, fall into the

valleys by slopes and hollows rich in green lanes, in tangled coppices,

in old cottages, and in other picturesque "bits," the whole airy swell

making a smaller and drier edition of Dartmoor. This once thinly

populated moorland could not but attract artists and authors, who began

to settle here

[Illustration: A WIDE STRETCH FROM THE GIBBET, HINDHEAD.]

in what they hoped to find a congenial wilderness. Mr. Birkett Foster

and Mr. Edmund Evans, the colour-printer, were, so far as I know, the

first colonists who built adjoining houses for themselves beside Witley

station. George Eliot came to live close by them at the "Heights," after

long searching for a home on the Surrey commons. The neighbourhood began

to be so much affected by literary and scientific people, that the

nickname _Mindhead_ was suggested. More than one leading London

consultant made his holiday retreat hereabouts, not keeping to himself

the secret of the dry clear air in which delicate invalids can sit out

of doors under winter sunshine. The merits of Hindhead as a health

resort were advertised by Professor Tyndall building a house near the

top, where he found himself able to spend the winter as well as on the

Bel Alp. Mr. Grant Allen deserted the Riviera for Hindhead, from which

he dated his "Hill-Top" novels, and here found many hints for "Moorland

Idylls." The local colour of one of Sir A. Conan Doyle's romances

betrays how he joined a colony where only successful novelists may now

aspire to find house-room.

Twenty years ago, Hindhead had a loose scattering of villas and cottages

round the Royal Huts Inn at the cross-roads, its post-office being at

Grayshott over the Hants border, which was the only thing like a

village. Now mansions and bungalows are more or less thickly strung upon

those old roads, and on new ones, with shops appearing here and there in

what before long may be spoken of as streets. The "Huts," improved into

an hotel, has half a dozen rivals, from the mansion-like "Beacon" to the

"Fox and Pelican" model public-house; and Glen Lea, oldest of Hindhead

_pensions_, sees fresh competitors springing up every year. Houses are

dear and lodgings hard to find in the fine season. As in the case of

Davos and other health resorts whose merit lay in their untainted air,

the place has been overbuilt from the curative point of view; and it

begins to attract a gayer society than the early Crusoes of this bracing

heath, on which such notable persons have staved off their latter end;

while the works of so many writers show how they have been at least

sojourners hereabouts.

Mrs. Humphry Ward at one time lived near Haslemere; and any one familiar

with its environs can take a good guess at the locality of Robert

Elsmere's Surrey parish, into which its squire's stately mansion may

have been transposed from Loseley or Sutton. Mrs. Oliphant must have

been here, since _The Cuckoo in the Nest_, one of the best of her later

novels, evidently deals with the neighbourhood, making a curious medley

of real and fictitious names, and hardly doing justice to the scenery.

An account of Hindhead a century ago is presented in an older novel

called the _King's Mail_. Then Mr. Baring-Gould's _Broom Squire_ opens

with that grimly authentic romance Hindhead has of its own, the murder

of a luckless sailor, commemorated by a stone at which Dickens makes

Nicholas Nickleby sit down to rest on his weary tramp along the

Portsmouth Road. A tomb in Thursley churchyard shows a rudely-carved

representation of the crime, with this inscription--

IN MEMORY OF

A generous but unfortunate Sailor,

Who was barbarously murdered on Hindhead,

On Sept. 24th 1786,

BY THREE VILLAINS

After he had liberally treated them, and promised them his

further assistance on the road to Portsmouth.

"When pitying eyes to see my grave shall come,

And with a generous tear bedew my tomb,

Here shall they read my melancholy fate,

With murder and barbarity complete.

In perfect health, and in the flower of age,

I fell a victim to the ruffians' rage;

On bended knees I mercy strove t'obtain,

Their thirst of blood made all entreaties vain.

No dear relation or still dearer friend,

Weeps my sad lot or miserable end.

Yet o'er my sad remains--my name unknown--

A generous Publick have inscribed this stone."

The Huts Hotel exhibits a series of quaint pictures illustrating this

tragedy. The murderers were hanged on what is still called Gibbet Hill,

the highest point of the moorland, looking over to Haslemere from the

edge of the Punch Bowl. The gibbet was soon blown down; then on its site

a granite cross with a nobler inscription was erected by Chief Justice

Sir William Erle. This spot, nearly 900 feet high, is the main point for

picnic parties; and it seems time to tell the reader how to reach it.

About nine miles beyond Godalming, the Portsmouth road runs between the

Gibbet Hill and the Punch Bowl, into which hollow leads a humbler

footway from Thursley, lying about half a mile to the right where the

road begins its long steady ascent. On the edge of the Punch Bowl,

Nicholas Nickleby's road has been brought down to a lower level, and the

memorial stone with it; one must scramble up the sandy lane

representing the old road to get the view from the cross. No

description can do justice to this panorama, seen at its best on a still

autumn day; and guide-book editors are here saved much trouble by an

orientation-table, on the top of which, as on a compass face, will be

found indicated the names, direction, and distance of all the chief

points around.

From the Gibbet Hill it is nearly a mile on to the inhabited part of

Hindhead, whose nearest station is Haslemere, three miles off, in the

valley below, to and from which now plies an omnibus. From Haslemere to

Farnham also runs a service of motor-cars that would give a good trip

over this district, but without touching that highest and wildest point.

Half-way up the ascent, near Shottermill Church and its fish-ponds, was

a temporary home of George Eliot, who did some of her best work in this

vicinity. Most of Hindhead's visitors come by way of Haslemere; and in

any case this is a place worth visiting for its own sake.

The picturesque character of the neighbourhood becomes very manifest at

Witley, the station before Haslemere, where one might get out to make a

gradual ascent of Hindhead by lanes on which it is easy to miss the

way, unless by steering for clumps of wood high above the right of the

railway some three miles on. Witley is also the station for

Chiddingfold, a couple of miles south-eastward, whose picturesque old

"Crown" Inn bespeaks former importance; and a factory of walking-sticks

represents the iron and glass making that once flourished in this

well-timbered district.

To the east of Witley station, Hambledon and Hascombe have some fine

hill and wood scenery, rising to the height of 644 feet in the Beech

Telegraph Hill, once a far-seen beacon point. To the north of this is

Hascombe Church, whose lavish interior decoration makes it one of the

sights of the vicinity. Severer features of interest are shown by Witley

Church, standing a mile nearer London than the station. It contains a

memorial of the murdered Duke of Clarence; and in the churchyard lies an

ill-fated financier of our own time, under a costly tomb, with the

inscription, "He loved the poor," which seems suggested by the career of

Robin Hood. On his home at Lea Park, above Witley, this notorious

adventurer lavished so much of other people's money, that there was some

difficulty in disposing of a place which failed to be started as an

hotel, even although baited with a golf course and other attractions of

sport. In a better organised state of society, it should be purchased by

the nation as free lodgings for authors and artists, who might help it

to live down its past by illustrating or advertising a vicinity which

George Eliot hit off as mingling the charms of Scotland with those of

the green heart of England. Luckily, the wilder part of the grounds has

been purchased by subscription, to be thrown into nature's own demesne,

freely available for public enjoyment, while at the same time the

neighbourhood has lately had to complain of other bits of common being

enclosed or stripped of their old trees.

The highway from Godalming to Haslemere comes by Lea Park, avoiding

Witley; but from its station, on the opposite side of the railway line,

one has another road, five miles of up-and-down windings, with lovely

views; and it would be only some couple of miles out of the way to go by

Chiddingfold and along the edge of the Fold country. But, indeed, every

approach to Haslemere, road or path, is charming, and would be more so,

if not so often shut in by new red mansions and cottages "with a double

coach-house." This Surrey border town, which was made a rather rotten

borough in Elizabeth's reign, fell away from such dignity, but in our

time revived as centre of so choice a district, and has a busy station

on the L. & S.W. Portsmouth line. The station lies beyond the roomy

village or townlet, to which Hindhead pilgrims might well turn back for

a glimpse of its broad street, forming a right angle at the modest

Market Hall, junction point of byroads with the highway between

Godalming and Midhurst. Its good old houses have been much overlaid by

châlets and bungalows, for even in the valley here we are some hundreds

of feet above the sea, and Haslemere has its own clientèle of

health-seekers. The Church stands rather out of the way, across the

railway line, but is worth a digression. In the nave, opposite the

porch, a coloured window, the subject taken from Burne-Jones's "Holy

Grail," makes a memorial to Tennyson. In the new part of the churchyard,

near the gate, will be seen a curious mass of gorse and heather, which

is Tyndall's tomb, taking this form, it is understood, by his own

desire, and rather painfully suggesting the remains of that "Screen"

with which he disfigured the slopes of Hindhead in the unphilosophic

design of fencing himself in against a neighbour.

[Illustration: WITLEY CHURCH.]

On the farther side of the town, above the main street, will be found a

remarkable Museum and Library presented to Haslemere by the late Mr.

Jonathan Hutchinson, long its special patron: this institution should

not be overlooked by those who have any interest in geology, as it

excellently displays the natural history of the neighbourhood. The

Recreation Ground on the same height offers a fine view across the

valley to Hindhead, and northwards over the Fold country. Here we are on

the steeper slope of Blackdown, which is rather higher than Hindhead,

and still more wild, not as yet so much invaded by the builder. Past the

Museum goes one of several ways up its sides, where an hour's walk

brings us finely over the border of Surrey; then beyond we gain the

Blackdown plateau, one of the highest points of Sussex, from which

Tennyson's summer home looks to the South Downs, across the view "long

loved by me."

In this neighbourhood, as in the Isle of Wight, amusing tales are told

of the poet's love of seclusion and the manner in which he repelled

unwelcome visitors. But the reader, no doubt above listening to local

gossip, may be waiting to know his way up to Hindhead from Haslemere.

