Prose-writers have had much to say about Hindhead, among them the late Grant Allen, who pleased a not very exacting public with the not always accurate natural history of "Moorland Idylls," and shocked it with Hill-top novels. But I think no poet has written of the hill, unless it is Charles Kingsley, who surely had climbed Hindhead and looked out on the view from its bracken and heather when he wrote Airly Beacon. It was one of the first poems he made after coming to Eversley, and it breathes the scent of June fern in the air and sun:—

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh, the pleasant sight to see Shires and towns from Airly Beacon, While my love climbed up to me!

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh, the happy hours we lay Deep in fern on Airly Beacon, Courting through the summer's day!

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh, the weary haunt for me, All alone on Airly Beacon, With his baby on my knee!

Of other writers, Mr. Baring-Gould has come nearest to catching the spirit of the moorlands and the breeze that sometimes drifts up over Hindhead from the great glen which local myth has named the Devil's Punch Bowl. The Broom Squire is strangely unsatisfactory as a novel, or I find it so, with its entire needlessness and inconsequence of plot. But it has something in it of the heather and the wind, of the sand of Thursley and the steam of the Punch Bowl on a wet day; and you may still meet broom squires if you like to wander down into the deep of the glen. The best broom squire is, I think, Kingsley's, in My Winter Garden:—

"The clod of these parts is the descendant of many generations of broom squires and deer stealers; the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though no more of the Queen's deer are to be shot in the winter turnip fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably once in his life 'hits the keeper into the river,' and reconsiders himself for a while over a crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults, and I have mine. But he is a thoroughly good fellow nevertheless. Civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; a far shrewder fellow too—owing to his dash of wild forest blood from gipsy, highwayman, and what not—than his bullet-headed and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South Saxon of the chalk downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone; swaggering in his youth: but when he grows old a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous as a prince...."



Perhaps broom squires belong more properly to Thursley and the moors. They are a disappearing race, and I have met few of them. But their cottages, some of then mantled with ivy, some of them broken and tumbling, some empty altogether, stand along the slopes of Highcombe Bottom, which is the glen of the Punch Bowl, and dot themselves here and there by the sandy lanes to the north. Compared with the loneliness of some of these lanes, the wildest tract of Hindhead is a garden. The flowerless, silent shade of a lane by Highcombe Bottom in August, when no birds are singing, is the most solitary thing in the countryside. But on Hindhead there is always wild life moving. I have seen strange visitors there; as strange as any were a brood of pheasants, almost on the highest ridge. Or perhaps even odder hill-dwellers are the tadpoles which swarm in the summer in the little pools on the highest ridge itself. What should frogs be doing on Hindhead? Perhaps they are toads. But the happiest and the most graceful of all living things on Hindhead are the swifts. To me, indeed, they are a part of the place; they belong to that hot clear air over the height of the downs, to the sense of immense distance of green fields spread south to Chanctonbury Ring and north to Nettlebed by Henley. I never think of Hindhead without two sights of summer; of children wandering over the hillside with their lips stained with bilberries; and the swifts sailing in royal circles high in the blue or screaming in pursuing companies, close and low over the roadway down the hill.



CHAPTER XIII

THURSLEY AND THE MOORS

Painters among heather.—The Devil's Jumps.—The Devil redivivus.—Cobbett at Thursley.—A superb belfry.—The Sailor's Grave.—Pig-iron and hammers.—The natterjack at eve.—A plank for bellringers.—Witley fifty years hence.—Mehetabel in the church.

Thursley lies nearly three miles north of Hindhead on the edge of the heather, and brings artists all the summer to paint its timbered cottages and glowing hills. Mrs. Allingham sketched as charmingly on Thursley common as by Haslemere; Birket Foster found a background of purple for his cottage gardens. Mrs. Allingham's sketch of Hindhead from Witley common, which runs up to Thursley from the north-east, is all the wild of this part of Surrey on a few inches of paper.

Thursley is Thor's ley or field, and has memories of the Danes. They left other names near: Tuesley, or Tuesco's field, lies towards Godalming, and Thunder Hill, near Elstead, is Thor's or Thunor's. Thor lives in local legends. Three strange conical hills, lying close together two miles or so west of Thursley, have been known since his day as the Devil's Jumps. Tradition draws a frightful picture of the Devil, horns and tail and all, jumping from hill to hill to amuse himself, until one day Thor caught him at it and knocked him over with an enormous stone. You can see the stone on the Devil's Jumps to-day.



The Devil jumped up again when I was last looking at the Jumps. I had climbed to the top of Kettlebury Hill, a mile away, and was looking out over those strange little lumps of rock and crimson heather, which puzzled Cobbett to the end of his days, when suddenly at my feet there started up a rabbit as black as a cinder, leapt wildly about the heather, and disappeared. There could have been very little doubt what that meant long after Thor's time.



Cobbett, riding in from Hampshire or Sussex, used to make Thursley his first stopping-place. But one thing he would not do, and that was to come into Thursley over Hindhead. He detested turnpike roads, and he detested Hindhead. He liked to ride through woods, or along lanes with trees meeting overhead. When he rides from Chiddingford to Thursley, he writes that "the great thing was to see the centre of these woods, to see the stems of the trees as well as the tops of them." Otherwise, the pleasure in riding was to pass fine turnip-fields, or bean-fields; anything rather than waste land. The heather on the hills might glow to crimson, and the bracken fade from emerald to bronze, without touching a chord in that sturdy farmer's heart. Hindhead, you read, "is certainly the most villainous spot that God ever made," and Cobbett will have nothing to do with it.

The last fifty years have altered and enlarged Thursley church, but it still retains the distinction, unique in Surrey, of its timber tower and steeple rising from the centre of the nave. Other churches in the county—Dunsfold and Alfold in the neighbourhood—carry their bell-turrets on ingenious constructions of timber, but there is no such collection in any other Surrey church of such superb beams as are to be seen at Thursley. The effect of these dark and majestic pillars of oak, some of them thirty inches square, with their great crossbeams, and their arches springing from the pillars across the nave, is one of astonishing splendour and power. Outside, the shingled turret tells the time with, instead of a clock, a fine old sundial.

To the north of the church stands a thing of terror. The full story of the murder of the "unknown sailor" belongs to Hindhead; but Thursley has his grave. It lies apart, in the centre of a stretch of green grass; above it, a stone too tall for quietness; no other grave shares that lonely lawn. Here is the queer, mis-spelt epitaph:—

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 three 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 hard Lot, or miserable End; Yet o'er my sad Remains, (my Name unknown,) A generous Public have inscrib'd this Stone.

Above the epitaph a rough carving shows the sailor kneeling to his murderers. Mr. Baring-Gould, in the Broom Squire makes Iver Verstage, the artist, laugh at the crudely drawn figures. But the horror of this grave, from which all the other quieter graves are gathered apart, has very little laughter in it.

Thursley Common once rang with the picks and hammers of an iron mine; it was one of the centres of a great industry of the Weald. The surface of the common is scarred with the pits from which the ironstone was dug; the hammer ponds lie in a string along a tiny tributary of the Wey. John Ray, in his Collection of English Words not generally Used, published in 1672, and printed in the Sussex Archaeological Collections, gives an account of the methods of the old iron smelters. A stream, or a pond with a stream running through it, would be dammed, and the fall of water at the lower end would then work two pairs of bellows for the blast for the furnace and a wheel which raised and let fall a hammer. The fuel used was charcoal. Before the ironstone was put into the furnace it was "mollified" or broken up into small pieces by being burnt between layers of charcoal. Then it was put into the furnace, and when melted drawn off in long lumps, called pigs or sows. Then the sows were taken to the forge or hammer, and beaten into square "blooms," two feet long; then the blooms were beaten into "anconies," three feet long; then the "anconies" had their ends nicely shaped, and the iron was ready for market.

A very extensive "collection of English words not generally used" is contained in an inventory of tools supplied to William Yalden, when he took over the Thursley ironworks. Perhaps an ironmaster of to-day might recognise some of those I have chosen:—

Twoe fargons. A beame way anckrues. One turnsowe. One hurdgier. One twewer trole; one twewer hook. Two hursts and brights to them. 2 eyron rackes. A hamer and ane bill and helfe and armes redy placed. Twoe boyghts about the Chafery. One quas to stopp the fyer. A neew locke.

Mr. Baring-Gould has described one of the natives of Thursley Common in the Broom Squire:—

"The natterjack, so rare elsewhere, differing from a toad in that it has a yellow band down its back, has here a paradise. It may be seen at eve perched on a stalk of willow herb or running—it does not hop—round the sundew, clearing the glutinous stamens of the flies that have been caught by them, and calling in a tone like the warning note of the nightingale."



I looked for the natterjack at eve, but did not find him. At Farnham, I am told, he is called a jar-bob. Thursley children like to catch a natterjack to sell.

Elstead is three miles away, on the northern edge of the belt of heather; a happy little village standing round a green, with a mill, a bridge, and a church with a wonderful ladder up to the belfry. This is actually a single vast plank of oak, black and immoveable, sloped up from a crossbeam and notched for steps. There are many magnificent beams in Surrey churches, but this is the finest ladder of all of them. It does not tempt ascent in days of more elaborate staircases; but it would not break under the heaviest set of bellringers that ever rung a change.



To the east is Milford, a good half mile from its station, and nothing much besides. There is a good natural centre to the village, with four cross roads and an inn, but no doubt Milford's future is to belong to Godalming. A few half-timbered and weather-tiled cottages, which have served as models for newer neighbours, some pollarded elms, a broad smooth road and dusty jasmine—Milford is the first village on the highway running south from Godalming, and on a summer Saturday is less a village than a road.



One of the four roads which branch off from Milford to the south runs to Witley. Witley will look more tranquil and more seasoned fifty years hence. To come into the village in the gathering dusk of a summer evening, as I saw it first, is an enchantment; nothing could throw a quieter spell than the brick and timber and tar and whitewash of the cottages, the flowers climbing up the old inn, and the familiar noises of a neighbouring game of cricket finishing in half darkness. But only part of Witley will stand the full glare of sunlight. The new cottages are finely designed, but they are too black-and-white and painty to group easily with the older, mossier buildings and the White Hart Inn, with its nobly ugly sign.

