Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 12

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 Has...o...b.. 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 Has...o...b.. to rejoin the railway at Milford or G.o.dalming, or one may turn west to Chiddingfold. But Has...o...b.. is better seen from G.o.dalming, 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 st.u.r.dily 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 pa.s.sed 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Crown Inn, Chiddingfold._]

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, f.a.n.n.y Kemble.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Rock Hill, Hambledon._]

To the Fold Country belong two other villages, Has...o...b.., two miles north of Dunsfold, and Hambledon, a little more than two miles west of Has...o...b... The Has...o...b.. 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, Has...o...b.. 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 Has...o...b.. 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.

Has...o...b.. 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 Has...o...b.. 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 gra.s.s and brambles, dives into an oakwood and emerges at the end of a long straight open ride of gra.s.s, 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 G.o.dalming 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 Suss.e.x. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Black Down, from Hambledon._]

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 gra.s.s 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 peac.o.c.k 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 s.p.a.ces and the ma.s.sive Norman pillars set an air of strength and quiet in the place that belongs alone to n.o.ble 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 gra.s.s-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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _At Ewhurst._]

North-east of Baynards an old Roman road runs from Rowhook on the Stane Street in Suss.e.x 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 gra.s.s. 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 a.s.sistant_ 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sures 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 a.s.sure himself is that he has plenty of time, or has a compa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ces; 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sed, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Chertsey._]

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 ca.n.a.l, 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 gra.s.s; 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 inc.u.mbent 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.