The carriage road from the station is plain, passing under the railway,

skirting the village of Shottermill on the left, then turning up a deep

hollow to reach the top at the "Huts." At the new church on Crichmere

Green, a little way beyond the railway arch, the foot traveller should

take a deep lane that looks as if it had strayed out of Devonshire, and

this will bring him on the heath, over which a track bears left for the

Huts, or he must keep up rather to the right for the Gibbet Hill. The

finest footway to the Gibbet Hill, about three miles, is by the road

mounting behind Haslemere Church, at the top of the ascent reaching a

common, from which the bare ridge of Hindhead appears full in view, to

be gained by a rough road over two intervening hollows, with pine-clad

knolls high to the right, a scene that suggests Bonnie Scotland rather

than Happy England.

From the top, the view over Hindhead itself has been criticised as

somewhat featureless, but for points like the isolated row of sand hills

to the north-west, known as the Devil's Jumps, from such a legend as has

so often arisen about any uncommon shape of scenery. The Devil's Punch

Bowl, _alias_ Haccombe Bottom, is indeed a most imposing basin, that

shelters a larger population of squatters than might be guessed on a

glance at its dark, wide hollow opening down to Thursley and the valley

of the Wey. Beyond it, the villa settlement of Hindhead, with Grayshott

as its nucleus, is marked by a new Water Tower, which has supplied a

felt want, these houses having at first stood dependent on wells that

sometimes failed them. Not that there is any want of water in clay

bottoms below the sand. All around are found tarns and pools, still

perhaps known as Hammer Ponds, beside huge furrows driven through the

earth by old searchers for iron. The marshy ground below Thursley drains

into several ponds like Pudmore, that figures in Mr. Baring-Gould's

story, as does the rock "Thor's Stone," haunted by a mythology older

than legends of that devil who took such athletic jumps. High up on the

heath, to the south of Grayshott, and about a mile to the right of the

Portsmouth road, are the Waggoners' Wells, a chain of lakelets among

dark woods, pronounced by George Eliot an ideal scene for a murder,

admired also by Tennyson, who is said to have written here his "Flower

in the Crannied Wall." On a lower level, to the north-west, beyond the

Devil's Jumps, close to the Wey and the Surrey border, lie the sparkling

sheets of Frensham Great and Little Ponds, either of them able to style

itself a lake. A large pond above Shottermill, beside the high-road from

Haslemere, is used for fish culture. It was by a short tenancy at

Shottermill that George Eliot made the acquaintance of this country,

which she describes as unsurpassable in "its particular style of

beauty--perpetual undulation of heath and copse, and clear views of

hurrying water, with here and there a grand pine-wood, steep

wood-clothed promontories and gleaming pools." If one might take

exception to any words of such a writer, running water in clear view is

not characteristic about Hindhead, unless at the bottom of the Punch

Bowl, or in the case of that branch of the Wey which she had beside her

in the Shottermill valley.

Such are hints of the scenes opening out to explorers on what may at

first sight seem a monotonous stretch of heath and pine-woods, with this

good quality for feeble folks, that, once at the top, they can ramble

some way without any trying ups and downs. "Eyes or no eyes," its

visitors cannot but be sensible of that "ampler ether," those restoring

breezes that blow over Hindhead, untainted by smoky towns or misty

flats. Too soon passes its season of purple glory; but it has other

charms that win on one by familiarity. Its very winter is apt to show a

more cheerful face than on the sodden, muggy lowlands; then always it

lies open to the painting of the sky, from crisp clear mornings, when

"not yet are Christmas garlands sere," till that evening of the year,

when--

Red o'er the forest peers the setting sun,

The line of yellow light dies fast away

That crowned the eastern copse; and chill and dun

Falls on the moor the brief November day.

Keble, like other writers of our day, means by _moor_ the heathy uplands

that are the chief ornament of Hindhead. But Spenser's "moorish Colne"

hints to us how, in the south of England at least, this name has implied

rather such marshy and rushy flats as, about Thursley, are still

vernacularly called the "moor" _par excellence_. These lowerlying skirts

have beauties of their own, and seldom fail to be at least patched with

the richer material spread out to dry on the heights.

It will soon be found how Hindhead runs into a neighbourhood of swelling

heaths, such as Frensham Common, Headley Common, Ludshott Common, and

Bramshott Common, over which one can expatiate for hours to the west. A

couple of miles south of the Huts, the Portsmouth road crosses a here

very jagged boundary of Surrey, reaching the "Seven Thorns" in

Hampshire, and thence falling to Liphook on the edge of Woolmer Forest,

which straggles on by the new Longmoor Camp to White's Selborne. In the

valley to the left, that is the course of the railway, runs the Sussex

border, across which may be sought out scenes still more beautiful as

more varied. Then on the north side lie another series of broken

moorlands, by which the high ground slopes into the Wey valley--Milford

Heath, Royal Common, Thursley Common, Kettlebury Hill, and Hankley

Common, not to add minor names. Even Cobbett had kind thoughts of

Thursley; and the author of _Robert Elsmere_, with an eye on this

vicinity, if I err not, speaks the mind of our generation about the

waste skirts of her hero's parish:--

The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely more

thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may

wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth,

guiltless of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that

grows or flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live

their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or

strangely little incommoded by his neighbourhood. And yet there is

nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches

of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them;

the brakes of ling, pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense

the stretches of purple heather, growing into scarlet under the

touch of the sun; the scattered farmhouses, so mellow in colour, so

pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of the

earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness

but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt petulant

child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for man's

grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks, and she will

be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful,

enticing, capriciously lovely; and she will throw herself into the

task with all the abandonment, all the energy, the heart could

wish.

These quiet heaths and copses "saw another sight" during the Great War,

when about Witley Common sprang up a huge camp, in which 30,000 raw

soldiers could be trained for service at the front. Latterly, it was

much occupied by Canadians, restlessly impatient allies, not altogether

as welcome in the vicinity as in Flanders. Too many of them had nothing

to do with their high pay but to waste it on liquor prohibited them at

home, so the police, if not the publicans of Godalming, were glad to see

the backs of these roisterers, who, once let loose upon the enemy,

turned their high spirit to better purpose.

But, to be sure, tents and warriors are no novelty on Surrey commons, as

will be shown in the next chapter.

IX

COMMONS AND CAMPS

Cobbett, so keenly appreciative of some aspects of English scenery, was

only a little old-fashioned in his contempt for Hindhead. We know how

writers of Johnson's and Goldsmith's school looked on such wilds, though

Gray was already clearing the eyes of their generation, to which an

elegant poet and philosopher lectured thus on the repulsive melancholy

of the Highlands: "Long tracts of mountainous country, covered with dark

heath, and often obscured by misty weather; narrow valleys thinly

inhabited and bounded by precipices resounding with the fall of

torrents, a soil so rugged, and a climate so dreary, as in many parts to

admit neither the amenities of pasturage nor the labours of

agriculture"--and the climax is, forsooth, "the grotesque and ghastly

appearance of such a landscape by the light of the moon"--so much for

the

[Illustration: WOODLAND DEPTHS, WOTTON.]

principles of taste in vogue with our long-skirted and night-capped

great-grandfathers!

Considering that Cobbett had been brought up among some of the finest

commons in Surrey, it seems strange what dislike he shows for heaths, on

which he bestows such epithets as "intolerable," "wretched,"

"blackguardly" and "rascally." Normandy Farm, where he died, is also in

a heathy district; and the name Cobbett Hill here would be taken by him

as no complimentary monument. This grudge may be not only the view of

the practical farmer, but an unconscious mental legacy from his

forbears, who had reason to look on half-savage "heathers" as

undesirable neighbourhood. In old days the "forest" moors as well as the

good greenwood harboured a sort of outlaws, good for nothing but to be

pressed as soldiers, when the sheriff could set on foot a strong

rounding up of the retreats where they lurked, like the Doones on

Exmoor. Almost up to our own day, out-of-the-way parts of the county

were inhabited by rough crews, apt to take a "heave-half-a-brick-at-him"

attitude towards outsiders. Certain villages, even, had long a bad name

as rustic Alsatias. The commons and woods of Surrey often made camps for

gypsies and other Ishmaelites, between whom and the constables of more

civilised parishes there was a natural aloofness. To such prosaic

agencies as the county police and schoolmasters, not to speak of roads

and respectable houses of entertainment, our generation, more than it

may guess, owes its secure enjoyment of "wild nature near London."

The Surrey Commons, as we have seen, are sprinkled all over the county;

but the widest stretch of them, extending also into Berkshire, almost

covers Surrey's western edge. The bed of "Bagshot sands" lying between

the Hog's Back and the Thames valley, Defoe speaks of as a dismal

desert, over which indeed the traveller was once fain to hasten, keeping

a sharp look-out for Bedouins in breeches. But the Sahara itself turns

out to be not everywhere so black as it has been painted; and this

Surrey wilderness has many an oasis of park and farm, gardened villages

like Chobham and Windlesham, pine-crested knolls and tangled dingles,

all the greener in contrast with their environment of dry slopes. The

railway passenger between Weybridge and Woking can see for himself what

grand fir-woods flourish on Defoe's desert. The whole district fell into

the bounds of the royal chase in days when trees made no necessary part

of a forest's character, so Pope has his eye on a wider scene than that

to which the name of Windsor Forest is now restricted:--

Here waving groves a chequer'd scene display,

And part admit, and part exclude the day;

As some coy nymph her lover's warm address

Nor quite indulges, nor can quite repress.

There interspers'd in lawns and op'ning glades,

Thin trees arise that shun each other's shades.

Here in full light the russet plains extend:

There wrapt in clouds the bluish hills ascend.