The church, bowered in ivy and roses, has some quaint inscriptions. One commemorates a forgotten office:—

"Off yo^r charite pray for the soull^e of Thomas Jonys and his wyfe Jane, which Thomas was one of the Sewers of the Chamber to oure Soverayne lorde Kynge Henry VIII."

A Sewer of the Chamber waited at the table and brought water for the hands of the guests—an office which suggests an obvious rhyme for poets writing of water-jugs. Another epitaph is a shining example of the proper manner of attributing to the dead an almost crushing superfluity of virtues. Sara Holney, first in Latin, and then in English, thus is lamented and extolled:—

"A better woman than here sleeps, there's none, Sara, Rebecca, Rahel, three in one: Religious, pious, thrifty, wise, fayre, and chast: Soe many goods in one, who finds in hast?"

One more name attracts. Mehetabel, daughter of John Leech of Lea, died in 1816. She was doubtless a friend of Cobbett, who often rode by Lea, and greatly admired her father's trees. The first Mehetabel was the wife of the king of Edom, and the last, possibly, is the heroine of the Broom Squire.

Witley has perhaps been a little overshadowed by the tragedy of a late owner of Lea Park. I have heard descriptions of the new features of Lea Park, the lakes and fountains and a billiard-room, I believe, under water, but I have not seen them.

Before Hindhead drew authors and artists up the hill, Witley had its own settlement of workers living deep in Surrey country. George Eliot was at Witley Heights; J.C. Hook, who could not bear to be watched while he was painting, sketched Witley gorse and heather; Birket Foster long lived among the Witley pines; and Mrs. Allingham, who was at Sandhills, a house near by, has painted few more interesting pictures than her Lessons, Pat-a-cake, and The Children's Tea. At Witley she painted most of her studies of children indoors, in the nursery and the schoolroom; after she left Witley, she liked to set her cottage girls and boys among bluebells and apple-blossom out of doors.



CHAPTER XIV

THE FOLD COUNTRY

The Wild Garden of Surrey.—Birds and their valentines.—Nightingales at Dunsfold.—Alfold Stocks.—Three yews in a line.—The King's Evil.—Alfold industries.—A dry canal.—Chiddingfold.—Red brick and Madonna lilies.—The Enticknaps.—Hungry scholars.—The Crown Inn.—On Highdown Ball.—A green ride in the woods.—The Chiddingfold Foxhounds.

The "Fold Country" is the wild garden of the Surrey weald, and the month to walk in it is May. Alfold, Ifold, Durfold, Dunsfold, Chiddingfold, and other "folds" lie among oakwoods and ploughlands that once were oakwoods; the railway runs nowhere nearer than seven miles from the heart of the woods, and in the woods the timbered cottages stand apart, old and tranquil. To me, the associations of the "Fold Country" centre round the memory of a First of May hotter and more glorious with flowers than any I can remember. I had started to walk from Baynards Station west among the woods, with the recollection of four days of north-east winds and heavy snow that had brought April to a close. The change was incredible. There, in the roads that ran through the oakwoods and hazel copses, it was the heat of summer. The birds had drawn new valentines. A cock chaffinch, gayest of suitors, danced round his demure hen in the roadway, careless of any pedestrian in that deep country; wrens crept like mice among the stubs of the hedge; the grass by the roadside and the ditch was lighted with primroses. A narrow copse of cut hazel, bordering the road on the Sussex boundary, was a carpet of primroses, anemones, milkmaids, and dog violets; spires of purple orchids stood above shining celandines; there could have been nothing more brilliant in a garden. On the hedge-bank a hen pheasant rustled through the undergrowth, caught sight of me, crept to a rabbit-scratch and crouched on the brown earth within a yard of my hand; for the birds are tamer in the Fold Country than beyond it. Above other hedge-banks, in other copses, the cuckoos called all that morning, from Sussex to Surrey, over the border road.

Two of the Fold Country farmhouses by that road, framed in that sunny setting, belong to the memories of a Surrey May. One is a timbered house twenty yards in Sussex, with white curtains and flower-pots behind its diamond-paned lattices, and clumps of primroses growing about stone causeways up to the very door. The other is Pallinghurst farm, a mile further on the road, whose long, lichened roofs shelter red-tiled walls and masses of ivy round a white doorway; the garden is a cluster of gnarled apple-trees, and over it and about the tall farm chimneys, when I saw it that morning, flew the first swallows of the year. But it was not the swallows that made summer that May-day. Beyond Alfold, on the road that runs out of Sidney Wood up to Dunsfold Common, there are coppices of thick undergrowth, set about orchards of grey-lichened fruit-trees and stretches of low cut hazel sheeted with primroses. There I heard the first nightingale of the year, a single jet of song as the brown tail flickered in the covert; a hundred yards further down the road there were three singing together; Dunsfold Common came in a burst of yellow gorse, and the song of a nightingale thrilled up from the gorse; another bird, beyond Dunsfold, sang high in the hedgerow in full sunlight. That is a Dunsfold lane, for me; a wild plum-tree branching out of the hedge dressed with the whitest of delicate blossom, and in the white blossom, with the hot blue of a May sky beyond and between, a nightingale's throat throbbing with singing.

Alfold almost touches the Sussex boundary, and is perhaps the most out-of-the-way little village in Surrey. I find Mr. Ralph Nevill, writing in 1889, lamenting that it was once charmingly rural, but that "the breath of the pestilence has passed over and vulgarised it." There are new houses in it, and new generally means hideous; but the pestilence has left some old work worth looking at. At the eastern end of the village stands Alfold House, a sixteenth-century timbered building; at the western end is the church, grey with its shingled spire, built like Thursley and Elstead on massive oak beams. A broad stone causeway leads to the door; in May, the springing grass shines with daffodils.

Alfold, like Shalford, Abinger and Newdigate, still has its village stocks. They stand at the churchyard gate, better worth sitting in, so far as appearance goes, than the other three. Alfold, too, has a great old yew-tree, one of a row of three in the Fold churchyards. Has it ever been noticed that the Alfold, Dunsfold, and Hambledon yews stand almost in a mathematically straight line? From Alfold to Hambledon is five miles as the crow flies, and Dunsfold is almost exactly half way between the two.

Three Alfold villagers, perhaps, made the journey to London, or to some halting-place in the royal progress, to seek the grace of King James II. The parish register-book contains the entry of their names on the title-page:—

2 May } { I gave certificates to Jane Puttock, Henry 4 — } 1687 { Manfield, Elizabeth Saker, to be touched 19 July } { for the [King's] Evil.

Whether Jane Puttock, Henry Manfield and Elizabeth Saker were cured of the scrofula by the highly medicinal contact of the royal hands does not appear; but in 1710 another patient, James Napper, was certified to be "a legal inhabitant of our parish of Alfold in the county of Surrey aforesaid and is supposed to have the disease commonly called the Evil." Perhaps not one of the four had much more than the country bumpkin's natural desire to see the King and be able to talk about it afterwards; perhaps they coveted the little gold tokens which royal physicking hung round the sufferer's neck. Not all those who were touched for the Evil were languishing with a fell disease. Charles II operated on nearly a hundred thousand of his lieges, with instant success when there was nothing the matter with them. But Anne, the divines held, did not succeed directly to the throne, and therefore did not succeed to the miraculous powers of the Jameses and Charleses. It was very little good for James Napper to go to London, for, practically speaking, the queen could cure nobody.



Alfold, which in Aubrey's day was Awfold—variant spellings of "old fold"—was not always purely rustic and agricultural. There is a slab of Sussex marble in the churchyard which is declared to cover the remains of the last of the Surrey glass manufacturers—the "French glass men" who are supposed to have carried on an illicit factory in the depths of Sidney Wood. Another Alfold industry was smuggling, or assistant-smuggling. "The gentlemen" ran their tobacco and brandy by way of some of the Alfold farmhouses; the farmer left out "bread and beef" for the gentlemen, and the gentlemen left kegs behind for the farmer.

Sidney Wood lies between Alfold and Dunsfold, and grows hazel and oak for various industries, besides acres of the purest and palest primroses. Through it runs a curious trackway, marked "disused" on the Ordnance maps. It is a section of the Wey and Arun Junction Canal, now a dry bed studded with hazel stubs and clumps of flowers. Dunsfold Common joins the wood, and beyond it, round a wide green, stand the Dunsfold cottages, seventeenth century mixed with twentieth. In the churchyard, when I was there in May, I once saw a curious sight. From inside the church the great yew seemed to be alive with bees; the noise was of twenty swarms. I went out to find that they were not bees, but flies. The western wall of the tower was black with them; so were the gravestones and the gravel. There must have been millions, hatched, no doubt, in the heat of the wooden belfry.

Dunsfold is too far from the railway to be crowded, but it is building busily. The twentieth century is not as frightened of deep country as Manning and Bray, who remark that "the common before coming to the church is wide, and over it a road has been thrown up in a regular way, and is tolerable, and a part near to Hascombe Hill has been done in the same manner, but between them is a dreadful gulph." Dunsfold would probably be thankful if to-day the "gulph" were wider.

From Dunsfold one may push on through Hascombe to rejoin the railway at Milford or Godalming, or one may turn west to Chiddingfold. But Hascombe is better seen from Godalming, and the natural way is to group Chiddingfold with the other "fold" villages.

Of the three, Alfold has hardly begun to grow, Dunsfold straggles, and Chiddingfold sits compact about its sunny green. Red-roofed, tranquil, and uneven the little cottages stand behind their glowing flower gardens. Here a long low brick wall edges the road, mellow and lichened; here a double-gabled, weather-tiled building stands next to a patch of old brick painted the newest possible yellow. Somehow the effect is not hideous, and fits with the haphazard, sunlit tiles and whitewash. Chiddingfold is at its best and sleepiest in high summer—a village of weatherworn red brick and Madonna lilies.

In the church, which stands among trees, with an air of large solidity a little graver than the small, shingle-spired churches of the other two villages, are tablets to the memory of a number of Enticknaps, described sturdily as "yeomen," of Upper Dunce, Pockford, and Gorbage Green, which appears on the maps in the plainer form of Garbage Green. Enticknap is a good Surrey name to-day, and there were Enticknaps in Chiddingfold at the Conquest. The parish registers are full of Enticknaps; in one century there were fifty burials in the family in Chiddingfold churchyard.

