First Edition, with 75 Illustrations, published in 1906
Reprinted in 1909, 1912, and 1915
Second Edition, revised, with 32 Illustrations, published in 1922

PREFACE

THE illustrations in this book speak for themselves. The writer feels it no easy undertaking to strike bass chords in prose that may worthily accompany these high notes of Surrey’s fame; but he has done his best towards pointing out its special charm of varied formation and surface, here displayed upon the course of excursions made in several directions, so as to bring in all the chief features. To author as well as artist, both at least long sojourners in this choice county that gives homes to many an adopted son, the work has been a labour of love. The moral enforced at once by pen and pencil is that few great cities are so lucky as London in having at its back-doors a playground, pleasure-ground, and garden-ground of such manifold interest and beauty.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS By SUTTON PALMER

SKETCH MAP OF SURREY

SURREY

I
A “HOME” COUNTY

SURREY is but a small county, the latitudes or longitudes of which a good walker could traverse in a day; but perhaps no other in England can be found so close packed with scenes of manifold beauty. Among the “Home Counties,” at least, it seems best to answer Mr. P. G. Hamerton’s criterion of a perfect country as “one which, in a day’s drive, or half a day’s, gives you an entirely new horizon, so that you may feel in a different region, and have all the refreshment of a total change of scene within a few miles of your own house.” Its over-the-way neighbour Middlesex, which Cobbett, in his slap-dash style, puts down as all ugly, is at least comparatively tame and monotonous; and one must go as far as Derby or Devon for such boldly “accidented” heights as those from which Surrey looks over the growth of London.

The county’s varied features run from north to south in zones a few miles broad, whose characteristic beauties not seldom dovetail into each other with fine effect of contrast. The north border of this “south land” is the winding Thames, its rich banks rising to wooded eminences like St. Ann’s Hill and St. George’s Hill, the swell of Richmond Park, the Ridgeway of Wimbledon, and those suburban eminences from which the Crystal Palace shines over Kent. The east side of this zone is masked by the spread of Greater London, rich and poor; and the west side, too, becomes more thickly dotted with villages and villas; while to the south that giant octopus goes on stretching its grimy tentacles over the green fields turned into “eligible building sites.” How far its process of urbanification will reach, seems to depend on the stability of Britain’s commercial greatness, which again depends, we are told, on the Fiscal question, if not on circumstances quite beyond our control, such as the stock still on hand in the national coal-cellar. When that New Zealand tourist comes to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s, will he find Southwark, like ancient Croton, fallen to a squalid fever-stricken townlet, or an American syndicate at work digging up the ruins of Kingston, as Nippur is now excavated after being forgotten for thousands of years? Babylon is “become heaps,” Nineveh a “dwelling-place for dragons.” What prophet, then, shall assure us that in a yet unbuilt Australian capital, or at some future transatlantic hub of the universe, fragments of jerry-builders’ brick and specimens of electroplated ware from Tooting or Woking may not come to be exhibited, even as our museums treasure Roman tiles and coins dug up in the fields of Surrey! There are scientific Cassandras who hint how no insurance office can guarantee that all these millions of smug citizens might not any night be roused to homeless terror by the shock of an earthquake, like that which ruined San Francisco.

Meanwhile the greatest city of the world thrives and goes on growing, so that almost all of Surrey which it does not already cover may be counted as its home-farm or pleasure-grounds. This generation is hardly moved to exclaim, as a writer of last century did on Denmark Hill: “The rich carpet of Nature decked with Flora’s choicest flowers, and wafting perfumes of odoriferous herbs floating on the breezes, expanded and made my heart replete with joy!” William Black, indeed, found beauty at the doors of Camberwell; and the heights of Norwood deserve a better fate than to be covered with villas. But this mass of bold contours is exceptional so near South London. More often we must be content to get over a green rim of our scenic nosegay. From the undulating streets and suburban rows we usually pass on to a plain, presenting market-gardens and dairy-farms, where the open ground is not required for playing fields. Private groves and hedgerows make a show of timber; and when branches are bare, a frequent feature of the scenery will be those goal-posts which a critically observing foreigner has mistaken for gallows. Here we are in the first zone of Surrey, a stretch of London clay and brick earth, broken here and there by patches of gravel and sand, which, when large enough, are like to be marked out by the hungry game of golf.