Ev'n the wild heath displays her purple dyes;

And 'midst the desert fruitful fields arise,

That, crown'd with tufted trees and springing corn,

Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.

"Even the wild heath" is lit up by indulgent condescension in a poet of

that periwigged period. Still this corner has large stretches of

obstinate heath, sandy swells, boggy hollows, and sheets of gravel,

which, given up by Ceres in despair, have been taken on easy terms by

Mars. About two generations ago the God of War became a tenant in

Surrey. Ever since standing armies had to be lodged, they would be

quartered from time to time on the wastes near London--Blackheath, dark

with the frowns of Cromwell's veterans when they beheld the fugitive of

Worcester return in triumph; Hounslow Heath, on which the Roman

soldiery were drilled in their day; and Finchley Common, where the

Guards would now find scanty space for a bivouac. It seems to have been

the Prince Consort who started or at least fostered the idea of camps of

training and exercise on Surrey heaths. The first of these was at

Chobham, in the summer before the Crimean War, after which was formed

the more permanent camp at Aldershot. What a delightful novelty to

Londoners was that military picnic may be seen in the faithful pages of

_Punch_, setting forth the hardships of dandy guardsmen cramped in small

room, the indiscreet curiosity of crinolined ladies, and the irreverence

of small boys towards kilts and bearskins. After forty years of peace,

the pomp and circumstance of war was something of a joke, as well as a

sentiment, to that generation, as it was becoming for ours, till South

Africa taught "duke's son and cook's son" what a serious business is the

great game of kings, that may in future be stigmatised rather as the

sport of newspapers.

Chobham, which gave its name to the camp in 1853, is not to be confused

with Cobham in the Mole valley, nor with the Kentish Cobham renowned in

Pickwick. This common takes its name from the village of Chobham lying

to the south of it, about an hour's walk from Woking Junction, still so

far out of the way as to remain much of an old-world Surrey village

straggling round its ancient Church, a little smartened in our time. The

camp was mainly on its north-eastern skirts, with headquarters about the

hamlet of Long Cross, half-way on the road between Chertsey and

Windlesham. The nearest station then was Chertsey, from which cabmen

fixed a sovereign as their fare on field-days. Prominent points were

Flutters Hill, a swell of park-land, and Staple Hill, which to Lord

Seaton, the commanding officer, recalled the ridge of Busaco by its

crest of thin firs, like his regiment's battle-blown ranks on that

bygone day. Farther west, a cross on Ship Hill marks the knoll from

which Queen Victoria reviewed her troops bound for the East. This camp

was pitched for only two or three summer months, and its smoke has gone

into the infinite azure, while overgrown traces of fieldworks on the

heaths may raise sore controversies among future Jonathan Oldbucks.

Controversy at the time with influential residents is said to have stood

in the way of Chobham being permanently occupied by Bellona, always apt

to be complained of as a demoralising companion to the rustic Venus;

but the village has a Russian cannon to show as souvenir of its

flirtation with the War Office.

A more dreadful campaign found its first scenes in this martial

district, though luckily it is airy nothing to which a local habitation

has here been given. The disaster of the _Battle of Dorking_ pales into

a shade before the lurid horrors of that _War of the Worlds_ conceived

by Mr. H. G. Wells's teeming mind. According to his most blood-curdling

history, the inhabitants of Mars find means of shooting huge projectiles

across space, to hit the earth with such force that the heaths and

pine-woods of Surrey take fire from the glowing impact. The first of

these giant missiles half-buries itself in the Horsell sand-pits between

Woking and Chobham, the second falls among the woods of Byfleet, and

others follow in the same vicinity. What strikes one as an improbability

is that the Martian gunners should fire with such precision as to get

all their shots into the bull's-eye of Surrey, but of course something

must be allowed to an imaginative inventor; and one remembers how when a

French romancer took a like daring flight of fancy, in which the world's

history was made to roll backwards as seen from a distant star, it

happened that Paris stood always in the foreground of the picture.

Most ingeniously our author reports those projectiles, at first received

with curiosity as matter for newspaper paragraphs, then with wonder and

terror, growing to frantic panic when it appeared that, like the Trojan

horse, they held hostile beings equipped with supermundane weapons and

means of locomotion. The fate of Troy would be a mere squib beside the

awful conflagration raised by such irresistible invaders, stalking

across the country on their jointed stilts, picking up bank directors

and baker's boys as we gather blackberries, trampling down the British

army like ants, scorching up everything about them by an invisible

heat-ray, and poisoning the landscape by fumes unknown to our chemistry,

while all the artillery that can be hurried up for the defence of London

has little more effect on them than pop-guns. Nervous readers may cry

out at the gruesome incidents of page after page; but no one can deny

the cleverness with which scientific imagination has been infused

through the realistic details of this grim story. Its most marvellously

simple device is that by which the triumphant giants are got off the

stage. When London has been left empty to the flames, when the Thames

is choked up by the monstrous and prolific red vegetation of Mars, when

the whole population of Britain are in mad flight, and civilised

humanity is trembling all over our earth at what seems its inevitable

fate, the most experienced novel-reader cannot for the life of him guess

what is to be the necessary _dénouement_ of deliverance; yet for

overthrowing those Martian giants the author has in reserve means more

ready and common than the pebbles of David's sling. Old poets, in such a

case, had to provide their heroes with flying chariots, clouds of

invisibility, interfering gods and the like; but all such machinery

appears clumsy beside the everyday natural wonders familiar to a

biologist. Of this tale, equally winged by imagination and knowledge, I

will only say further that it were best read on a sunny bank of Surrey,

by no means beside a guttering candle amid the creakings and scratchings

of some lonely moated grange.

At the opening of his chronicle, the narrator's supposed stand-point is

Maybury Hill, looking down on the Woking railway line, which might be

taken as an eastern boundary for the district now in view, if the

commons did not straggle over the line to the edge of the Wey valley.

Here lies,

[Illustration: AN OLD FARM, NEAR LEITH HILL.]

about Woking Junction, a town that has grown up fast in one generation

to attract some score thousand people scattered roomily over a parish

whose centre of gravity became shifted by the railway. Among its public

buildings is one notable for singularity among Surrey pine-woods, a

Mohammedan mosque at the south end of a row of brick buildings beside

the down line of the railway as it approaches Woking station. This

exotic institution was planted by the late Dr. Leitner as a college for

Oriental students of different creeds; and at the other end the mosque

had or was to have had its _juwab_ in a temple for Hindoo devotions; but

since the death of its eclectically pious founder, the enterprise seems

to have come to nought.

The amplest stretch of what is called Chobham Common lies some miles

away, upon the Berkshire edge. The best way of reaching this from London

is to get out at the border station of Sunningdale; then at once one can

mount to the common, on this side subdued by its inevitable destiny to

be cut up with lines of houses and swept by a fire of golf balls. Due

south one has still a fine open walk by sandy tracks and among ragged

thickets, making what our fathers called a dreary waste; then come the

wooded ridges and peopled hollows of Windlesham, one of Surrey's most

pleasant nooks, that, fortunately for its peacefulness, is not too near

a railway station. There is one at Bagshot, to which a path leads over

the valley of the Windle, striking into the high-road from Egham beside

Bagshot Park, a hunting lodge of former kings, now the seat of H. R. H.

the Duke of Connaught. Bagshot, a noted coach station, twenty-six miles

from London, that fell into some decay when railways overshadowed roads,

has been reviving again in our time. Its chief fame is the nursery

gardens of a well-known firm, with its huge holly hedges, the most

imposing of which may be sought out above the Church.

Beyond, the road rises on Bagshot Heath, at the "Jolly Farmer," a mile

on, forking for Basingstoke and for Winchester by either side of Crawley

Hill. This inn was once known as the "Golden Farmer," a name connected

with Dick Turpin, when the road over Bagshot Heath made a Harley Street

of his profession. The then lonely heath has borne a crop of military

and other institutions, which people the new town of Camberley in the

fork of the roads, its villas also sought as a retreat for "captains and

colonels and knights at arms." The extensive woods on the Berkshire side

are pierced by a Roman road, and by a fan of long, straight ridges that

look like War Office work, nine of them converging at a point called the

Star Post, from which other fine woodland walks go northward to Ascot,

westward to Broadmoor and Wellington College--but one must not be

tempted to expatiate on this trim wilderness where Hants, Berks, and

Surrey meet among the heaths and pine ridges shutting in the Blackwater

valley.

The right fork of the high-road soon leads us past the Staff College and

Sandhurst into Hampshire, reached by the left fork at Frimley. To keep

inside of Surrey, and to have one of the finest walks in the county, I

should choose the byroad which at the "Jolly Farmer" turns south along

the Chobham ridges. Here, some miles west of Chobham village, rises a

sandy bank about 400 feet high, beautifully covered with heath, ferny

copses and pine-wood, where one might believe oneself in the Highlands

but for the open prospects on either hand. The sides of late years have

been cut up by the building of various institutions; and towards the

farther end of the four-mile road it is frowned on by War Office notices

that trespassers are within range of stray bullets from the Pirbright

and Bisley ranges lying below the east side. While firing goes on,

there will be a red flag on the bold edge of Windmill Hill, which at the

south end of the ridge drops brokenly to the railway and the Basingstoke

Canal. This long unfortunate waterway, one understands, is now restored,

and to be worked by a new proprietor. But whether full or empty, it

gives a very pleasant walk by its bushy banks, often shaded by firs or

birchwood, its winding reaches, its sedgy bays and lagoons, and its

heathy environment. These features are especially un-canal-like on the

first crooked bend beyond Windmill Hill towards Aldershot.

In the other direction, a couple of miles of it leads to Brookwood

station, past the Pirbright Camp of the Guards on the opposite side.