It was by Chiddingfold churchyard that Cobbett made a discovery in the peerage. He was riding through the village with his son Richard on a fine frosty November morning, and saw a carriage and pair conveying an old gentleman and some ladies to the churchyard steps. "Upon inquiry we found that this was Lord Winterton, whose name, they told us, was Turnour. I thought I had heard of all the Lords, first or last; but, if ever I had heard of this one before, I had forgotten him." A little further on, he came across some less wealthy churchgoers, a school of poor boys in uniform:—

"There were about twenty of them, without one single tinge of red in their whole twenty faces. In short, I never saw more deplorable objects since I was born. And can it be of any use to expend money in this sort of way upon poor creatures that have not half a bellyful of food? We had not breakfasted when we passed them. We felt, at that moment, what hunger was. We had some bits of bread and meat in our pockets, however; and these, which were merely intended as stay-stomachs, amounted, I dare say, to the allowance of any half dozen of these poor boys for the day. I could, with all my heart, have pulled the victuals out of my pocket and given it to them: but I did not like to do that which would have interrupted the march, and might have been construed into a sort of insult. To quiet my conscience, however, I gave a poor man that I met soon afterwards sixpence, under pretence of rewarding him for telling me the way to Thursley, which I knew as well as he, and which I had determined, in my own mind, not to follow."



Chiddingfold's old inn is the Crown, which claims to have been standing for more than five centuries. According to a copy of a deed dated March 22, 1383, which hangs in the coffee-room, Peter Pokeford, of the parish of Chudyngfold, gave and granted to Richard Gofayre, "the said tenement, namely, the Hall and the Chamber with a solar, and also the kitchen with a small house with their appurtenances for the term of fifty years for four shillings of yearly rent payable to the said Peter." The inn is pleasant and solid, and dark with enormous wooden beams. Above a fine old open hearth hang three engaging pictures—or used to hang—of actresses of days gone by. Madame Vestris, in a feather hat and a red cloak, plays Don Giovanni; Miss Paton, spangled, trousered and red-slippered, would appeal to any Turk as Mandane; Belvidera, in a sober grey gown, is an actress who knew Surrey well, Fanny Kemble.



To the Fold Country belong two other villages, Hascombe, two miles north of Dunsfold, and Hambledon, a little more than two miles west of Hascombe. The Hascombe yews, which make an arched gateway to the churchyard, will some day be famous; the church lacks something of the quiet of plainer, whiter walls. Half-a-mile south of the church, Hascombe Hill once lit a beacon, and looks out over many miles of the Fold Country. At the White Horse in the village I was told of a great old beech-tree standing on the hill, and learned that if you went up the hill it was impossible to miss it; however, I followed all the directions and achieved the impossible. Once Hascombe was the home of a divine whom the biographers briefly describe as "controversialist." He was Doctor Conyers Middleton, the author of a famous Life of Cicero, for which he stole the materials from a Scottish professor's work, De Tribus Luminibus Romanorum, and for some time was not found out. His controversies were chiefly with Bentley, who perhaps was as arrogant as Middleton was greedy.

Hascombe Hill is the eastern of three hills which stand in a triangle round the north of the Fold Country. Highdown Ball is the centre of the three, fifty feet lower than Hascombe Hill, which is 644 feet; but Highdown Ball somehow seems the higher of the two. A strange little rhyme, or riddle, belongs to the hill:—

"On Hydon's top there is a cup, And in that cup there is a drop: Take up the cup and drink the drop, And place the cup on Hydon's top."

The third hill is Hambledon's. The village is dotted over the hill and at its foot; the church is perched on the very top, and it is worth climbing the hill to look at the pair of yew trees in the churchyard. One of them cannot be much smaller than the Crowhurst yew itself. Like that monarch of trees, it is hollow; unlike it, it has not yet been damaged by man in order to protect it from the weather.

Hambledon is best approached from Chiddingfold through Hambledon Hurst, a stretch of cool woodland. A tiny path leaves the main road over a strip of grass and brambles, dives into an oakwood and emerges at the end of a long straight open ride of grass, edged and shaded by oak trees, green, smooth and silent. Into such open glades dark fallow deer should come, and roedeer dancing out from the shadows to listen and snuff. If bearded men with jewelled feathers and crimson cloaks rode across the patches of sunlight, it would be nothing strange in that deep wood. The illusion of virgin solitude is perfect. Yet the green ride was once the main road south from Godalming through Hambledon to Chichester.

I ought not to leave the Fold Country without mentioning the Chiddingfold foxhounds, a pack which hunts the country south of Guildford to the borders of Lord Leconfield's Hunt in Sussex. It is poor riding, for there is too much woodland, and on the heather there is hardly any jumping. "The prettier the country the poorer the hunting," Mr. Charles Richardson quotes in writing of the Chiddingfold foxhounds: perhaps one might add that in a poor country there can be some pretty hunting.



CHAPTER XV

CRANLEIGH AND EWHURST

A coffee-pot yew—Vachery Pond—The osprey as a guest—Baynards and its ghost—Ewhurst—A pet lamb—Children and a gipsy—Bilberries on Pitch Hill—Lost in Hurst Wood—Farley Heath—Mr. Watson's poem—Blackheath well named.

Cranleigh lies on the edge of the Fold country, neither in it nor of it. In the Fold country the villages are set deep in woodlands and grass fields, and the railway runs too far away to bring the slate for the villas. But the railway runs through Cranleigh and stops there, and so does the builder. The fields and woods are being "developed." But in the heart of the village there is a touch of what is old and quiet. A strange, towering figure of a clipped yew stands up in the middle of a small garden, whether most like a peacock on a pillar, or a colossal coffee-pot, I cannot determine. A wheelwright's yard is near by—one of the best of all sights of any country village. Farm carts and their wheels, and big spokes and shavings of white wood give as full a notion of solid, strong outdoor work as the forge and the rickyard, and no village is quite a country village without the three.

Two manors, Vachery and Knowle, have chapels in the church, which is cruciform; but the Vachery chapel is seated for ordinary churchgoers. The Knowle chapel is separated off by a fine fifteenth-century screen. But the chief beauty of Cranleigh Church is the great sense of breadth and light which you get from the size of the nave and the chancel arch. The broad spaces and the massive Norman pillars set an air of strength and quiet in the place that belongs alone to noble churches.

Of Vachery Manor one may hear little; of Vachery Pond every troutfisher knows something. The maps mark a superb sheet of water, nearly a mile long, and, two or three times, travelling from Guildford or Horsham, I have tried to catch a glimpse of the water from the railway, but in vain. When at last I stood on the edge of the water, the reason was clear enough; the pond is surrounded by banks covered with trees. A right of way runs from the road near Cranleigh round the south of the pond to Baynards beyond, and the pond lies near the right of way, a grass-edged road alive with rabbits. I saw the pond first on a July morning; the drying leaves showed that earlier in the year the road to it ran between carpets of primroses. The water lay without a ripple in the sun; at the far side, two crested grebes swam low, like submarines, diving for fish to feed their young, who asked for food without weariness and without ceasing, and received it with excited splashings. Under the bank danced a cotillon of tiny dragon-flies, needles of turquoise stuck suddenly on a reed, flitting aimlessly over the clear, shadowed water. Just in such sunlight, though later in the year, those two glorious guests visited Vachery Pond in September, 1904. A pair of ospreys, on their journey south for the winter, made the water their home for a few days, to the consternation of the wildfowl and the delight of the other troutfishers. One of them, writing to the Field at the time, described the way in which the bird he saw fished the water. It would sail up and down over the lake and then drop into the water with a resounding crash, rising always with a trout in its talons. But the visit did not last long. A keeper shot the male bird, and its mate—ospreys pair for life—went on to the south alone.

On the other side of Vachery Pond is Baynards, one of the historic Surrey houses, and a fine relic of Tudor days. Baynards once was the home of Margaret Roper, daughter of Sir Thomas More, and the story goes that after her father's execution she brought his head to Baynards. Perhaps that started the Baynards' ghost. Legend plays with the aura of Baynards as of Loseley. Once a year the two ghosts meet: the Baynards ghost dines at Loseley, and the Loseley ghost pays back the visit next year at Baynards.



North-east of Baynards an old Roman road runs from Rowhook on the Stane Street in Sussex towards Farley Heath, where there was a Roman camp. The Roman road, now hardly traceable, cuts the road from Cranleigh near Ewhurst. Ewhurst lives comfortably fifty years behind Cranleigh, and is still, happily, what the late Louis Jennings called it in Field Paths and Green Lanes, "a one-horse place." When Mr. Jennings was at Ewhurst everybody was half-asleep. "At the post-office a woman and a girl turned out in some consternation to look at me, thinking, perhaps, that I had a letter concealed about me, and was about to post it, and thus overwhelm them with work." Such a village would be desirable anywhere. But Ewhurst, although it can be sleepy in the sunshine, as everything in the country ought to be, has an eye for country business. At the door of the post-office, when I was there on a hot day in July, a long-tailed sheep, fat and woolly, cropped the grass. It was a pet lamb grown up, apparently, and pleased to be patted. A cart drove up, and there was a conversation which might have come out of Edgeworth's Parent's Assistant when Simple Susan's pet lamb was in the same evil case. From the cart descended a butcher, who shook his head when questioned by the lamb's caretaker, or keeper, who looked after its owner's interests from a neighbouring dwelling. Wasn't he worth three pounds? Not three pounds; no. Fifty-five shillings, perhaps, would be a fair price in a week's time. A fair price in a week's time—it was impossible to listen to the careful bargaining over the creature feeding in the sun. I went into the shop to buy something, and within a few minutes was asked, as an obvious admirer of the lamb, whether I would like him for fifty shillings.

Miss Edgeworth should have stayed at Ewhurst, and have seen the best of an English village as I did that July afternoon. Opposite the church—a church which, with its stainless glass windows, its white walls, and its green carpet and curtains, gives you the feeling of entering a drawing-room—are the village schools. Out of the schools as I watched them the village children came tumbling. Half of them made for a passage by the churchyard, where a small boy, gipsy or pedlar's child, sat in the shadow of the wall. He was dusty and hot, and by him lay a large bundle wrapped in a spotted blue handkerchief. One of the schoolchildren stopped after passing him, and whispered to another. Then four little boys went back and each dropped a penny or a halfpenny into the child's hand. Then they ran off through the churchyard.