This, where the builder is busiest “making the green one red,” may be called in general the stratum of surface brick, followed southwards by successive belts of chalk, sand, and clay. Some ten miles bring us to rising ground, on which cuttings and broken knobs reveal chalk built up at the bottom of the sea ages before London or Babylon had a name. Here we reach the second zone, that of the North Downs, a chalk ridge running roughly straight across the county from Farnham to Tatsfield, near the eastern border reaching a highest point of about 880 feet. This central line, broadened to several miles at Croydon, narrowed to a high edge beyond Guildford, makes Surrey’s best-marked feature, its natural baldness much bewigged by the woods and parks of London’s luckier citizens; and thus adorned, there are those who hold the chalk heights, with their dry soil and clear air, dearer than the aspects more common in the next zone.

The steep south faces of the Downs look into the Holmesdale Valley of greensand and gault, across which, within a rifle-shot, rise a line of sandy hills whose more rugged and shaggy outlines often form the loveliest scenes in Surrey, to some tastes, certainly the wildest, though many corners have been tamed by grounds and gardens among stretches of bristling common and straggling pine wood. These heights stand usually lower than the Downs; but at more than one point, as Leith Hill, they are the most mountainous prominences of the south-eastern counties. Hants, Sussex, and Surrey meet about Hindhead and its neighbour Blackdown, next in height to Leith Hill, where an illustrious settler has famed the view over

Green Sussex fading into blue
With one grey glimpse of sea.

But here a prosaic describer must note how it is only from some point of vantage, and at some rarely clear hour, that through a gap the sea comes in view of Surrey hills, since their prospect southwards is usually bounded by the line of the South Downs, crossing Sussex to end in the bluff of Beachy Head.

Between stretches the Weald, a strip of which, except in that south-western corner filled by the broadened sand heights, belongs to Surrey and makes its southern zone of fresh features. This wide plain once lay shaded under the great Andredeswald, that was the Black Country of England before coal and steam came into play, and still earlier it raised a barrier parting the South Saxons from kindred invaders. Its hursts and woods hint how the clay soil bore a primæval forest, notably of oaks, patches of it still preserved in the parks dappling an expanse of farm land long ago cleared to feed the furnaces that cast cannon and other iron work, specimens of which may be found in churches and homes about this district. Less picturesque, on the whole, than the zones to the north, the Surrey Weald is more remote from metropolitan sophistication, and keeps perhaps a larger proportion of the old weathered cottages and moated granges, which æsthetic citizens love to look on rather than to inhabit. It must be the Weald Fuller has in mind when he speaks of Surrey’s skirts as “rich and fruitful,” but its inward parts “hungry and barren,” though these, even in his day, “by reason of the clear air and clean ways, full of many genteel habitations.”

Some brooklets of the Weald run southward to the English Channel, else, nearly the whole of Surrey drains into the valley of the Thames, a river to make the landscape fortune of any county. If ever its scenes have a fault, from the artist’s point of view, this may appear to be the absence of water; yet some of its noblest prospects are where the Mole and the Wey break through the sand or chalk ridges to reach the river plain. Surrey has smaller streams less widely known. Ruskin, to deaf ears, lamented the defilement of the Wandle, its source, its curving course, and its mouth all now within the limits of Greater London. Do Putney boys trace to its head the Beverley Brook, as Charles Lamb’s companions tried to play explorer up the New River? How many of the most schooled Londoners could tell through what parishes and by what suburban settlements flows the Hogsmill River, or the Bourne, or the Burway Ditch? A Brixton householder may hear the name of the Ephra without guessing how its course is below his feet. There are veteran ramblers in Surrey who know not the Deanoak Brook, nor the Blackwater. The motorist scorching along the Tillingbourne Valley road comes home ignorant what beautiful banks he has skirted, while one goggled eye was all upon his gear, and the other on the look-out for police traps.