Behind this lie the ranges of Bisley, where the volunteer camp,

transplanted from Wimbledon, blossoms out so gaily and jollily for a

July fortnight, during which our amateur soldiers bear warlike

hardships, made not too uncomfortable, the worst of it being usually a

thunderstorm or two that put whiskered Pandours of Fleet Street to their

shifts. The nucleus of permanent buildings appears on a low height

north-west of Brookwood station, then, beyond, the ranges run up against

the Chobham ridge, where barren banks display the "Hundred Butts" and

other groups of targets like that nicknamed "Siberia," or the sliding

course of the "Running Deer," so familiar to ambitious marksmen. On the

north side the knolls of the camp look to the no longer secluded village

of Bisley, with its outskirts Donkey Green and West End, growing along

the roads towards Bagshot and Windlesham.

On the other side of the railway spreads a great Camp of the Dead, which

Londoners will style _Woking_ Cemetery, to the indignation of that

lively young town, three or four miles away. The Brookwood

burying-ground, belonging to the London Necropolis Company, is the

largest in the country, and in beauty grows into competition with some

of the elaborate cemeteries of American cities. Laid out half a century

ago, on part of a large estate belonging to the Company, it encloses 500

acres of sandy land, which, among its native turf and heather, has been

planted with flower-beds, clumps of wood, banks of rhododendrons and

other shrubs, that go to disguise the gloomy shadows of the grave. Apart

from the division between those who have and have not the right to sleep

in consecrated earth, certain areas are allotted to London parishes, or

to communities such as the London Bakers, the Foresters' Society, etc.,

so that the associations of life are not lost in death; there is an

"Actors' Acre," as well as an "Oddfellows Acre," also a last common

bivouac for the Chelsea Pensioners and the corps of Commissionaires;

fellow-countrymen, too, can lie side by side, and fellow-believers of

many a creed: a notable feature, for instance, is the Parsees'

resting-place, so far from their Eastern Towers of Silence. The Company

has its own railway station in London, from which special funeral trains

convey their mournful freight into the cemetery, all arrangements being

carried out with as much reverence as is consistent with the conditions

of crowded city life.

About a quarter of a century ago these conditions called forth a

movement which will be remembered with respect by future generations.

This was the founding of the Cremation Society, and the building of the

first British Crematorium near Woking, that, after a delay of doubt and

difficulty as to the law, has been in use since 1885 for carrying out in

an hour or so, with due decency and complete safety to the living, those

chemical processes which, sooner or later, nature will work on us all,

however we seek to hinder her slow operation. The late Mr. J. N. Tata,

that beneficent Parsee millionaire who was not so rich in rupees as in

culture and enlightenment, confessed to me that he looked forward with

horror to the vulture burial of his creed, but that he would not indulge

his own preference for cremation on account of paining his wife's

feelings. After all, she died a few weeks before his useful life ended,

in Europe, and, as it chanced, he came to be buried at Brookwood. Some

of the more enlightened of his community, I hear, are considering the

question of substituting cremation for their repulsive form of

sepulture. Devout Parsees have looked on fire as too sacred for such an

office; but the objection of Christians is merely an ignorant prejudice,

kept warm by the ashes of mediæval eschatology. The sentiment twining

about a quiet country churchyard finds less deep root in a close-packed

metropolitan cemetery, haunted by the hideous vulgarity of the

undertaker's art; yet even here thrives a superstition of half-savage

regard for that part of us that yesterday made the tissues of a pig or

an onion, and to-morrow may be passing into the meanest forms of life. A

more truly Christian doctrine would inspire us to take care that our

farewell to earth might surely do no harm to any fellow-man.

That prejudice has been so far broken down that several other

Crematoriums are now open over the country, two close to London,

welcomed by the Cremation Society as taking away much of its business,

one by no means worked on commercial principles. In the course of twenty

years, over twenty-five hundred bodies were consumed at Woking, many of

them names of eminence: travellers like Sir Samuel Baker and Sir Henry

Layard; physicians like Sir Benjamin Richardson and Sir Spencer Wells;

authors like George Macdonald and W. E. Henley, Eliza Lynn Linton and

"Edna Lyall"; artists like Watts and Burne-Jones; philanthropists like

Sir Isaac Pitman and Dr. Barnardo; clergymen like H. R. Haweis and

Brooke Lambert, all concerned in their last dispositions to set such a

good example. Two dukes have been cremated here, with a due proportion

of duchesses and other members of the peerage; a judge or two can be

counted; and a crowning triumph of the Society would be to get a bishop

among its clients. At the outset of the movement one bishop came forward

to denounce it, but he was put to silence by a reminder how certain

distinguished prelates had been cremated alive, so far back as Queen

Mary's time, with no presumable damage to their souls' welfare.

[Illustration: THE GREAT POND, FRENSHAM.]

As an original supporter of an enterprise that never sought to make

money, I need not shrink from giving it bold advertisement. The one

valid objection to cremation, that death by poisoning might be

undetected, is obviated by the precautions all along insisted upon by

the Cremation Society, which, along with its own aims, has advocated

such more stringent examination into the cause of death as itself

requires in every case. The proceedings are facilitated when, in

lifetime, one has expressed a disposition for this kind of funeral. The

cost of cremation has now been reduced to a few pounds, becoming lowered

as the apparatus was more often used. The Golder's Green Crematorium has

almost extinguished the Society's, which stands below the Knap Hill

Barracks, and above the canal bank, a mile or two out of Woking, just

beyond the church of St. John's Hill. The building includes a chapel,

where any religious service desired may be held, this and the final

disposal of the remains being left to the friends of the deceased. The

body, shrivelled up by a blast of hot air, is turned into a small

handful of ashes, which can be preserved in an urn or buried in the

ground, when its life is scattered through this world in the undying

good or evil a man has helped to do. The Crematorium enclosure has a

close-packed show of tiny tombstones and dwarf crosses, that give a

strange effect, as of a dolls' cemetery, so inveterate is the desire for

some visible memorial of our loved ones. For my part, I should wish what

is not my real self to be thrown out on any of the breezy commons about

Woking--

That from his ashes may be made

The _heather_ of his native land.

All this fair country has been used for sepulchres since, above the

heaths trodden by funeral processions and cheerful warriors of our day,

were heaped tumuli where long-forgotten chiefs "quietly rested under the

drums and tramplings of three conquests." The neighbourhood has some

notable recent graves, besides those in the great gathering. Over the

common to the west of Brookwood Cemetery is reached Pirbright, where,

near the east end of the churchyard, Henry Stanley lies at rest beneath

a huge block of rough stone, an appropriate monument for him whom the

natives styled "stone-breaker," in admiration of his masterful dealing

with difficulties. At Frimley, on the Surrey border, is buried Bret

Harte. A little to the south of this, beside Farnborough station, on a

wooded hill rises a far-seen dome, miniature of that which covers the

great Napoleon at Paris, this one crowning a Benedictine Abbey built to

enshrine the tombs of Louis Napoleon and his ill-fated son. On the other

side of the line is the home of the Empress who, one might think, had

little reason to love sights that should sorrowfully remind her how many

a French mother's son may have been spared through her untimely loss.

Yet here this bereaved exile was neighbour to our chief national

manufactory of martial death.

To reach Aldershot Camp, one crosses the Blackwater, the parting of

Surrey and Hants, where the last great English prize-fight was fought

between Sayers and Heenan on a meadow chosen for convenience of dodging

either county's police. The quarters extend for miles about the

high-road running on from Farnborough station to Farnham, the North and

South Camps being divided by the transverse line of the Canal. The bulk

of the Camp is on Hampshire ground, but its ranges shoot into Surrey,

where, on the Fox Hills or the Romping Downs, peaceably-minded strangers

may be challenged by Roderick Dhus in khaki starting from copse and

heath, or find themselves beset by the invisible rattle of skirmishers

practising the game of war. Across a projecting tongue of Hants we come

back into Surrey again; anyhow, it is not straying far from our theme to

take a glance at this great military station.

Aldershot Camp, dating from after the Crimean War, has grown so much in

half a century that it now sends out suckers to spring up on more remote

commons, like those of Longmoor and Borden towards Selborne, where the

soldier is understood to pine, exiled from the joys of Aldershot. His

officers are not always much in love with the main camp, if one may

judge from military novels like Lockhart's _Doubles and Quits_; I have

heard subalterns wofully grumbling that they had nothing to do here but

work, while their seniors profess to be reminded of Aden rather than of

Eden. Of Aldershot as it was in earlier days, we get lively sketches in

Mrs. Ewing's _Story of a Short Life_, this author having been familiar

with the place before lines of barracks had replaced the huts, "like toy

boxes of wooden soldiers," in which it seemed not easy to "put your

pretty soldiers away at night when you had done playing with them, and

get the lid to shut down." In that touching story she tells us at what a

cost _Asholt_ Camp was constructed.

Take a Highwayman's Heath. Destroy every vestige of life with fire

and axe, from the pine that has longest been a landmark, to the

smallest beetle smothered in smoking moss. Burn acres of purple and

pink heather, and pare away the young bracken that springs verdant

from its ashes. Let flame consume the perfumed gorse in all its

glory, and not spare the broom, whose more exquisite yellow atones

for its lack of fragrance. In this common ruin be every lesser

flower involved: blue beds of speedwell by the wayfarer's path--the

daintier milkwort and rougher red rattle--down to the very dodder

that clasps the heather, let them perish and the face of Dame

Nature be utterly blackened! Then: shave the heath as bare as the

back of your hand, and if you have felled every tree, and left not

so much as a tussock of grass or a scarlet toadstool to break the

force of the winds; then shall the winds come, from the east and

from the west, from the north and from the south, and shall raise

on your shaven heath clouds of sand that would not discredit a

desert in the heart of Africa. By some such recipe the ground was

prepared for that Camp of Instruction.... Bare and dusty are the

Parade Grounds, but they are thick with memories. Here were blessed

the colours that became a young man's shroud that they might not be

a nation's shame. Here march and music welcome the coming and speed

the parting regiments. On this Parade the rising sun is greeted

with gun-fire and trumpet clarions shriller than the cock, and

there he sets to a like salute with tuck of drum. Here the young

recruit drills, the warrior puts on his medal, the old pensioner

steals back to watch them, and the soldiers' children

play--sometimes at fighting or flag-wagging, but oftener at

funerals!