The Ordnance Maps mark a hill north of Ewhurst of which the country children have never heard. Coneyhurst Hill, the map assures you, is 844 feet high, only 50 feet less than Hindhead. People who like bell-heather, bilberries, and a magnificent view should climb it, but it is no use asking the children the way to Coneyhurst Hill. Pitch Hill they know, and only Pitch Hill. Nor will they recognise bilberries or whortleberries so called; "hurts" is the name. Another point on which the traveller wandering in these wilds should assure himself is that he has plenty of time, or has a compass with him, or can find his way by the sun. The woods—Hurt Wood is the general name for miles—north and west of Pitch Hill are the loneliest places. Here and there a forest fire has cleared openings in the trees, but where the pines have fallen or have been cut the bracken still grows breast high, and birches have seeded themselves into thick, thwarting plantations. The wood runs in ridges, so that whichever way you want to go you cannot keep an objective in sight. Missel thrushes clatter up from the open spaces; jays bark in the birches, angry at an intrusion. Except for them the silence, in a silent month like July or August, is profound.

When I was in Hurt Wood I wanted to walk from the windmill to Farley Heath, two and a-half miles as the crow flies, nearer five miles as I walked it. The perplexing thing is the number of disused rides and paths in the wood. They cross each other perpetually at right angles, like lines on a chessboard, and if you are walking diagonally across them the temptation is to a succession of knights' moves which end in wrong places. I followed one of these rides a long way, and the wood grew thicker and thicker; suddenly it ended, and I found myself in a clearing, with the loneliest little cottage in the corner, guarded by a huge black retriever in an iron kennel; a woman was drawing water by the door. Where was I, could she tell me? Where did I want to go to? she asked in reply—probably the right answer.

Farley Heath is one of the few well-defined stations of a Roman camp in the county. Mr. William Watson, writing in the shade of the Emperor Yew by Newlands Corner, thought of the Roman legionaries encamped on Farley Heath below the downs, and one of the finest passages in the poem he made there belongs half to the yew and half to Farley:—

Nay, hid by thee from Summer's gaze That seeks in vain this couch of loam, I should behold, without amaze, Camped on yon down the hosts of Rome, Nor start though English woodlands heard The selfsame mandatory word

As by the Cataracts of the Nile Marshalled the legions long ago, Or where the lakes are one blue smile 'Neath pageants of Helvetian snow, Or 'mid the Syrian sands that lie Sick of the day's great tearless eye,

Or on barbaric plains afar, Where, under Asia's fevering ray, The long lines of imperial war O'er Tigris passed, and with dismay In fanged and iron deserts found Embattled Persia closing round,

And 'mid their eagles watched on high The vultures gathering for a feast, Till, from the quivers of the sky, The gorgeous star-flight of the East Flamed, and the bow of darkness bent O'er Julian dying in his tent.

Between Farley Heath and Chilworth Station, which is the chosen end of the walk from Cranleigh, is Blackheath, well named. In winter the flowerless heather darkens the whole moorland; and through it the roads, the rough roads the Roman legionaries knew well, run ribands of white sand.



CHAPTER XVI

CHERTSEY

Through the hayfields.—The Abbey.—John de Rutherwyk.—Cowley in his garden.—Bill Sikes at Chertsey.—The curfew.—A duel of hearts.—The Chertsey legend.—St. Anne's Hill.—Digging for treasure.—St. Paul's like a mushroom.—Charles James Fox.—Sunshine and turnips.—Triumphant rooks.

Chertsey might well be taken as the centre from which to explore north-west Surrey, but it is less generally convenient as regards the railway than Weybridge, which allows exploration north, east, south and west, whereas Chertsey lies on a branch line. Besides, there is the walk from Weybridge to Chertsey to be taken, and there are few more delightful near the Surrey Thames. The high road from the bridge over the Wey runs between double ribands of water; on one side lies the sunny, slow canal, edged with iris and forget-me-nots, and banked up higher than the road; on the other, a shady stream, dun and bleak-haunted. Before the road turns into Addlestone there is a field-path, breaking off at right angles, which leads to a wooden bridge crossing the clear, brown little Bourne, and beyond the bridge lies Chertsey Mead, one huge hayfield, bounded on the left by wooded slopes, on the right by the Thames itself. Two or three narrow paths intersect the level of waving grass; the turf underfoot is as springy as peat, and the standing crop scents the June wind, rich with daisies and clover. Beyond Chertsey before you lies St. Anne's Hill, dark and incumbent over the town; but you do not guess that the Thames edges that shining hayfield until you catch sight of a boat-sail, leisurely dipping and nodding under the Lombardy poplars that line the stream. The path leaves the meadow close to Chertsey Bridge, graceful with seven stone arches.

A thousand years ago Chertsey was the centre of a very large tract indeed. Chertsey Abbey, up to the Dissolution, was one of the greatest religious houses in the kingdom, and one of the oldest. It was in 666—the date is suspiciously exact—that Frithwald, viceroy of Surrey under Wulfer, king of the Mercians, gave the land on which the building was to stand, and he and Erkenwald, its first abbot, duly founded the Abbey. Frithwald, since he could not write, made the sign of the Cross in delivering the deed. But Frithwald's Abbey was short-lived. Perhaps it was then not much more than a little wooden church, with buildings for its journeying priests; at all events, the Danes had no trouble in sacking it two hundred years later, when they made their foray brutally complete by murdering the Abbot and his ninety monks.

But Chertsey's Abbey was to rise again. Edgar rebuilt it, and his building was rebuilt again by the Abbot Hugh of Winchester, early in the twelfth century, and from that date began the great days. The Abbot and convent were in high favour with the king, and lived as well as good monks should. They had rights of warren and liberty of the chase, they had the right to keep dogs, and they might take hares and foxes, the neighbouring manor of Egham sent them fifty fat hogs a year, Chobham sent them a hundred and thirty, Byfleet sent them 325 eels, and Petersham contributed 1,000 eels and 1,000 lampreys.



Other manors swelled the noble list. Such good living should produce a good man, and Chertsey's great Abbot has left an abiding name. He was John de Rutherwyk, an ardent and admirable landlord and a prelate of enduring energy and wisdom. No squire of modern days ever did more to improve his property. He built chapels and rebuilt churches; he laid out roads and had pathways raised from the level of flooded meadows; he set up mills and threw bridges over streams; he sowed oak plantations and taught forestry; he planned barns and granges for corn, and dug stews and ponds for fish, and he was as enthusiastic a churchman as he was energetic as a farmer. He died in 1347, and two hundred years later, chiefly owing to his energy and foresight, the manors which had once been Chertsey's were paying to Henry VIII some L700 a year—perhaps L14,000 of our money.

Of all that great Abbey there remains scarcely one stone upon another. An arch and part of an arch, a ruined wall, and the foundations of a barn; so much and no more can be seen as John de Rutherwyk saw it. A number of faced and dressed stones are built in haphazard among the bricks of neighbouring walls; and the rest of the Abbey, unseen and unknown, drains Chertsey's foundations and paves her streets. Surely never a great house fell so low and so far.

Chertsey's main street is wide and bright, and at its side lies a pond through which the carthorses go plunging. But the town's most notable building stands in the narrower road from the main street to the south. This is the old Porch House, where Abraham Cowley, the poet laureate, spent the last two years of his life, seeking in the solitudes of his garden and the fields of his farm the rest and freedom which the ingratitude of Charles II had forgotten to find for a faithful servant. It was from Porch House that he wrote to John Evelyn, dedicating to him his essay The Garden with its pathetic opening:—"I never had any desire so strong, and so like to covetousness as that which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life only to the culture of them and study of nature." Cowley was no lover of the town. The Garden holds his philosophy:—

"Who, that has reason, and his smell, Would not among roses and jasmine dwell, Rather than all his spirits choke With exhalations of dirt and smoke And all the uncleanness which does drown In pestilential clouds a populous town?"

His simpler pleasures were of the orchard and the farm. The husbandman of fruit and flowers is king:—

"He bids the ill-natured crab produce The gentler apple's winy juice; The golden fruit that worthy is Of Galatea's purple kiss; He does the savage hawthorn teach To bear the medlar and the pear. He bids the rustic plum to rear A noble trunk, and be a peach. Even Daphne's coyness he does mock, And weds the cherry to her stock, Though she refused Apollo's suit, Even she, that chaste and virgin tree, Now wonders at herself, to see That she's a mother made, and blushes in her fruit."



Poor Cowley! The country was too much for him after all. Late on a July evening, after helping his haymakers to get in their last loads, he was soaked with a heavy summer dew. He caught cold and died, on July 28, 1667, and the Thames bore his coffin to burial in Westminster Abbey.

Less easy to find, if in some ways more familiar, than Porch House, is the very house into which the unwilling Oliver Twist was thrust by Bill Sikes mounted upon the stooping Toby Crackit. You can see the window through which Mr. Sikes pointed the pistol, and the door from which burst the valiant Mr. Giles and Mr. Brittles in pursuit. Or, at least, the more devout of Dickens students are thus privileged; I have been less fortunate. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, I believe, has identified the house to the satisfaction of many with Pyrcroft, a dwelling north-west of the station. But I have gone burgling after Bill Sikes and followed the road precisely as Dickens describes it, and Pyrcroft I never came near.

Chertsey still keeps up some fascinating customs. She has two quaintly named fairs, "Black Cherry Fair" on August 6, and "Goose and Onion Fair" on September 26, when she presides over the selling of horses and poultry. But the oldest and best custom is the ringing of the curfew bell, which still peals out to St. Anne's Hill and over Chertsey Mead from September 29 to March 25. The Chertsey bells are some of the finest in the country. The original curfew bell, which is supposed to have hung in the Abbey, tolled for the funeral of Henry VI, murdered a few hours before in the Tower of London, and hurried to Chertsey to be buried "without priest, clerk, torch or taper, singing or saying." According to the safer chronicles, the dead king's body was ferried to the Abbey by water. But Shakespeare in Richard III sends the corpse through London streets "borne in an open coffin; gentlemen bearing halberds to guard it; and Lady Anne as mourner." It is when Lady Anne, widow of the murdered king's son, tells the bearers to go "toward Chertsey with your holy load," that the coffin is stopped by the murderer Gloucester, and then follows that strange duel of hearts and words between the murderer and the prince's widow:

GLOSTER. Teach not thy lip such scorn; for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt. If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive, Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword; Which, if thou please to hide in this true breast, And let the soul forth that adoreth thee, I lay it open to the deadly stroke, And humbly beg the death upon my knee.