The fact is that Surrey has plenty of water, often lost in the picturesque roughness of its contours. In smoother counties any hillock may disclose some Ouse or Avon shining miles away, whereas here the windings and branchings of the Wey and Mole go often unsuspected till one come close upon them. Below Surrey’s bare, bony prominences, its veins will lie lost in the plumpness of the valleys. Both chalk and sand hills, dry as their tops may seem, are full of springs, escaping not only in streams, but into stagnant or slowly trickling pools, that sometimes form a chain of lakelets, or, as in the case of Virginia Water, have

been improved into trim sheets to leave no note wanting in the landscape scale. Even within the wider bounds of London sparkles a lake like that of Wimbledon Park, where in hard winters ice is coined into silver. Sandy commons, as well as marshy bogs, are unexpectedly found dotted with ponds, often beautifully hidden behind a curtain of foliage, as the “Silent Pool” of Albury, invisible to the cyclist spinning by within a hundred yards. The modest titles of some of these Surrey lakes may well deceive a stranger who has not opened his eyes upon the “Waggoners’ Wells” of Hindhead or the “Ponds” of Frensham. On the south side of the county, where they once lay among thick woods, such waters often preserve the title of “Hammer Ponds,” from the days when they were dammed up to work iron forges.

Surrey’s character for variety is carried out by the way in which green openings and barren scrubs are mixed up with the elaborate works of man. Who shall say where London begins or ends? If we think to get clear of it at Wandsworth, we find it breaking out again at Wimbledon. The country lad tramping up to those streets paved with gold, may meet them at Mitcham, and a little farther on lose himself on Figgs Marsh. The widest definition of Great London is the Metropolitan Police District, taking in all parishes fifteen miles from Charing Cross, the Postal District being a little more restricted. But still, beyond these bounds, we come upon settlements of citizens making their homes an hour’s journey from the smoke and din of their work-place. Favourite sites for such colonies are the edges of commons so frequent on the south side of London, in Surrey to be counted by hundreds, open woodlands, stretches of copse and heath, well-worn playgrounds, down to the patches of green that seldom fail to grace the smallest hamlet. Several of these public pleasure-grounds run into London, where the south-western resident can make a round over Clapham, Wandsworth, Putney, Wimbledon, Mitcham, Tooting, Tooting Bec and Streatham Commons, with tramways or ’buses to bridge him from one open space to another. It is on the farther side of the county, of course, that we must look for the widest and wildest expanses of ground, not waste so long as it serves to keep jaded citizens in touch with the charms of untamed nature; yet even here begin to gather the shadows of villadom, and the haunts of vipers are dug out for tram-lines through brick and stucco avenues.

Of Surrey’s population, over two millions, the greater part is concentrated on some fifty of the 755 square miles that make its measurement. In this county lie half a dozen of the metropolitan boroughs, to which may be tacked on Croydon, Richmond, and Kingston, and many a village promoted to be a “choice residential suburb.” The last census notes a slight decrease in what it terms the outer belt of suburbs; but that seems to mean only a shifting farther into the country, as trains and trams bring a wider circle within the area where the builder can claim fresh nooks as “ripe for development.” The once rustic “box” of the early Victorian citizen is apt to have come down in the world. Perhaps nine-tenths of my readers may look blank when reminded how Mr. Quirk’s “Alibi House” was at Camberwell, and Mr. Tagrag’s “Satin Lodge” at Clapham; yet surely they are aware of the miniature Walworth Castle, in which Mr. Wemmick kept an aged parent. “Lovell the Widower’s” home at Putney, and the palatial Roehampton villas of Thackeray’s city magnates may still stand high in house agents’ books. But in ex-suburbs, as a rule, such pleasure-houses of a former generation are in no demand now, their sites often covered by shabby streets, shops, or blocks of flats; while leagues farther out, at Purley, Tadworth, or Claygate, spring up a fresh crop of smartly painted villas, in lines or knots, with white walls, red roofs, green water-butts and “modern conveniences,” to tempt Londoners who can afford fresh air for living in. Every year some new village or hamlet is strangled in the arms of the monster that has yearly been adding a score of miles to its myriad streets, and taking in new inhabitants enough to people a town. Yet Surrey has the surprising feature of a deserted village, and that on the very edge of the county of London. Fitly named Lonesome, it stands close to Streatham, a few minutes’ walk from more than one railway station. The builder is so busy hereabouts, that for all I know it may have been broken up before this page gets into print; but for a generation it has stood uninhabited, with cracked walls and smashed windows, an unlovely ruin, making a monument of some story in which an obstinate landlord, a disagreeable industry, or a disastrous enterprise are vaguely mixed up in my memory.