Before the Crimean War, this obscure parish had only a few hundred

people. The little church above Aldershot station betrays what a small

place it originally was that has grown into a large town, its streets

alive and alert with the varied uniforms of Mr. T. Atkins, some dozen or

score thousand of him in ordinary times. The High Street, like certain

more famous thoroughfares, has only one side, facing to the blocks of

building and parade grounds of the South Camp on a ridge above the

canal. The busier side streets bear such appropriate names as _Union_,

_Wellington_, _Victoria_, while the blocks of soldiers' quarters are

inspiringly dubbed _Corunna_, _Talavera_, and so forth; and other names

of military fame mark the Lines stretching over the canal to the North

Camp, which has a station and "bazaar" quarter of its own. On very hot

days, indeed, one might mistake parts of the camp for an Indian

cantonment, till the eye catches ragged firs bordering this dusty

_maidan_. The Cavalry lie to the west, beside the Winchester high-road,

which is a boundary of the permanent barracks, while beyond it summer

brings out mushroom-beds of tents for the volunteers and militia

temporarily under training. On this side, to the south, opens the Long

Valley, haunted by shadows of dust, where the Royal Pavilion makes a

station for the Sovereign reviewing the troops in that "awful Campus

Martius." On a knoll in a hollow hereabouts has been hidden the statue

of the Great Duke that was laughed off its old perch on the arch at Hyde

Park Corner. Farther south, on the right of the high-road, stands out

Hungry Hill, and beyond it the bluff called Cæsar's Camp, from which at

a height of 600 feet there is a wide view northwards. Cæsar has other

doubtful camps in Surrey, whose border is recrossed on these heights.

Hence, by a hedge of public-houses with which Hale tempts the British

Grenadier, or through the quiet shades of the Episcopal park, we come

down to the hop grounds of Farnham, and across the Wey's gault beds may

gain that other series of commons about Hindhead.

All along this western side of the county sand has been mainly in

evidence. Where we cross the chalk, between Aldershot and Farnham, its

ridge is so much narrowed and lowered as not to force itself on the

notice of unspectacled eyes. This is exceptional, for elsewhere in

Surrey nature lays her record open, plain to read, leaf after leaf, only

here and there a little crumpled and dog's-eared at corners by the

careless hands of time. So we can see clearly on our next transverse

section, made nearer the eastern border.

X

THE BRIGHTON ROADS

All the main roads running southwards from London would lead with more

or less of a circumbendibus to Brighton; and the ideal way for a

leisurely traveller might be to pass from one to another on short

cross-roads, so as to pick out the best stretches of each. In Paterson's

road-book (1792) the _Brighthelmston_ Road is indicated as going by

Croydon, Godstone Green, East Grinstead and Lewes, fifty-nine miles,

with a short-cut beyond Godstone by Lindfield, saving seven miles; but

it also gives the "New Road" by Sutton, Reigate, and Crawley, fifty-four

miles. A newer road by Croydon and Redhill, joining the Reigate route at

Povey Cross, so as to save a mile or so, came in our time to bear the

name of the Brighton Road _par excellence_, and was preferred by coaches

and cycles, till the crush of Croydon traffic and tramways

[Illustration: THE BOURNE, CHOBHAM.]

drove them back to the Sutton route, even at the cost of facing the

steep windings of Reigate Hill.

This road through Sutton and Reigate seems to have been the standard one

when the Prince Regent's patronage made Brighton's fortune. The

lumbering stages of older days took a whole long day to go all the way

round by Lewes; but early in the century lighter vehicles began to ply

on a shorter route, their wheels soon greased by competition. Among the

many faults Cobbett has to find with George IV.'s reign, one is that

"great parcels of stock jobbers" live at Brighton with their families,

who "skip backwards and forwards on the coaches" to business in the

City. He speaks of at least twenty coaches running daily on three or

four routes, by which the Brighton resident, "leaving not very early in

the morning, reaches London by noon, and starting back two and a half

hours after, reaches Brighton not very late at night." If 7 A.M. would

answer to this matutinal worthy's idea of a not very early start, that

allows five hours for a journey recorded to be done once, under William

IV., in the exceptionally short time of three hours forty minutes. A

more precise writer of Cobbett's date gives six hours as a good rate for

sixteen regular coaches plying all the year--besides eight

"butterflies" in summer--the "Times," the "Regulator," the "Rocket,"

the "Patriot," the "True Blue," and so forth. In our own day of coaching

revival a record run has been a little under eight hours to Brighton and

back, with the disadvantage of more thronged thoroughfares to be

traversed at either end. The cyclists' record seems to be about seven

hours for the double journey, which is only a little more than that of

an amateur Dick Turpin on horseback. The famous Stock Exchange walk to

Brighton was won in nine and a half hours. One can hardly say in what

time the motor-car could devour this way, if it got a fair chance and a

clear road, as the rail has for its rush of an hour or so. One of the

latest appearances on the Brighton road has been a motor omnibus, that

modestly professed to take four hours to Brighton. For some time the

Post Office has been carrying its heavy traffic this way by a motor

vehicle, which once encountered the old-fashioned peril of highway

robbery. There has been talk of a special road from London to Brighton,

reserved as a track on which such careering vehicles may consume their

own dust at their own pace.

The Sutton route is certainly the best in that it soonest brings one out

into something like open country. Once clear of tram lines at Tooting

or Streatham, roads from the west end and the city converge by Figgs

Marsh on the flats of Mitcham. This is a widely straggling sucker of the

metropolis which clings to relics of its rustic character, showing

clumps of cottages, old inns, and patches of open ground not yet

squeezed out of existence, while it has a fame of its own for the

manufacture of tobacco and for the culture of aromatic herbs, that are

distilled at Carshalton not far off. About several villages around,

indeed, the air is perfumed by crops of lavender and peppermint, the

essence of which makes an export to France. This neighbourhood had also

an old name for walnuts, as mentioned by Fuller; and it still has room

for gardens as well as golf ground. Let us trust that only

scandal-mongering jealousy prompted a reproach once current among its

neighbours:--

Sutton for mutton,

Carshalton for beef;

Croydon for a pretty girl,

And Mitcham for a thief!

It may be that Mitcham got this bad reputation through the gypsies that

long hung about it, and other undesirable aliens who gathered to the

revels of Mitcham Fair.

Outside of Mitcham, when the road has passed a very pleasant glimpse of

the Wandle, it becomes truly rural, running for two or three miles by

hedges, trees, and park palings, with as yet few hints of suburban

expansion. Yet, truth to tell, this is but a commonplace prospect of

Surrey; and the cyclist or pedestrian might do well to make a bend by

the left for a more varied route, by Mitcham Common, Hackbridge, and

Carshalton, with its old Church and the pond wept over by Ruskin, who

would have mourned more loudly had he lived to see its well-timbered

park invaded by the builder. Carshalton--spelt _Casehorton_ in Georgian

books, _Cash-Haulton_ by Fuller--is one of those places that has a

wilful pronunciation of its name, this and the spelling perhaps worn

down from _Cross Old Town_; and it is old enough to figure in King

Alfred's will. Eastwards, by Wallington and Beddington, this choice

place of residence almost runs into Croydon, to which a pretty walk may

be taken by the bank of the Wandle opposite Beddington Park, where the

stately Hall of the Carews, that has entertained Queen Elizabeth, is now

an Orphan Asylum, and may be visited on week-day afternoons. In the

gardens here it is said that oranges were acclimatised for a century,

till an unusually severe frost proved too much for them. The spirit of

the nineteenth century turned part of Beddington Park into a sewage

farm; but still this vicinity has some pretty peeps not yet blocked out

by bricks and mortar.

Even in George I.'s time, Defoe tells us, the edge of the Downs

hereabouts, as "the most agreeable spot on all this side of London," was

thickly set with citizens' houses, some "built with such a Profusion of

Expense that they look rather like Seats of the Nobility." In our day,

the merits of a high and dry site have spread building farther on to the

chalk heights. Coming by Carshalton, one strikes Sutton in its centre,

where beside the railway station the road, till not long ago, was

spanned by the sign of the "Cock," that held out longer than the

turnpike gate below it. The high-road runs right through this long

place, for two miles or so, first descending then ascending on the chalk

slopes, where so many Londoners seek healthy homes that this must be the

largest of our scores of _South towns_, one of the commonest place-names

in England. _Newtown_ is still more frequent, and not far behind Sutton

comes _Weston_, whereas _Nortons_ and _Eastons_ appear comparatively

rare.

The Sutton of Surrey seems more prosperous than picturesque, its old

features overlaid, and its parish monuments packed away into a handsome

new Church. But a mile to the west, Cheam has more rural features

scattered round a spire below which stands the chancel of the old

Church, enshrining some stately monuments; then from this village one

can walk on through Nonsuch Park to Ewell on the Epsom road. Cheam is

perhaps best known by what seems the oldest private school in England,

now a nursery for Eton, but it has passed through various phases, and

was at one time kept by the Rev. William Gilpin, whose search for the

picturesque came to be caricatured in the tours of _Dr. Syntax_.