[He lays his breast open. She offers at it with his sword.

Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry,— But 'twas thy beauty that provoked me. Nay, now despatch; 'twas I that stabb'd young Edward,—

[She again offers at his breast.

But 'twas thy heavenly face that set me on.

[She lets fall the sword.

Take up the sword again or take up me.

ANNE. Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death, I will not be thy executioner.

GLO. Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.

ANNE. I have already.

GLO. That was in thy rage; Speak it again, and, even with the word, This hand, which for thy love, did kill thy love, Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love: To both their deaths shalt thou be necessary.

ANNE. I would I knew thy heart.

GLO. 'Tis figur'd in my tongue.

ANNE. I fear me both are false.

GLO. Then never man was true.

ANNE. Well, well, put up your sword.

GLO. Say, then, my peace is made.

ANNE. That shalt thou know hereafter.

GLO. But shall I live in hope?

ANNE. All men, I hope, live so.

GLO. Vouchsafe to wear this ring.

ANNE. To take, is not to give.

[She puts on the ring.

King Henry's funeral is history; another tale of the Chertsey curfew bell is legend. It was first put into the form of a story and dramatised by a now almost forgotten novelist-poet, Albert Smith, who was born at Chertsey himself, and wrote books which were illustrated by Leech. He called his story Blanche Heriot: a Legend of the Chertsey Church, and the play in its outline follows the legend. Blanche's lover, Neville, the nephew of Warwick the Kingmaker, had been captured by the Yorkists and condemned to die on Chertsey Mead within twenty-four hours. There was a hope of reprieve if he could send his ring as a token to the king. He sent it, but the messenger returning with the pardon was late, and the twenty-four hours were up while the reprieve was being carried over Laleham Ferry. But the knell for the death-stroke never sounded; Blanche had climbed the curfew tower and held the clapper of the great bell. The story has always been popular locally, but it first reached a really wide audience, perhaps, when Mr. Clifford Harrison embodied it in his poem The Legend of Chertsey. Since then, reciters' audiences have had their fill.

About a mile outside the town lies St. Anne's Hill, chiefly notable, perhaps, to-day because on its southern slope stands a house which was at one time the residence of Charles James Fox. Its older title to fame was the magnificence of its view. On the highest point stood St. Anne's Chapel, of which the half-buried ruin of but a single wall remains. It is, Aubrey remarks, "a most romancy place, from whence you have the Prospect over Middlesex and Surrey, London, to Hertfordshire and St. Albans, Berks, Bucks, Oxfordshire, to Windsor Castle, St. Martha's Chapel, Hampton Court, Kingston, Hampshire, etc." Eight counties is a noble stretch of England. But to-day the view has lost most of its grandeur. The hill has been thickly planted with trees, conifers for the most part, and the view can only be had in peeps and patches. Forty or fifty years ago, before the pines were planted, there stood on the hill three sister elms, a proud mark for all the country round. One alone remains, fenced in with iron and hollow, and still a splendid tree; but her shade falls on altered ground. Before the middle of the last century the level stretch of soil to the south was ploughland: it is now a level mead of green, glowing with bordering rhododendrons in June, and bitten close and smooth by rabbits. It is amusing to notice the fineness of the turf within three or four yards of the rhododendrons all round the green; the rabbits are "poor men," like Chuchundra, and afraid to come out into the middle of the room.

Besides the ruins of St. Anne's Chapel, which is not very much to look at, and at which very few look, there are two other relics on the hill. One is a spring, welling up under an arch. It is still what Aubrey describes it to be, "a fine clear spring dressed with squared stones," and up to within recent years the country folk round about have been used to fetch away water from it, in the belief that it has virtues as an eye lotion. It has a strong taste of iron; would that be good for the eyes? Another curiosity is the so-called Devil's Stone, or Treasure Stone. Aubrey calls this "a conglobation of gravel and sand," and says that the inhabitants know it as "the Devil's Stone, and believe it cannot be mov'd, and that treasure is hid underneath." There have been many searchers after the treasure. One of them once dug down ten feet or more, hoping to come to the base of the huge mass, but his task grew unkinder as he got deeper, and he gave it up. He might well do so, for what is pretty certain is that he was trying to dig up St. Anne's Hill. All over the face of the hill there are masses of this hard pebbly sandstone cropping up, though they are not so noticeable as the so-called Devil's Stone because they are flat and occasionally crumbling, and have not had their sides laid bare by energetic treasure-seekers.

The view from the hill has not, of course, been wholly lost. To the south the trees shut it out almost entirely, so that part of Hampshire and all Sussex disappear. Looking to the west you can see the pines on Chobham Common, and perhaps Bagshot Heath beyond, but you can no longer get a sight of Windsor Castle, for the trees have grown up on Cooper's Hill, which lies between. To the north the church spire on the hill at Harrow stands beautifully up from the horizon; the Wembley Tower, which used to scar the distance, has gone. Eastward lie two familiar towers; and you are reminded of Mr. Max Beerbohm's reflective observation that "the great danger of travelling on the South Eastern Railway is that you might put your head out of the window and catch sight of the Crystal Palace." So much the greater by contrast is the loss of Windsor Castle to the north-west. I have never yet, by the way, had the good fortune to get to the top of St. Anne's Hill on a really clear day. I have been informed by the lodge-keeper that the best time to get a view is in the summer immediately the sun is up and before the London fires are lighted. You can then see all the big London buildings, the Clock Tower, and the Houses of Parliament, and "the dome of St. Paul's as plain as a mushroom in the field."

Fox lived at the house at St. Anne's Hill in his quieter old age. Samuel Rogers in his Table Talk draws a pleasant picture of his life among his books and farm buildings:—

"When I became acquainted with Fox, he had given up that kind of life (gambling, etc.) entirely, and resided in the most perfect sobriety and regularity at St. Anne's Hill. There he was very happy, delighting in study, in rural occupations and rural prospects. He would break from a criticism on Porson's Euripides to look for the little pigs. I remember his calling out to the Chertsey hills, when a thick mist, which had for some time concealed them, rolled away: 'Good morning to you! I am glad to see you again.' There was a walk in his grounds which led to a lane through which the farmers used to pass; and he would stop them, and talk to them, with great interest, about the price of turnips, etc. I was one day with him in the Louvre, when he suddenly turned from the pictures, and, looking out at the window, exclaimed, 'This hot sun will burn up my turnips at St. Anne's Hill.'"

In his later life, Fox's chief delight was almost wholly in his garden, and in country sights and sounds. It was with the greatest difficulty that he could be dragged to London. On one occasion, in the throes of a political crisis, he was induced to leave St. Anne's Hill on the understanding that he would have to remain only two nights in town. When he heard that the debate was postponed owing to Pitt's indisposition, he was, Lord Holland relates, "silent and overcome, as if the intelligence of some great calamity had reached his ears. I saw tears steal down his cheeks; so vexed was he at being detained from his garden, his books, and his cheerful life in the country." On another occasion, begged to go to town, Fox answered that he would do so if he thought his going would be serviceable to the public, but the idea greatly troubled him. "Never did a letter," he wrote, "arrive at a worse time than yours this morning. A sweet westerly wind, a beautiful sun, all the thorns and elms just budding, and the nightingales just beginning to sing; though the blackbirds and thrushes would have been quite sufficient to have refuted any arguments in your letter. Seriously speaking, I cannot conceive what you mean by everybody agreeing that something may be now done. I beg, at least, not to be included in the holders of that opinion."

Fox's favourite bird was the nightingale; and he used to sit for hours on a particular seat listening to its song. The St. Anne's Hill garden is still very much as he left it; the Temple of Peace, in which Ariosto was his most intimate companion, stands undisturbed, a quaint testimony to the love of summerhouses in the form of temples which Fox inherited from his father. Another summerhouse, lined with shells and quartz, is so like the monstrosity built by the Duke of Newcastle in Oatlands Park at Weybridge that probably Fox copied it, on a smaller scale; and near by stands the inscription, carved on stone, of Fox's favourite verses from Dryden:

"The painted birds, companions of the Spring, Hopping from spray to spray were heard to sing. Both eyes and ears received a like delight, Enchanting music, and a charming sight.

On Philomel I fixed my whole desire, And listened for the queen of all the quire. Fain would I hear her heavenly voice to sing, And wanted yet an omen to the Spring.

* * * * *

So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sung That the grove echoed, and the valleys rung."

It must remain a problem to discover why such verse should be associated with the singing of nightingales. Perhaps the nightingales dislike the association; at all events, I am told that they have deserted St. Anne's Hill. If they have, it is a strange conclusion to the years of close protection which a former owner of St. Anne's Hill extended to her birds. The late Lady Holland would never have a singing bird killed nor a nest touched in all her grounds, and if one of them was found dead in any of the shrubberies, her orders were that it was to be given a prompt and respectable burial. Jays and magpies, however, she could not abide, nor crows and rooks, and a curious story is told of a rookery which these birds tried to establish near the house. Every year they decided to build in a particular tree, and every year they were shot or otherwise driven away. At last Lady Holland died, and the gardeners gladly laid aside their guns. The very next spring the rookery was firmly established, and has cawed its paeans ever since.



CHAPTER XVII

WEYBRIDGE

A Georgian village.—The Kembles.—A prophetic lament.—Wey no more.—The Brooklands bucket.—Exiles.—Riddles of spelling.—A royal palace.—The Duchess's Monkeys.—Oatlands cedars.—Portmore Park.—St. George's Hill.—The Leveller's Beanfields.

There is a pleasant melancholy in trying to imagine a Georgian Weybridge. Fanny Kemble describes the village as she saw it as a girl, before the railway came. Then, in the twenties, it was "a rural, rather deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former residence of the Duke of York." Eighty years have gone, and the deserted-looking village has spread into a town and suburbs covering more than a square mile of ground; Portmore Park has vanished; Oatlands is a hotel. The railway has created one more residential neighbourhood.