The old towns of Surrey have more or less undergone the same change as the metropolitan outskirts, some almost lost in the “Wen,” as Cobbett loved to call it, some making a nucleus for a sort of remote suburb, much affected by the “dead weight” fund-holders and stock-jobbers so loudly denounced by that obstreperous patriot. The villages, too, are a conglomeration of old and new about their ancient or spick-and-spanly rebuilt churches, and their straggling greens, kept in time-honoured sanctuary from the weapons of the jerry-builder. The whole county betrays its metropolitan dependence in the many trim enclosures around modern mansions and villas, among which holds up its head here and there some lordly old hall like Sutton or Loseley, some once strong castle like those of Guildford or Farnham. There are not a few ivied manor-houses still standing; some fallen to the estate of farm-houses, some restored or enlarged to be choice residences for new owners. A weather-beaten cottage of gentility will command a fancy price, so long as it be not too near the madding crowd, nor yet too far from means of soon mingling with the same. Then Surrey is famed for those real cottages, “sacred to the poor,” that may appear in the very heart of some smug, commonplace suburb, but more often in out-of-the-way nooks, where nature better blends with their timbered and gabled quaintness, “each a nest in bloom,” thatched, tiled, time-stained, patched, top-heavy, leaning-to as if ripe to tumble among a bed of flowers—

One that, summer-blanch’d,
Was parcel-bearded with the traveller’s-joy
In Autumn, parcel ivy-clad; and here
The warm-blue breathings of a hidden hearth
Broke from a bower of vine and honeysuckle:
One look’d all rose-tree, and another wore
A close-set robe of jasmine sown with stars:
This had a rosy sea of gillyflowers
About it; this, a milky way on earth,
Like visions in the Northern dreamer’s heavens,
A lily-avenue climbing to the doors;
One, almost to the martin-haunted eaves
A summer burial deep in hollyhocks:
Each its own charm.

With such modestly hidden charms are contrasted a rank growth of conspicuous Institutions—schools, orphanages, “homes,” asylums, barracks, prisons and the like, thick set in certain spots, as about Sutton or Caterham. Some of these have been able to adapt stately old mansions to their use, as at Beddington and Roehampton; but more often they are modern, ungraceful, appalling, usurping, dominating landscapes thrown away on criminals or lunatics. It seems an ominous sign of the times that as often as one sees a new pile rising on Surrey heights, it is apt to turn out a lunatic asylum, for which the flats about Hanwell surely offer a fitter site. The most showy of such structures are the far seen Holloway College above Egham, and the Sanatorium for the insane in the valley below, which cost over a million, made out of the profits of notorious patent medicines, to be given back thus to the public by a benefactor who here showed himself a posthumous humorist in bricks and mortar. Or was his will made in some mood of repentance, such as led mediæval cut-throats to endow churches and chantries? His College, for which olet would make an appropriate motto, is devoted to the higher education of women, that they may teach their children to put no faith in quackery, even when disguised under the American euphemism of “proprietary articles.”

Had I had the ear of such a pious founder, I would have counselled him to leave part of his ill-got gains as a fund for prosecuting, pillorying, pelting, daubing with hatred and ridicule, whipping at the cart’s tail of public opinion, transporting to some Malebolge, foul with their own concoctions, those unspeakable humbugs, who, not content with the lower-class religious papers as an area to be defiled by their lying advertisements, impudently deface the fair scenes of Surrey with loathsome placards of this and that mischievous or worthless nostrum, to sicken the considerate passer-by at the thought of popular ignorance and credulity so easily preyed upon. Some day this mean offence may be repressed by law. Might we not begin by restricting the pill-and potion-mongers to Hackney Marsh or Barking Level as a sink for their shameless besliming? There is no spot in Surrey, not even the New Cut, Lambeth, nor the Sewage Farm of Croydon, that deserves such pollution. The endowment above invited may be vested in a body bearing the mystic device S. C. A. P. A., a league of champions sworn to slay this hideous Jabberwock, which one should not fear to mention by its legion names, for the last thing such an impostor dare do is to look twelve honest men in the face and have wrung out of him the composition of his panacea, swallowed so trustfully by the fools who enrich knaves.