Having cleared the Sutton villadom, about the twelfth milestone from

Westminster once more we emerge into the open; yet for a time the green

Downs are cumbered by huge institutions, a lunatic asylum, and other

blocks of building till lately used as Metropolitan Union schools, whose

pupils made an advertisement for Sutton's salubrity; but one hears that

they are now to be devoted to the care of more afflicted wards of our

local government. Beyond, on the right, is seen the outlying place

called Belmont, that hardly justifies its name. The unshackled wayfarer

might bear over the Downs to the left, making for the spire of the

pretty village of Banstead, hidden among fine trees. Those who keep the

high-road must not forget to turn round, near the crossing of the Epsom

Downs line, for a view from the highest point, over 500 feet, looking

across the southern suburbs to the dome of St. Paul's, that may be seen

on a clear day, and sometimes, it is said, the eye catches Windsor

Castle to the west. Closer at hand are scenes that moved an

eighteenth-century poet:--

... where low tufted broom

Or box, or berried junipers arise;

Or the tall growth of glossy rinded beech;

And where the burrowing rabbit turns the dust,

And where the dappled deer delights to bound,

Such are the downs of Banstead, edged with woods

And towery villas.

Here we are fairly on Banstead Downs, stretching to the Epsom

racecourse, that seems to have originally come under Banstead's name.

Epsom town lies two or three miles to our right, beyond Nork Park. To

the left, on the north side of the Downs, is the park called the "Oaks,"

seat of that Lord Derby who founded the race so named. On either side

there are alluring byways, like that leading by Banstead along the ridge

to Woodmansterne, at whose little Church guide-posts set us on the way

back to Carshalton, or into the Chipstead valley, where we might turn

down to Purley, or up the valley to regain the high-road at Tadworth by

a very pleasant path through Banstead woods and over Burgh Heath.

At Tadworth, where the Chipstead valley line to Tottenham Corner is

crossed, the high-road forks, its right branch going to Dorking, its

left to Reigate by the spire of Kingswood Church. The Dorking road runs

over Banstead Heath and Walton Heath, where, at the height of nearly 600

feet, stands up Walton-on-the-Hill, so called in distinction from Walton

low-lying on the Thames. Here there is a wide stretch of real stubbly

heath, such as Cobbett would abuse as "villainous," but the Romans had

not such bad taste, who left the remains of a considerable villa to be

unearthed on it. Walton Place is said to have been the retreat of Anne

of Cleves after her lucky separation from the royal Bluebeard. In our

day Walton is perhaps best famed for its excellent golf links. The whole

district is a charming jumble of fields and woods among pitted sandhills

and wrinkled chalk ridges, where a pedestrian will often be tempted to

stray from the open road. A mile or so to the west of Walton,

[Illustration: REIGATE HEATH, EVENING.]

over a wooded hollow, is reached the conspicuous Church of

Headley-on-the-Hill, already mentioned as goal of so many footpaths.

From this may soon be gained the Roman Road; and southwards, from Walton

or Headley, there are pleasant tracks leading to the edge of the Downs

to strike the Pilgrims' Way as it comes to pass above Reigate.

These heaths are skirted by our Brighton highway, which at Gatton Park,

about three miles beyond the fork at Tadworth, approaches its grandest

point. Through the cutting to lower its level, that gave such strange

offence to Cobbett, it suddenly emerges on the steep brow above Reigate,

passing under the Suspension Bridge of the Pilgrims' Way, whence on the

left a most leafy lane leads down to Redhill, the modern annexe of

Reigate. A footpath runs along the cutting to the end of the Suspension

Bridge, where are seats for enjoying the celebrated view from this brow;

but from the open turf by the roadside the prospect is hardly

diminished, embracing the whole south of the county. The Holmesdale

Valley lies at our feet, with Reigate spread out in the foreground,

backed by the sand ridge; far away to the east stretches the Weald of

Kent; and the towers of East Grinstead stand up to the south-east,

across the Sussex border, with Crowborough Beacon beyond. Chanctonbury

Ring and the Devil's Dyke on the Sussex Downs can sometimes be made out

to the south. To the west, the Holmesdale Valley is continued between

Leith Hill and the Chalk Downs on which we stand; then on that hand the

featureless ridge of Hindhead will close the view in fine weather.

The descent to Reigate requires caution, imposed on prudent wheels by

its steep turns, and on imprudent ones by the fame of the local police,

who have made themselves a terror to scorchers. In the valley, beyond

the railway station, the road pierces into the heart of Reigate by the

unusual feature of a tunnel beneath the hillock on which stand its

Castle ruins and the brand-new block of Municipal Buildings.

Reigate, now so disguised in villas and wooded grounds, and so swollen

by the railway growth of Redhill on its east side, is no mere

mushroom-bed of London homes, but an old chief town of south-eastern

Surrey. Here was built a Norman Castle of the De Warennes, a rival to

that of Bletchingley on the sand ridge beyond Redhill. Till the last

Reform Bill Reigate had a member of its own, and two in olden days.

When membership of Parliament was often felt a burden rather than a

privilege, this neighbourhood was but too well represented, Gatton on

the Downs above being one of the most notorious rotten boroughs, and

Bletchingley another, that made a phosphorescent end with Lord

Palmerston as its member.

The nucleus of the place is marked by a gathering of old inns and shops

about the cross-roads, above which the site of the Castle has been laid

out as a public garden. There is not much of the structure left, the

chief sight being the sandstone caves underneath, which tradition, or

perhaps no better authority than Tupper's novel, _Stephen Langton_,

makes the secret meeting-place of the barons conspiring to bring King

John on his knees for the signing of Magna Charta. Still older legends

haunt these caves, where rude carvings have been attributed to Roman

soldiers quartered in them. Under other houses in or about the town

there are caves or excavations said to be better worth seeing, but not

always open to idle curiosity, one of them, indeed, being used for a

rifle gallery. What will be apparent to the passer-by is a pleasant

mixture of lawns, gardens, and clumps of fine foliage, among which

footpaths lead one in view of these private amenities well displayed on

the swells of the valley.

Reigate, then, may prove a spot to "delay the tourist," certainly for

the charms of its situation between the varied features of chalk and

sand closely facing each other from either side. On the north a steep

ascent leads to the celebrated Beechwood view, from which one may wander

along the timbered Downs to Box Hill. Up the valley runs the road to

Dorking, going out by Reigate Heath, where on a byway to Leigh is found

the curious feature of a windmill turned into a little church. Beyond

the town the sand ridge leads eastward to the broken expanse of

Earlswood Common; on the west side of the road it is crowned by the

clumps and knolls of Reigate Park, open to the public for striking

prospects both north and south; and from this enclosure one may hold on

along the heights to come upon the Mole winding through one of the most

Surreyish corners of Surrey.

The Brighton road mounts straight up the sand hill, deeply cut under the

edge of Reigate Park, below which the old Augustinian Priory has been

transformed into a mansion, whose late owner, Lady Henry Somerset, made

herself a high name both in England and America as a temperance

reformer. By path to Redhill along the top of the ridge, or over

Earlswood Common on its south side, one can now in a couple of miles

strike across to the road through Croydon, soon to converge with that we

have followed through Reigate. From Woodhatch, the latter drops on to

the Weald, in four miles joining the other road at Povey Cross,

twenty-six miles from London. A mile or so more brings us to the edge of

Surrey, guarded by a "White Lion," but no longer marked by the "County

Oak," whose time-seasoned timber has gone to make the screen of Ifield

Church.

Henceforth this much travelled road belongs to Sussex. The last stretch

of it in Surrey is not its most attractive part, from which, however,

one could make a fine diversion among the branches of the Mole to the

west, crossing over to the line of Stone Street. But our theme is the

Brighton road, on which let us now skim backwards along the main branch

_viâ_ Croydon, that, more closely accompanying the Brighton rail, might

be chosen by wayfarers bent on business or record-making.

Behind the convergence, this branch leads by the racecourse of Gatwick,

then, across the Mole, by the new growth of Horley, that might be called

the southernmost of London's dependencies, if the same thing were not

to be said of Brighton; but the old yews by the Church, and the

"Chequers" and "Six Bells" inns speak for Horley's unvillaed antiquity.

To carry out the sporting character of the neighbourhood, Horley is

headquarters of the Surrey staghounds, and at Burstow, to the east, are

the kennels of one of three packs of foxhounds that hunt this edge of

the county, where Mr. Jorrocks must have had many a day before he came

to his mastership at Handley Spa. To the east here extends a part of the

Weald little famed in the tourist world, yet containing such points as

Burstow with its monument to Flamsteed, our first Astronomer-Royal;

Thunderfield Castle, taken to have been a Saxon fortress; and the old

mansion of Smallfield Place, by which the free foot or wheel might

wander across to the East Grinstead road.

On the Brighton road itself--where the reader must bear in mind that his

head has been turned Londonwards--he finds not much of interest till it

comes to switchback over Earlswood Common, between an artificial lake

and the palace of the idiot asylum. Thus it mounts the sand ridge,

stretching towards Reigate in boldly broken scars and tangled hollows of

the red sandstone that gives Redhill its name, here crowned by a

circular clump to commemorate the Jubilee of 1897. On the other side

this range invites a fine diversion, by either low or high roads, past

Nutfield and Bletchingley to Godstone, on whose Green can be joined the

road going southwards by Caterham.

Our business-like highway has now nothing for it but a long down and up

through the main street of Redhill, in the central depression passing

the big Junction and St. Ann's Schools on the right, where, on the other

side, the excrescence of Warwick Town has grown along the cross-road

almost into Reigate. When the high-road gets out of Redhill, it is

climbing the Downs, reached at Merstham below Gatton Park, and passed by

a valley making the course of the Bourne, one of those English _wadys_

so common in chalk countries, which, filled by the overflowing of some

subterranean reservoir, may burst out in ravaging floods, as this one

has often done. In the same hollow pass is pent up the railway that was

apt to be choked by the trains of two lines, till the Brighton Company

relieved the pressure by a new conduit from Earlswood to Purley.