Fanny Kemble first came to Weybridge as a fifteen-year-old school-girl, and spent three summers with her family at Eastlands, a little cottage, still to be seen, on the outskirts of the village, of which she has written some amusing reminiscences. Charles Kemble, the actor, her father, used to come down from Saturday to Monday, but had no great appreciation of country life, or, perhaps, rather of the cottage, which was too small for him; "he was as nearly as possible too high and too wide, too long and too large, for every room in the house." But Fanny Kemble herself and her mother enjoyed the country to the full. Mrs. Kemble had a passion for fishing, and she and her children used to spend her days on the banks of the Wey, apparently with the slightest possible success.

A curious relic remains of the Kembles' Weybridge holidays. This is to be seen in the Eastlands' cottage garden, and is a semi-circular heap of earth or sand planted with trees and shrubs. Once, when it was much larger and higher, it was "the Mound," and was the favourite playground of the Kemble girls and boys. It grew out of a huge heap of sand which the landlord refused to move, and which Mrs. Kemble therefore planted and cut into shape with a walk round the top. Naturally enough, tradition has grown up round this heap of sand. Fanny Kemble was a famous actress, and lived here as a child; therefore this mound was a theatre. It is locally known indeed as "the theatre." But I can find no evidence that it was ever used as anything of the kind; certainly Fanny Kemble never refers to it as a theatre, nor as anything else but a "domestic fortification" and a "delightful playground." To her it is always "the Mound."



If that charming and brilliant lady could revisit these glimpses of the moon, what would she say of that infinitely larger "mound" and its surroundings in the new motor track, with which it is Weybridge's unhappy fate to be linked to-day? Nearly a square mile of quiet meadow and forest and hill slashed and scarred and scarped into a saucer of cement; acres of pine and cedar and oak and rhododendron smashed and sawn to fragments; the roar of thundering Napiers and Hotchkisses, where once the reed-warblers climbed the meadowsweet and cuckoos called from the willows—how would she have addressed the originator of that staring blatant racecourse? Strangely enough, she saw something of the kind befall her beloved Weybridge pinewoods sixty-seven years ago, and wrote of it in her diary. She was staying as a guest at Oatlands, and found one of her favourite walks among the Brooklands trees destroyed. Her outcry is prophetic:—

"O Lord King, Lord King (we were riding through the property of the Earl of Lovelace, then Lord King), if I was one of those bishops whom you do not love, I would curse, excommunicate and anathematize you for cutting down all those splendid trees and laying bare those deep, leafy nooks, the haunts of a thousand Midsummer Nights' Dreams, to the common air and the staring sun. The sight of the dear old familiar paths brought the tears to my eyes, for, stripped and thinned of their trees and robbed of their beauty, my memory restored all their former loveliness. On we went down to Byefleet to the mill, to Langton's through the sweet, turfy meadows, by hawthorn hedges musical as sweet...."

Well, she could not do that now. Let an ornithologist poet lament the change:—

By Brooklands hill but since a year Untrod the meadows lay, Unspanned through musk and meadowsweet Ran olive-bright the Wey.

Blackbirds about that wind and wild Carolled a roguish choir, From willow green to willow grey Kingfishers shot sapphire!

There gay and far the Surrey sun Spread cowslips far and gay, Lit wide the orchid's purple flame, The white fire of the May;

And thither stole a happy boat To hear the ringdoves coo, To mark again the drumming snipe Zigzag the April blue:

To watch the darting dragon-flies Live pine-needles awing— O Brooklands meadow, there we knew You first knew all the spring!

And then—the change! Spade, engine, pick, The gangers' myriad Hun, A thousand branches' banished shade, Flat glare of sand and sun.

From pine and stream to steam and stone, From peace to din and pain, From old unused to new unuse, But never Wey again!

The motor course led to at least one interesting discovery. When the picks were hard at work in the sand, and day and night were enlivened by steam-engines and casual labourers sleeping off their wages in other people's summerhouses, there went about a word of a great find. A pot of copper had been found, some said; of coppers, said others; of Roman gold coins, there was a rumour, and all the coins exchanged for beer. Perhaps some coins were found; what certainly was found was a beautifully made bronze bucket, buried deep below clay and sand in a bed of gravel. It has been classified by the experts as belonging to a Venetian workshop of the seventh century B.C.—actually the early days of the Tarquins. Prehistoric traffic between Britain and Italy may not be an entirely new idea, but the bucket opens a new chapter.

A few years after the Kembles had given up their cottage Weybridge had other brilliant visitors. The French Revolution of 1848 drove abroad thinkers and writers and a royal family, and Weybridge saw most of them. John Austin, author of The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, settled with his wife at a sober, red brick building near the church, and there they were visited by Lavergne, and Victor Cousin and de Remusat and Guizot: Barthelemy St. Hilaire wrote to Mrs. Austin in 1854—"I assure you that Weybridge is the place in England I love best." There were royal exiles at Claremont near Esher, then, and they came to mass at the Roman Catholic chapel which fronts the common; Louis Philippe and Queen Amelie, and the Duchess of Orleans and the Comte de Paris; there is a monument in the chapel to the Duchess of Nemours, who died at Claremont in 1857. Tot luctuosis domus Aurelianensis addita funeribus is the inscription, and the glorious beauty of the white marble lights the chapel; she was only thirty-four.

Weybridge's church is modern, but the registers and churchwarden's accounts are old and amusing. The following items, taken at random from the lengthy and exact copy made by Miss Eleanor Lloyd in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, are pleasant riddles of spelling:—

L s. d.

1622. Pd for a gally slabs seate for y^e parson 00 01 00

1623. Pd for drinke for the Ringgers upon the Prince came out of Spain and at other tymes 00 02 08

Pd for 23 Bushells of Lyme and five Bushells of hare 00 11 08

1655. Paid for an hower glass 00 00 06

1658. Rec^d of John Durling for breach of y^e Saboth 00 05 0

Rec^d of several bargemen for breach of y^e Saboth 14 08 6

1659. Rec^d of Adlms Barg for Breach of the Saboth 04 00 0

Rec^d for the Church grass being praised: besides X^s worth taken away 07 00 0

Edward Ginger Junior carried away the grass worth X^s

1667. Item given to the ringers one gunpowder treson day 0 1 0

Item for expenses in going twice to the Justices w^th the fanattick 0 2 0

Item for Inditing Robert Hone for takinge in an Inmate and Rich for not cuminge to Church for the space of that month for y^e fes for the same 0 9 4

1669. paid for buring a pore man that dyed brocklands farm 0 2 6

1671. Rest due to the parrish for the grass this yeare 1 2 9 Mils Bucklands bill not being holy aloud

1697. gave to John Born for a foxes hed 00 03 04

Sept. ye 16 gave ye ringers for Joy of ye pees 00 04 00

for a botel of wine 00 03 02

1701. payd for 3 botells of winde 00 08 03

The political events which brought the ringers joy and shillings seem to have been the peace of Ryswick and the return of Charles I, then Prince of Wales, from his journey to Spain in search of a princess. Weybridge would have always followed royal doings with interest, for Weybridge history, bound up with its oldest and greatest mansion, goes back to the kings almost of the middle ages. On the ground, or near it, which now belongs to the Oatlands Park Hotel, Henry VIII built one of his finest palaces: Elizabeth followed her father and hunted deer in the park; James I added to the palace a silkworm room for Anne of Denmark, planted mulberry trees to feed the silkworms, and bred pheasants to please himself; Charles I killed his stags and encroached on private ground to kill more; his youngest son, Prince Henry of Oatlands, was born in the palace. But Charles was the last English king to hunt at Oatlands. After the Civil wars the land was disparked, and the palace fell into ruins. To-day hardly a vestige remains. Old drawings show it to have been a large, straggling building with one great court and a number of smaller yards and quadrangles, turreted and gabled and quaint with tall and delicate chimneys. The oddest neighbour for Weybridge of to-day! It is not always difficult to re-people an old house, even if it has been greatly altered, with the ghosts of great men who have walked its passages and worked in its rooms. But among the newness and smallness of modern building plots there is nothing so hard as to conjure the ghost of a great palace, vibrating with the energy and the obsequiousness, the simplicities and the intrigues of a hunting King and his Court.

Georgian days brought another being as a visitor. Oatlands came to the seventh Earl of Lincoln in 1716, and he built himself a house on the higher ground overlooking a fine stretch of water and many miles of Thameside country. From his son, who had inherited the dukedom of Newcastle, this house was bought by the Duke of York in 1794, but was burnt down the same year, and the royal Duke rebuilt it. He and his duchess lived there until 1820, when she died. It must have been a curious household. George III brought Queen Charlotte there, and the Court with her; Georgian wits and beauties gathered in the duke's dining-rooms and played cards in his grottoes. Charles Greville was often at Oatlands, and Sheridan and Beau Brummell and Horace Walpole; Mrs. Gwyn came there, and Mrs. Bunbury, Oliver Goldsmith's "Jessamy bride" and "Little Comedy." Both were buried in Weybridge old church. Samuel Rogers, in his Table-talk, gives a quaint picture of the household:—

"I have several times stayed at Oatlands with the Duke and Duchess of York—both of them most amiable and agreeable persons. We were generally a company of about fifteen; and our being invited to remain there 'another day' sometimes depended on the ability of our royal host and hostess to raise sufficient money for our entertainment. We used to have all sorts of ridiculous 'fun' as we roamed about the grounds. The Duchess kept (besides a number of dogs, for which there was a regular burial-place) a collection of monkeys, each of which had its own pole with a house at top. One of the visitors (whose name I forget) would single out a particular monkey, and play to it on the fiddle with such fury and perseverance that the poor animal, half distracted, would at last take refuge in the arms of Lord Alvanley.—Monk Lewis was a great favourite at Oatlands. One day after dinner, as the Duchess was leaving the room, she whispered something into Lewis's ear. He was much affected, his eyes filling with tears. We asked what was the matter. 'Oh,' replied Lewis, 'the Duchess spoke so very kindly to me!'—'My dear fellow,' said Colonel Armstrong, 'pray don't cry; I daresay she didn't mean it.'"

The Duke of York died in 1827, and thirty years later Oatlands became a hotel. The building was greatly altered, but the grounds still keep some untouched memorials of the past. One is an extraordinary grotto, built by the Duke of Newcastle, and used by the Duke of York and his friends, according to local tradition, as a card-room, plentifully supplied with wine bottles. It is lined with a profusion of crystal spar and sea shells; it contains a deep bath, bashfully presided over by a statue of Venus, and the steps leading up to the door are paved with horses' teeth picked up on the battlefield of Waterloo. How the Duke of Newcastle accomplished this feat it is difficult to imagine, for he died in 1794. Perhaps they belonged to other horses, or perhaps the gallant Duke of York made the addition. He was Commander-in-chief, and the grisly relics may have been sent him as a present.