Staringly mendacious advertisements are not the only scandal to raise the gorge of a poor but honest wayfarer on Surrey’s countless roads, alive with all kinds of travel, from farm-waggons to cycles, from four-horse coaches to tramps. At their London ends, the highways are cut up by

tram-lines, which threaten to go far, unless this locomotive growth be nipped by the blast of motor cars. The invasion of the motor is still a sore subject along once quieter roadsides of Surrey. How Cobbett would have blustered if, on some rural ride, he had fallen in with a modern “dead weight” hurrying out of the “Wen” at full career, on his 60 h.-p. Mercedes, a flashy show of paint and furs! But one need not have any special spite against the “jews and jobbers” who were his bêtes noirs, to be choked by indignation in the fog of dust and smoke through which one catches a hasty glimpse of bugbears in armour, masked and bandaged, like the uncanny monstrosities of Mr. Wells’ stories. It is all very well to remember how railways, too, were banned by prejudice, so that some half-century ago a liberal-minded John Bull, like the chronicler of Jorrocks and Soapey Sponge, still undertakes to apologise for those novelties on the score of their useful service to country life. But trains do not drive people off the roads and out of snug homes that lie too near the dusty triumph of Goth and Vandal chariots, “rigged with curses dark.” Far more terrible are such swift Juggernauts than the insidious speed of the cyclist, who has lived down his reproach as a “cad on castors,” being indeed kept considerate by the chance of getting the worst of it in case of collision with man or beast, whereas there can be no standing against the weighty momentum of those Bulls of Bashan, “hazing and mazing the blessed roads with the devil’s own team”—nay, the very fields, into which they scatter grit over strawberry beds and haycocks as well as hedgerows. And what one grudges most in the mad speed of the motorist is that, while he makes a moving blot on the landscape, his goggles can snatch but dim joy from prospects through which he is borne in such a whirl of excitement past one lunatic asylum to another.

Sportive sons of this tribe of Jehu have the enjoyment of an automobile race track laid down at Brooklands, near Weybridge, a sort of mechanical Epsom or Newmarket, and there has even been talk of a motor road all the way to Brighton. Did they never cast an eye on the miles of useless tunnels at Welbeck, which their present owner might be glad to have turned to some good purpose? There they could pant and fizz up and down at their own pace all day and night long in an exhilarating gleam of electric light, and smudge no fair scene flung away on their rushing course. These machines are signs of the times, when, as Horace said—or something to this effect—in days that were not so high-geared:—

Too bold we grow, too fast we go;
Too many things we want to know,
Too many sights to see;
’Tis not enough o’er earth to fly;
Man strives to scale the very sky
On L.S. piled on D.

But let the humble pedestrian take heart when overshadowed by the proud passage of Sir Gorgius Midas. His car prevails on the highways, but on the byways it is helpless, all the more if the weight of its armour be five thousand shekels of brass. And Surrey abounds in byways, some still twisting through the outer streets of London, their original character to be guessed only by such titles as Coldharbour Lane, Cut-throat Lane, which perhaps was “Cut-through Lane” in its blossoming days, and the Worple Roads and Worple Ways of Richmond, Wimbledon, and Mortlake, whose villa-dwellers may be ignorant that these names denote old bridle-paths.

Country-folk or towns-folk, we are not always fully aware of our own blessings. Let not familiarity breed contempt for what strikes a stranger as one of the pleasantest traits in an English landscape. Nathaniel Hawthorne is not the only American who, in visiting Our Old Home, has taken admiring note how:—

The high-roads are made pleasant to the traveller by a border of trees, and often afford him the hospitality of a wayside bench beneath a comfortable shade. But a fresher delight is to be found in the footpaths, which go wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected yet strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idylls and eclogues. These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him; for, with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the property of the public as the dusty high-road itself, and even by an older tenure. Their antiquity probably exceeds that of the Roman ways; the footsteps of the aboriginal Britons first wore away the grass, and the natural flow of intercourse between village and village has kept the track bare ever since. An American farmer would plough across any such path and obliterate it with his drills of potatoes and Indian corn; but here it is protected by law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably springs up in this soil along the well-defined footpaths of centuries. Old associations are sure to be fragrant herbs in English nostrils; we pull them up as weeds.

Surrey is seamed with such immemorial rights of way, some, indeed, lost, stolen, or strayed into more formal roads; but County Councils and the like are now vigilant against private usurpation of their charms. On the edge of the noisy town, and all over the quiet countryside, they may be found and followed, sometimes for miles, every kind of them, straight field-cuts, blooming hedgerow paths, hard-beaten tow-paths, green ridges, leafy archways, trim woodland avenues “for whispering lovers made,” free passages over lordly demesnes, straggling tracks across rough heaths, half-choked smugglers’ lanes, and old historic roads, here improved into a busy turnpike, there run wild as a grassy sward or shrunk to a doubtful footway, all open to lovers of virtue, who are quiet, and go a-walking, as a modern Izaak Walton might choose, now that the waters of the Mole and the Wandle are strictly preserved. Let other-minded excursionists stay in Middlesex.