The road through Croydon falls into Smitham Bottom, brightened for

Londoners by such names as Stoat's Nest and Hooley Farm, but

overshadowed by the great County Asylum on Cane's Hill, and the

buildings that have sprung up about it. By Cane's Hill opens the

Chipstead valley, running up to Kingswood and Walton Heath. On the other

side rises the smooth swell of the Farthing or Fairdene Downs, which,

with Coulsdon Common beyond, are a pleasure-ground of the City of

London, as seems too little known to Londoners, unless it be the

Guardsmen from Coulsdon Barracks, whose uniforms may appear as showy

dots on the turf slopes, where sometimes hardly a human figure comes in

sight over a mile of open prospect. Yet few finer rambles can be found

so near London than by mounting from Coulsdon station to the bare top of

this ridge, and keeping straight along, to hold on by a woodland lane

for Chaldon and the brow of the Downs, with more than one rough path

dropping off into the hollow on the left to straggle up again to

Coulsdon Common and towards Caterham.

But our road, as Mrs. Gamp philosophically remarks, being born in a

vale, must take the consequences of such a situation. It leads us humbly

on to the violent outbreak of new houses about Purley, looked down on by

the Reedham

[Illustration: FLANCHFORD MILL.]

Orphanage to the right and the Warehousemen's and Clerks' School on

Russell Hill to the left. Guide-books remind us how here Horne Tooke

wrote his _Diversions of Purley_; but contemporary Radicals seem not

much disposed to seek either amusement or instruction from the works of

that philosophic grammarian and agitator. What will interest the present

generation more is an effort to preserve Purley Beeches, a fine woodland

on the Downs, as pleasure-ground for this fast-growing suburb.

On the east, beyond the railway, beside a face of quarried chalk, opens

the Caterham valley, its hollow and its south side much choked up with

streets and mansions, strung together by two railway lines; but the

north slope opens in the steeps of Riddlesdown, where a thousand acres

are preserved as a London park, with tea-gardens and other attractions

much in favour with school-treat parties; and in the background, by a

path to Warlingham, may perhaps be found a strong encampment of gypsies.

The last time I passed that way, on a fine Sunday evening, I came upon a

band of "burly chiels and clever hizzies" from the North, actually

dancing about a piper--"to give them music was his charge," as more

rigid Scots might quote grimly. The waters by which these cheerful

exiles thus forgot the Sabbath songs of their Zion show, in the

reservoirs of Kenley and Purley, a strikingly blue tint one guesses to

be due to some process for softening their chalky impregnation; and this

valley also has a subterranean bourne, to which fond tradition gives a

periodicity of seven years. Again a word to the unshackled wanderer: let

him pass up by the curving face of Riddlesdown and through the lower

part of Caterham, past the Congregational College, then by a track up

the Harestone valley, leading to a high brow of the Downs at the War

Coppice. The Caterham valley itself is some hundreds of feet above the

sea, so no wonder that so many well-to-do Londoners make their nests

about what a local guide styles "its cluster of ambrosial hills."

At Purley begins the long tram line that takes us through Croydon, and

on to Norbury by still open spaces, shrinking like Balzac's _Peau de

chagrin_, where the footpaths that run off to the heights of Norwood may

any year be found hedged by houses. Croydon ought to be well equipped

with trams, for one of the first in the country was made hence to

Wandsworth, the very first, in 1800, belonging to Derbyshire, the

contrivance of Benjamin Outram, from whose name _Outramways_ is said to

have been playfully derived; but the word tram is of course an old one.

There is now only one hiatus, at Streatham, in the electric tram route

from the Chalk Downs to the Thames bridges; and that seems like to be

bridged over, for Croydon is running into London as fast as its own

satellites, Purley, Sanderstead, Thornton Heath, and Beddington are

drawn into the growing mass of Croydon.

Croydon has some right to resent its threatened absorption into the

metropolis, for, as populous as London was three centuries ago, it is by

far the largest independent municipality in Surrey. It was a town of

high antiquity, and a main seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury in days

when those prelates had a dozen palaces in their diocese. The "Colliers

of Croydon" were once well known as burning charcoal in the woods

around. Then the town lay mainly to the west of the present main

thoroughfare, on low ground about the head-waters of the Wandle. This

part has been swept and garnished in our day; and with other old taverns

has gone the "King's Head," kept by Ruskin's grandmother. But Croydon

has still relics of the past among its smart modern features displayed

by electric light round the tower of its Town Hall. At the corner where

the chief street is gained from the Central station stands Whitgift's

Hospital, a "haunt of ancient peace" since it was founded by Elizabeth's

archbishop; but it is now threatened with removal or alteration as

standing too much in the way of the busy tram line, that seems already

to have pushed the Brighton coaches off this road, where Croydon's

"Greyhound" was once a well-known stage. From the crossing at Whitgift's

Hospital, Church Street leads down to Croydon Church, destroyed by fire

forty years ago, but reproduced by Sir Gilbert Scott, and containing

some of the old monuments saved from that disaster. Close to it may be

seen the remains of the Archbishops' Palace, in part preserved and

restored, now, after being turned to base offices, used as an orphanage

school under care of the Kilburn Sisters. It is said to have been

founded by Lanfranc, and was occupied by a long line of prelates up to

George II.'s time.

When this palace was sold in 1780, the proceeds were used to buy

Addington Park, on the heights to the east, which became the

Archbishops' country seat till it in turn came to be sold and replaced

by a mansion at Canterbury in our time. The park, several miles in

circuit, shows a beautiful contrast of fir-woods and heath, recalling

Scotland, with the softer features of an English demesne; so one hoped

for it to escape the fate of being broken up for building lots, as seems

now the doom of its seclusion. But the Addington Hills on the Croydon

side, and the bare brow of Shirley, are open, giving a wide view over

South London, with the Crystal Palace in the foreground upon the edge of

Kent. Into a pretty corner of this county we soon pass by a conspicuous

windmill and the high built spire of Shirley Church, outside which, at

the east end, may be seen the tomb of Ruskin's parents, with a

characteristic inscription. Kent is entered a mile farther on, at West

Wickham.

This is not the only fine point of view about Croydon. Just outside of

the town, to the south-east, above Selsdon Road station, the high wooded

bank called Crohamhurst is now a public park, about which pleasant

footways lead over a country too rapidly being built over. On the other

side, beyond the Duppas Hill Park, the Wandle is our guide to half-rural

scenes of Waddon and Beddington, already mentioned as we passed by

Mitcham.

The main road runs Croydon into Purley, passing the aerodrome station

for Paris. A fork of it is the oldest Brighton Road, which leaves the

county below East Grinstead. From Croydon it goes by Caterham, dropping

through a hollow in the Downs to Godstone Green, with its good old inns,

then by Tilburstow Hill, a bold knob of the sand ridge, on to a stretch

of the Weald, from which once more it rises to the Forest Ridge of

Sussex. But we have already crossed this road at its best points; and

fresh scenes will be opened out by taking a more devious line a little

to the east, on which articulate guide-posts and more or less articulate

men may be consulted to keep one in touch with straighter roads to

Brighton.

From the main road, this line diverges by a fork to the left at the "Red

Deer," no longer the south terminus of Croydon trams. Past spreading

suburbs it mounts up to Sanderstead, whose pretty Church stands at a

height of 500 feet upon a sandy patch, from which our road soon passes

on to the chalk tableland. An hour's sharp walk would bring us to

Warlingham above the Caterham valley, where the Church, with its ancient

yews, has among other old features a faded fresco of St. Christopher. A

mile or two farther on, the chalk is broken by gravel pits and traces of

ancient excavation on Worms Heath; then the road rises to 800 feet on

Nore Hill, and still higher as by Botley Hill, the unpretending Mount

Blanc of the Surrey Downs, about seven miles beyond Croydon, it reaches

the sharp drop to Titsey, on the brow where five roads meet, between

Tatsfield to the left and Woldingham to the right. This is the point we

gained in passing along the edge of the Downs by Harden Park, above the

Pilgrims' Way.

On such a descent the cyclist needs no notice boards as warning to

caution. The pedestrian may leave the careful course of the high-road

for the steep chalky lane on the right, plunging straight down beside

the woods of Titsey Park. Either road brings him by Titsey, across the

line of the Pilgrims' Way, to Limpsfield, a scattered village lying

prettily against the farther slope, where the common makes a favourite

golf ground. Village is hardly the word for what seems a roomy suburb,

spreading itself on the broken ground that has given fine sites for such

institutions as the Church Missionary Home and the Caxton Convalescent

Home for printers; but here is well shown that scene so frequent around

London, a quiet roadside Church and core of old houses beginning to be

lost among rows of new ones, even as in many a Surrey graveyard the

heavy, flat, weather-worn slabs, under which "the rude forefathers of

the hamlet sleep," are now thrown into shade by a thickening display of

choicer and fresher memorials that mark the passing of a more æsthetic

generation to its last home.

Here one might turn aside on either hand through fine country. Near the

station, shared by Limpsfield with Oxted, to the west of it stands the

Church of the latter village, looking up to the Downs, which may be

ascended by steep ways. A little beyond this Church is Barrow Green, the

summer home of Jeremy Bentham, where he entertained James Mill and his

well-taught son. By Oxted, an hour or so's walk leads westward to

Godstone, past or not far from Tandridge and Godstone Churches, both

finely restored by Sir Gilbert Scott, who lived here under the brow of

Marden Park. His alabaster monument to his wife in Tandridge churchyard,

and the view from its ancient yew, are worth a slight bend to the south,

bringing one in the latitude of Tilburstow Hill, that rises between

Godstone Green and its far-off station; then along that sand ridge one

might keep on for half a dozen miles to Redhill. There is a still finer

walk to the east of Limpsfield, across

[Illustration: A SLOPE OF BLUEBELLS, HASCOMBE.]

its common, with a windmill and the little Chart Church as landmarks to

the left, then up an avenue-like road to Kent Hatch, where the wooded

heath of Crockham Hill slopes suddenly to the Kentish Weald. A most

beautiful round might be made of this excursion into Kent, by taking the

path through Squerryes Park, behind Crockham Hill, to descend into the

pretty town of Westerham, with its memories of Wolfe, from which some

three miles bring one back over the Surrey border to Limpsfield.