Another relic of the dead is the cemetery in which the Duchess of York used to bury her cats and dogs and monkeys. There may be, perhaps, thirty or forty little tombstones, each with a name.

Oatlands Park preserves a not very trustworthy legend. In the grounds stand a number of magnificent cedars, and one of them bears a notice by which you are informed that it was one of the first cedars of Lebanon planted in England and was placed where it stands by Prince Henry of Otelands. Neither statement quite fits the facts. If Prince Henry of Oatlands planted the cedar, he must have done so either before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (in which case he would have been hardly three years old, for he was born in 1639), or else in the summer of 1660, the year of the Restoration, and the year in which he died. As a matter of fact, cedars were hardly known at the time, for John Evelyn in his Sylva, published in 1664, only mentions them as unsatisfactory seedlings, difficult to grow; and the earliest cedar planted in England is probably the Enfield cedar, which may have been set in the ground by Dr. Uvedale, master of the Grammar-School, about that date. There are, in any case, much finer cedars than the Oatlands Park trees in adjoining private gardens. Probably all of them were planted by the Earl of Lincoln or the Duke of Newcastle early in the eighteenth century.

Another of Weybridge's links with royalty is not quite so reputable. Portmore Park is the name for a large slice of the town which lies near the river, thickly built over with villas and cut up into new roads. Once there stood in it Ham House, which with its park was given by James II to his mistress Catherine Sedley, notorious at least as much for her wit as her features. She herself, even with the brilliant eyes which were pretty nearly all she had of good looks, could not understand the king's infatuation. "It cannot be my beauty," she said; "for he must see that I have none; and it cannot be my wit; for he has not enough to know that I have any." Whatever the attraction may have been, he made her Countess of Dorchester and gave her Ham House, and she very prudently married David Colyear, first Lord Portmore. The gates of her park survive her; the house has disappeared.

One great estate still remains, and on its hill the oldest settlement of the neighbourhood. The generosity of the Egerton family throws open to the public, in the woods of St. George's Hill, some hundreds of acres of pine forest and heather. On the summit of the hill stands a large prehistoric camp, where neolithic Wey-siders in Wey beaver-fur and buckskin entrenched their wives and their cattle. There are fifteen or sixteen of these ancient British camps in Surrey or just over the border; this is the largest, and the height and strength of its earthworks are admirable. It is more than three-quarters of a mile in circumference, and since it is obviously a camp, has naturally been set down as Caesar's. But that is the fate of anything old which looks like a fortification—part of the traditional method of assigning otherwise inexplicable phenomena to their proper agents. Camps are all Caesar's, Cromwell made all the ruins, and all geological wonders belong to the devil.

St. George's Hill, or rather the low-lying ground on the Cobham side of it, was once the scene of a curious agricultural experiment. In the late days of the Parliamentary wars the Levellers sent some thirty men, under leaders named Everard and Winstanley, to seize part of the common land and plant roots and beans. Fairfax sent two troops of horse after them, and the captured Everard made him a speech, in which he claimed that he had had a vision instructing him to dig and plough the earth for the benefit of the poor, and that his mission was to help his oppressed fellow-Israelites back to their rights over all landed and other property. The Digger-Socialist did not give Fairfax much more trouble, for the irate commoners, refusing to be delivered from bondage, drove the Levellers from their common and pulled up the roots and beans.

The Levellers have their poet, and he made them a song with a fine lilt. Here are the first three stanzas:

You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now, You noble Diggers all, stand up now, The wast land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name Your digging does disdaine, and persons all defame. Stand up now, stand up now.

Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now, Your houses they pull down, stand up now. Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town, But the gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown. Stand up now, Diggers all.

With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now, stand up now, With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now, Your freedom to withhold, seeing Cavaliers are bold To kill you if they could, and rights from you to hold. Stand up now, Diggers all.

Although not one of the highest of Surrey hills, St. George's Hill provides a series of delightful glimpses of distant scenery through the trees. Windsor Castle stands up like a battleship on the horizon to the north-west, twelve miles away: west lie the rolling open spaces of Chobham Common and Bagshot Heath; south-west Guildford and Godalming stand over the shining valley of the Wey; Ranmer Church spire marks Dorking to the south: Leatherhead, Epsom, and the Crystal Palace almost complete the ring. I have never seen St. Paul's. But the abiding charm of St. George's Hill is not the view, which is surpassed by a dozen others. It is the deep quiet of the place; the sound of the wind in the trees, even on windless days, like the sound of the sea in a shell; the scented pine-needle carpet, crinkling in the sun; the bracken and bluebells of May, and the crimsons and purples of June's profuse rhododendrons.



CHAPTER XVIII

NORTH TO RUNEMEDE

Virginia Water.—Ruined Temples.—Grebes and Pheasants.—Bishop's Gate.—Shelley's "Alastor."—"Perdita" at Englefield Green.—Mrs. Oliphant's Neighbours.—Runemede rolled.—Egham's Almshouses.—Sir John Denham.—Frightful Monuments.—King Charles and the grateful stag.—The quiet of Thorpe.—The Crouch Oak.—Love Philtres.



There is no better way of roaming through north-west Surrey than to take the train to Virginia Water station, which is as near as you can get to the county boundary by the railway, and then to set out almost along the boundary northwards till the Thames turns the road south again at Runemede. Virginia Water itself lies more than a mile from the station, and is not at its best on Saturdays and Sundays. On quieter week days there is no lovelier stretch of woodland lake-water. It is, of course, not a natural sheet, but its designer had skill enough to know what would not look unnatural. He was Thomas Sandby, Royal Academician and Deputy-Ranger of Windsor Park, and one of the great landscape gardeners of Georgian days. He planned the lake for the Duke of Cumberland, Ranger of Windsor Park after Culloden, and he made it by choking back a number of small streams that trickled through a reedy marsh, and so spreading a single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December or June, when the green leaf is high on the beeches or the copper leaf strewn below them, and in any month of the year the thick, deep moss of the open glades is a carpet to delight to walk upon. But not all Sandby's landscape gardening has an equal charm. The cascade which drains the outflow of the water is a pretentious pile which no doubt filled the eye of the royal Ranger, and perhaps would have pleased John Evelyn, but it suits a simpler taste very little. But "the ruins"—it is their vague and proper name—are worse. Once, on the southern shore, stood a classical temple. It was the genuine article; the pillars were brought direct from Tripoli; the Ranger of the day (for they were added after the Cumberland era) liked to have them there, and thought that the beauty of English woodlands was enhanced by a pagan altar and Greek porticoes. Northern rains and northern ivy have done their work, and "the ruins" remain—capitals, columns, and pedestals shouting a thousand Cockney scribbles, tumbled headlong under laurel and yew.

Like other large stretches of Surrey water, the lake has become the home of wildfowl once passing from the stage of rarity to extinction, but now increasing and more often seen. The reeds that line parts of the shore are the happy homes of coots and water hens, but mallards and ducks are common on the water, and I have watched more than one pair of great grebes, conspicuous on the level lake with their gleaming necks and chestnut ruffs, swimming and diving close in the shore.

Padlocked gates prevent you from walking precisely as you please from the north-east of the lake through Windsor Park, and it is not impossible to miss the right path through the trees. But if you are walking north from the lake it is worth while to make your way to the Cumberland obelisk—a gaunt column which the clustering ivy and shrubs at its base will some day topple down among the grass and heather—and to reach the Bishop's Gate through the single narrow stretch of Windsor Great Park that lies in Surrey. In winter, pheasants crouch under the brushwood or splutter through the trees; in summer the rhododendrons scent and empurple the woodland rides.

Below Bishop's Gate, which is a yard or two over the Berkshire border, lies the little hamlet of the same name where Shelley, the year before his marriage to Mary Godwin, spent a happy summer and wrote "Alastor." He was supposed to be dying of consumption, and was to live as much as he could in the open air; and from Bishop's Gate he began an expedition up the Thames, which took a fortnight of the warm July of 1815. He began "Alastor" in the glades of Windsor Park in the summer, and that strange and brooding poem is full of the splendour of the Windsor forest. The poet, "led by love, or dream, or God," sought the "dearest haunt" of Nature:—

"More dark And dark the shades accumulate. The oak, Expanding its immense and knotty arms, Embraces the light beech. The pyramids Of the tall cedar overarching frame Most solemn domes within, and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating hang Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites, Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes, With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs Uniting their close union; the woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue light of day, And the night's noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Beneath these canopies extend their swells, Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms Minute yet beautiful."

This is a corner of Surrey, indeed, which is full of links with writers and poets. Hardly a mile to the east of Bishop's Gate is Englefield Green, a high and breezy common surrounded by delightful old houses. Poor "Perdita," Mrs. Robinson, died in one of them, deserted and forgotten by the Prince for whom she had thought her name well lost.

To a later generation Englefield became familiar, if unvisited, through Mrs. Oliphant's Neighbours on the Green. Two of her friends in real life who lived there were Richard Holt Hutton, essayist and theologian, and one of the greatest of English journalists; and Sir George Chesney, author of The Battle of Dorking, whom we are to meet on the scene of one of his hitherto bloodless battlefields. Other neighbours, perhaps even better known, survive in the half-fiction of Mrs. Oliphant's pages.

But the most enthusiastic admirer of the neighbourhood was a poet, Sir John Denham. What would the author of the poem in praise of Cooper's Hill say to some of the buildings which crown that "airy mountain" to-day? For Englefield Green stands on Cooper's Hill as Sir John saw it, and to him the common must have been part of the hill itself. To us Cooper's Hill has become less a hill than a college, and will become a hill again. The buildings of the College, started with the brightest hopes to provide a special education for the Indian Civil Service in 1870, and closed as a failure in 1905, stand untenanted and unhappy, fenced about with placards. There is no building quite so depressing as an empty school.

On a day of light mists one may see the view from the hill as Denham knew it, and as it was seen and known by Surrey nobles long before his day. For below the hill lies Runemede, and it needs the filmy gauze of mist to spread the meadows and trees of the Thames banks into a green carpet, untouched with the mark of the builder and the roadmaker. But Runemede is not seen best from the hill. Best, I think, you can measure that broad green floor by coming on it as King John might have come had he ridden or rowed from Windsor. Then it stretches suddenly before you, a level plain of springing grass, a single rich hayfield in June, as perhaps John looked out over it on the day he sealed the Charter. The meadow and the river can have changed little in seven hundred years, and perhaps the farming of the meadow is not wholly different. But I shall always remember the shock with which once I came upon Runemede on an open day in March, when the farmers' men were out over all the fields with the horses and the farm machinery. Runemede was being rolled.

South of that great meadow, Egham stands opposite Staines, separated by the river and a mile of dull road. Egham may have once had attractions, but they have nearly all disappeared. Nothing old or quiet could live near the Holloway College. A building of such appalling pretensions sears its neighbourhood like a hot iron. The town takes colour from its flamboyant arrogance; the local builder studs his rough-cast with glass, red and green and blue. Two old almshouses stand by the main street of the town; one, a lowly set of cottage rooms, built by Sir John Denham in 1624, crouches quietly apart; the other, two hundred years younger, but still good Georgian brick, stands behind a gateway in grounds which, when I saw them last, were a miracle of untidiness. The almshouses, were rebuilt in 1828, when perhaps the grass round them was mown also.

Epitaphs and monuments can be dull enough, but no one could call the monuments dull which family piety has erected in Egham church to the memory of Sir John Denham, father of the poet. Sir John, clothed in a shroud, quits his tomb at the Last Trump; below him, among skeletons and skulls, two grisly corpses writhe to the light. It is edifying to conceive the satisfaction with which Sir John's descendants must have feasted on such horrors every Sunday. A gentler memory lives on a stone erected "to the most dutiful, engaging, and tender child of seven years old. Miss Sarah Honywood"; and a finer epitaph is Garrick's, written to the memory of Thomas Beighton, a former vicar:—

"He had no foe, and CAMDEN was his friend."



Sir John Denham, the poet and unsuccessful defender of Farnham Castle in the Parliamentary Wars, lived at the house which is now the vicarage, and from its windows looked out on the long rising slope of Cooper's Hill. He has been laughed at for his description of the hill as an "airy mountain," but three hundred years ago, before the hill was cut up with hedges and ditches, and when he could look across open grass to its foot, Cooper's Hill may well have seemed higher than to-day. It is higher than St. Anne's Hill, after all, and can make an imposing break on the horizon.

Here is Runemede as Sir John Denham saw it from Cooper's Hill:—

"There lies a spatious and a fertile Greene, Where from the woods, the Dryades oft meet The Nayades, and with their nimble feet, Soft dances lead, although their airie shape All but a quicke Poeticke sight escape, There Faunus and Sylvanus keepe their Courts, And thither all the horrid hoast resorts, When like the Elixar, with his evening beames, The sunne has turn'd to gold the silver streames.

Here have I seene our Charles, when great affaires Give leave to slacken, and unbend his cares, Chacing the royall Stagge, the gallant beast, Rowz'd with the noyse 'twixt hope and feare distrest, Resolv's 'tis better to avoyd, than meet His danger, trusting to his winged feet."

Which he does, a most moving business, until at last the gallant animal turns. He stands at bay—

"Till Charles from his unerring hand lets flie A mortall shaft, then glad, and proud to dye By such a wound he fals, the Chrystall flood Dying he dyes, and purples with his blood."

Between Egham and Thorpe to the south is one of the few fine Elizabethan houses in the county, pleasantly named Great Fosters. But even Great Fosters, with all the charm of its gables, its chimneys and its mullioned windows, does not stand in quite such sharp contrast to the garishness of the Holloway buildings as the little village of Thorpe itself. Thorpe has been little written about. It lacks its sacred bard. But neither Shere, nor Gomshall, nor Thursley, nor Chiddingfold, which have been compared and criticised as the most beautiful of all Surrey villages, can surpass Thorpe for richness of peace of ancient homes and quiet brooding over the past. Enter Thorpe from the north by the fields, and you will walk by lanes over which a hundred years have passed without adding a tile or a tree to cottages or cottage gardens; and in Thorpe itself you can sit near the church on the edge of a stone stile, and look round at walls and roofs which might surely have sheltered Sir John Denham himself, walking by Thorpe to Chertsey. The stile stands across an ancient right of way, which crosses the fields; a straight line from the churchyard to Chertsey. John de Rutherwyk, doubtless, often walked or rode that lonely byway; perhaps it was he who raised the level path dry and well-drained out of the swampy, snipe-haunted meadows that lay between the little church and the great Abbey.



South of Chertsey to the Wey is rather uninteresting country. Addlestone lies between Chertsey and Weybridge, though not in a direct line, and was the home for years of two octogenarian authors, each of whom had a pension from the State, and who between them wrote or edited over five hundred books—Samuel Carter Hall and his wife Anna Maria Fielding. Both are buried at Addlestone; so is Fanny Kemble's mother, Mrs. Charles Kemble, who as Mademoiselle Decamp had delighted French theatres. But Addlestone's great possession is still living, the huge Crouch Oak which spreads vast branches over ground where Wycliff is said to have preached, and Queen Elizabeth to have dined. Once the Crouch Oak stood to mark the bounds of Windsor Forest; and up to years not long gone by love-lorn young women gathered its bark to boil down into philtres to ensnare the hearts of unwilling swains.



At Anningsley Park, two miles away, lived Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton; Thomas Day, who took a foundling child of thirteen and named her Sabrina, and educated her to be his wife—a position which she, at an age to marry, refused. His fate was perverse to the end. He taught himself to dance, wooing another lady who spurned him; and, teaching himself to ride, he was thrown and killed.



CHAPTER XIX

CHOBHAM AND BISLEY

Euclid in Surrey.—Chobham.—Bagshot Rhododendrons.—Vultures of the Road.—The Golden Farmer.—Catching the Small-pox.—A contented Family.—The Queen's Bon-graces.—A Gentle Hermit.—Prize fights.—Bisley.—Donkeytown.—A wilful brook.

Half of north-west Surrey belongs to the soldiers. Chobham Common, Bagshot Heath, Chobham Ridges, Bisley, Pirbright, York Town, and Camberley contain among them pretty nearly all the camps, colleges, training grounds, and rifle-ranges that do not belong to Aldershot over the Hampshire border. The whole aspect of the country is military; rural outlandishness has been drilled into rigidity and pattern. The roads run as straight as if the Romans had driven them—and, indeed, some of them in the neighbourhood are Roman roads; the face of the hills and heather commons is scored with roads like figures of Euclid, triangles, oblongs, radii, rhomboids, every kind of road which enables you to go from one place to another in the shortest space of time possible; which, for that matter, is a thing you frequently wish to do. Nobody wants to linger on a road as straight as a gunshot.

Camberley, perhaps, is as good a centre as any for exploring this part of Surrey; but the border of the county is intersected with such a network of railways that it is easy to get to Bagshot or Camberley or Frimley from almost anywhere and to join the railway again where you please. One of the best walks is from Chertsey over Chobham Common to Windlesham and Bagshot, and then over Chobham Ridges down into Frimley. Bisley is most easily visited from the railway, as thousands visit it—or rather the rifle range—every July.

Chobham Common is at its best in July, when the heather is out. But it has a day in May, under a hot sun, which is, in some ways, more distinct. The scent and the glow of the heather belong to other Surrey hills; but Chobham Common has its own features of sandy hillocks topped by clumps of pines, which set an austere gauntness on the place unlike the rolling flanks and ridges by Frensham and Hindhead. In May the heather is dark and dry; there are sparse patches of gorse scattered about the slopes, and looking across at a group of pines edging the horizon you sometimes get a setting of black, yellow, and blue, which belongs peculiarly to this corner of Surrey. Chobham Common and its heather have often been compared to Scotland, and I can never catch the likeness. The heather is there, and the scattered pines like some of the Lowlands; but the wind is a southern wind, and never blows like Stevenson's wind on the moors "as it blows in a ship's rigging, hard and cold and pure." Beyond all, there is nowhere the Scottish horizon of hills.

Windlesham lies on the western edge of the Common, and straggles over a dozen short, crooked roads—an oasis among parallelograms. Once it had a reputation for growing bog-myrtle, as you may learn from Aubrey:—

"In this Parish, at Light-Water-Moor, grows great store of a plant, about a foot and a half high, called by the inhabitants Gole, but the true Name is Gale; it has a very grateful smell, like a Mixture of Bays and Myrtle, and in Latin it is called Myrtus Brabantica; it grows also in several places of this healthy Country, and is used to be put in their Chests among their Linnen."

Perhaps it may still be put there. Such a plant must have been a favourite with an excellent housewife buried in the churchyard, whose epitaph attracts wandering readers:—

She was, but words are wanting to say "What," Think what a wife should be, and she was "That."

If Aubrey were making another perambulation of Surrey to-day, he would forget the Windlesham bog-myrtle when he had seen the Bagshot rhododendrons. To imagine Bagshot without rhododendrons is to think of Mitcham without lavender, Epsom without salts, Farnham without hops. The other name that goes naturally with rhododendrons is Waterer, and the Waterer nurseries have the magic of gardens of fairy tales. Even in winter, on a sunny day, an Italian air blows through those tall thuias and cypresses, down those dark aisles of shining green. But in May and June, when the rhododendrons glow from pearl to crimson, and the azaleas light long stretches of flaming chrome and orange, the gardens take a glory that belongs to no other flowers.

In the days of the stage-coach Bagshot was a thriving village with an inn, perhaps the King's Arms of to-day, where thirty coaches a day changed horses. That rich traffic drew the vultures of the road, and Bagshot Heath was one of the most dreaded stretches of highway in England. Dick Turpin is said to have used the King's Arms and the Golden Farmer further down the road; it was the Golden Farmer in his day, and an unimaginative age has turned the farmer from Golden into Jolly. It is a pity, for "Jolly Farmer" means no more than White Lion or a dozen other names, but to "Golden Farmer" there belongs a story. There was a highwayman of Bagshot Heath who never would rob a purse of banknotes; he would touch nothing but gold. At Frimley at the same time lived a farmer, who never paid his debts in anything but gold. The golden farmer one day was recognised as the golden highwayman, and the inn stands close by the spot where they hanged him in chains.