But there still remains to be seen the south-eastern corner of the

Surrey Weald, containing some notable sights. For them, from the

"Plumbers' Arms" cross-roads at Limpsfield, let the traveller trace out

his way along labyrinthine byroads near the straight course of the L.B.

& S.C. rail southward. Three miles on, a little to the west of this

line, soon after it has been intersected by the S.E.R., he will find the

old-world village of Crowhurst standing up among the remains of Wealden

woods. The restored Church has two brasses, and one of the cast-iron

tomb-stones common in this Black Country of old days; but its lion is

the churchyard yew, taken as the oldest and largest in Surrey,

thirty-two feet in girth, its fame sometimes confused with that other

great yew's, that distinguishes likewise the Sussex Crowhurst. The

yew-hedged farm close by was the manor-house of the Angell family, whose

name revives in the highly respectable but commonplace Angell Road,

Brixton. A mile farther south, to the right of the road, lies Crowhurst

Place, one of the old moated granges of Surrey, still a delight to the

artistic and antiquarian eye. A little more to the south, and rather

farther off the road, Moat Farm is another old house to be sought out;

and indeed the whole of this district makes a happy hunting-ground for

the sketcher or photographer.

The road from Crowhurst goes on with the railway to Lingfield. If one

have strayed as far west as the high-road through Godstone, at Blindley

Heath a byroad turns off it for Lingfield, to which a footpath leads

from Moat Farm. Lingfield is a place of varied note, not least for its

quaint timber-fronted houses, and its "Star" inn, a type of hostelry now

rare about London. The noble Church, formerly a collegiate one, is to be

visited for its show of Cobham monuments and brasses, and other old

features. The old College has disappeared; but a modern foundation here

is the "Homestead" colony for the afflicted in mind, body, or estate, a

praiseworthy effort of the Christian Union for Social Service. Then, as

the nettle grows near the dock, Lingfield has its noted racecourse,

which may have ruined such lives as that colony strives to reclaim. What

looks like a small-pox hospital to the south of Lingfield station turns

out to be the Grand Stand and stables that bring noisy crowds to this

else peaceful neighbourhood.

On a height to the south of the racecourse stands the last and latest

village of Surrey, making a strong contrast with its time-weathered

neighbours. This is the group of bungalows originally entitled

Bellaggio, which a generation or so ago was built as a sort of

co-operative country home for Londoners, standing in its own grounds

round the tower of a club-house. The enterprise did not succeed very

well; and the place has sought to gain a fresh start under the name of

Dormans Park, the club being turned into an hotel, that does good

business at the race meetings, and at other times would make a centre

for exploring the skirts of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex, here converging.

Beyond the grounds, ornamented with wood and water, across a dip rises

in Sussex the edge of the Forest sand ridge, where the towers of East

Grinstead beacon us to "fresh woods and pastures new" of a county no

less beautiful than Surrey.

But the reader must not be led farther afield, when space fails me to do

justice to my proper theme. I have said nothing of Farley and Chelsham,

that look so finely over Kent from the high and dry north-east corner of

Surrey. I have barely mentioned the wooded and parked northern edge of

the Downs which, so far back as Defoe's time, could be spoken of as one

line of gentlemen's houses between Guildford and Leatherhead. I have not

said enough of the stretch of broken land between the Wey valley and

Leith Hill, nor of picturesque old villages and "greens" hidden among

its wild commons and copses. Other points may have been unwillingly or

unwittingly passed over, as not readily brought into view from the

various routes by which we have crossed nearly every part of Surrey. But

enough has been said at least to hint what are the varied leaves of

chalk, sand, and clay with which nature makes up such a noble bouquet of

landscapes laid at the feet of London.

INDEX

Abinger, 175

Addington Park, 244

Addlestone, 31

Albury, 127

Aldershot, 219

Anningsley, 29

Anstiebury Camp, 164

Ashtead, 157

Bagshot Heath, 210

Banstead, 230

Barn Elms, 52

Barnes, 50

Basingstoke Canal, 85

Battersea, 54

Beddington, 228

Bellaggio, 251

Betchworth, 108

Bisley Camp, 212

Blackdown, 193

Blackheath, 84

Bletchingly, 140

_Boating on Thames_, 36

Botley Hill, 141

Box Hill, 108, 134

Bramley, 69

Brighton Road, the, 224

Brockham Green, 108

Brookwood, 213

Burford Bridge, 107

Burstow, 238

Byfleet, 85

Camberley, 210

Camilla Lacey, 104

Cane's Hill, 240

Capel, 110

Carshalton, 228

Caterham, 241

Chaldon, 138

Chalk Downs, the, 5

Chantries Wood, 123

Charlwood, 110

Charterhouse School, 67

Cheam, 230

Chelsham, 252

Chertsey, 28

Chessington, 149

Chiddingfold, 190

Chilworth, 124

Chipstead, 240

Chobham, 204

---- Ridges, 211

Claremont, 94

Cobham, 96

Coldharbour, 164

Compton, 119

Cooper's Hill, 22

Coulsdon, 240

Cowey Stakes, 35

Cranleigh, 180

Crohamhurst, 245

Crooksbury Hill, 64

Crowhurst, 249

Croydon, 242

Deepdene, 162

Denbies, 133

Devil's Jumps, 194

---- Punch-bowl, 184

Dorking, 159

Dormans, 251

Earlswood Common, 236

Eashing, 66

Effingham, 84

Egham, 25

Elstead, 64

Ember River, 89

Englefield Green, 23

Epsom, 149

Esher, 91

Evershed's Rough, 133

Ewell, 147

Ewhurst, 180

Farley, 252

Farnborough, 218

Farnham, 59, 117

Farthing Downs, 240

Felday, 178

"Fold" Country, 181

_Footpaths_, 20

Frensham, 197

Friday Street, 174

Frimley, 218

Gatton, 136

Gatwick, 237

Gibbet Hill, 188

Godalming, 68

Godstone, 248

Gomshall, 139

Grayshott, 195

Great Bookham, 98

Guildford, 71

Ham House, 44

Hampton Court, 38

Haslemere, 193

Headley-on-the Hill, 158

Hersham, 95

High Down Ball, 70

Hindhead, 183

Hogsback, the, 117

Hogsmill River, 148

Holloway College, 15

Holmbury Hill, 178

Holmesdale Valley, 134

Holmwood, 169

Horley, 237

Horsley, 84

Juniper Hill, 105

Kenley, 242

Kent Hatch, 247

Kew, 48

Kingston-on-Thames, 40

Leatherhead, 99

Leigh, 108

Leith Hill, 167

Limpsfield, 247

Lingfield, 250

London suburbs, 29

"Lonesome," 12

Long Ditton, 39

Losely, 121

Magna Charta Island, 25

Marden Park, 140

Merstham, 135

Morton, 146

Mickleham, 101

Milford, 70

Mitcham, 227

Mole, the, 87-110

Molesey, 87

Moor Park, 61

Morden, 147

Mortlake, 50

_Necropolis, the_, 213

Newark Priory, 83

Newdigate, 110

Newlands Corner, 124

Nonsuch Park, 148

Norbury Park, 100

Oakwood, 166

Oatlands Park, 33

Ockham, 83

Ockley, 165

Oxshott, 97

Oxted, 248

Pease Marsh, 70

Peperharow, 66

Petersham, 44

Pilgrims' Way, 111-143

Pirbright, 83

Pirford, 218

Polesden, 103

_Population_, 11

Purley, 240

Putney, 53

Puttenham, 118

Ranmore Common, 133

Redhill, 239

Redland Woods, 169

Reigate, 135, 223

Richmond, 44

Riddlesdown, 241

Ripley, 83

_Rivers of Surrey_, 7, 57

Roman Road, the, 144-166

Rotherhithe, 55

Runnymede, 24

St. Anne's Hill, 29

St. Catherine's Chapel, 122

St. George's Hill, 32

St. Martha's Chapel, 123

Sanderstead, 246

Sandown Park, 90

Seale, 118

Send, 82

Shalford, 122

Shere, 130

Shirley, 245

Shottermill, 189

"Silent Pool," the, 129

Stoke D'Abernon, 97

"Stone Street," 145

Surbiton, 39

Suspension Bridge view, 233

Sutton, 229

Sutton Place, 80

"Swallows" (of the Mole), 100

Tadworth, 232

Tandridge, 248

Tatsfield, 142

Thames, the, 22

Thames Ditton, 39

Thursley, 187

Tilburstow Hill, 248

Tilford, 64

Tillingbourne, the, 127

Titsey, 141

_Towns and villages_, 12

Virginia Water, 24

Waggoner's Wells, 195

Wallington, 228

Walton-on-Thames, 35

Walton-on-the-Hill, 232

Wandle, the, 228, 245

Warlingham, 246

_Watts Gallery, the_, 120

Waverley Abbey, 62

Weald, the, 6

Westcott, 170

Wey River, 58-86

Weybridge, 32

White Hill, 139

Wimbledon, 41

Windlesham, 210

Windsor Park, 24

Wisley, 84

Witley, 189

Witley Common, 199

Woking, 82

Woldingham, 141

"Wolsey's Tower," 90

Wonersh, 74

Woodmansterne, 231

Worcester Park, 148

Wotton, 172

_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.