II
THE RIVERSIDE

SURREY’S crooked northern border is washed by the Thames, “great father of the British floods,” to whom so many compliments, vows, and addresses have been offered in prose and verse:—

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full!

These lines, in which let no writer scorn to join chorus of quotation, are from Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, a title supplied by the “airy mountain” that raises its “proud head”—to a poetic height of 200 feet and more—upon the north-western corner of Surrey. Descending the river from Windsor, after passing Old Windsor Church, we enter this county beyond the “Bells of Ouseley,” to find the right bank edged by what plain prose must belittle as a wooded rise, on whose top, pleasant rather than proud, stands a stately mansion that, in the course of its chequered history, grew into a banyan grove of buildings built in vain. Cooper’s Hill was in Victorian times the property of one of those meteoric financiers flashing across the sky of British commerce, the same who in London built for himself a house so large that no one ever lived in it. Then the place made itself a new name as a college for the Indian engineering service; but this institution came to be uprooted, and its halls passed into private occupation, after for a time standing desolate, as those of Ossian’s Balclutha, while there was question what to do with them. An academy for horse-marines, a week-end club for members of Parliament, a training-school for county councillors, are suggestions that could be made; but, to my mind, a truly Liberal Government might have endowed Cooper’s Hill as an asylum for minor poets.

This first though not foremost of Surrey heights is surrounded by fair and famous scenes to inspire the Denhams of our generation. Below it, on the Berkshire edge, lies Beaumont, once home of Warren Hastings, now a Roman Catholic Eton. Behind it opens Englefield Green, a village of much gentility, which has housed many well-known persons, from Louis Napoleon to the late R. H. Hutton of the Spectator; and it is clearly the “Dinglefield” of Mrs. Oliphant’s Neighbours on the Green. Near this, at the Bishops Gate of Windsor Park, is the hamlet where Shelley wrote his Alastor, and did not let his views of Church or State be charmed by the sight of Windsor Castle that here rises royally into prospect. Windsor Park is mainly in Berkshire; yet, keeping down the woods and rhododendron walks on the east side, we should come upon Virginia Water, overflowing at one end into Surrey, which may claim a share of the royal demesne, and a large one of the wider bounds once known as Windsor Forest.

From the Thames slope of Cooper’s Hill, where “Denham’s Seat” makes a view-point across the river, expands a wider landscape over the flat fields of Bucks and Middlesex, watered by the branching Colne. The spire to the north marks a village known on maps as Wyrardisbury, but to men as Wraysbury; then a mile beyond, across the railway, comes Horton, home of Milton’s youth. But the scene of greatest fame lies in the foreground, at our feet, for this wide riverside meadow, degraded to a race-course as it has been, is Runnymede, on which King John was forced to sign the first great charter

of our liberties. Some would have that historic stage to be Magna Charta island off the west end of the mede, where a stone is shown as the table of signing; but no Surrey patriot can allow such a pretension on the part of Buckinghamshire, while it may be that the king had his quarters at the Benedictine Nunnery of Ankerwyke on the other bank, if not at the old house in Staines pretending to that honour. It is remarkable what a number of places in many parts of England claim to have housed or lodged a so unpopular and worthless sovereign.

Above Runnymede, dropping off the ridge of Cooper’s Hill, one may come down to the pleasant town of Egham, its one long street lying a mile back from the river; but its accretions straggle on towards the bank, where the tow-path leads by havens of boating men and “Anglers’ Rests” to the bridge of Staines. This is a Middlesex town, the older part of it also lying back from the Thames, upon the Colne, whose damp flats form a somewhat dreary background, not enlivened by the banks of a huge reservoir for thirsty London. But Staines has a name on the Thames through its ancient stone, marking the limit of London City’s jurisdiction, thirty-six miles up the river. There may be Londoners who never heard of this stone, which made the goal of a Lord Mayor’s progress eighty years ago, to be celebrated by his Lordship’s chaplain in a most amusing style, by no means meant to be amusing. Having spared the reader Akenside’s inscription for the column on Runnymede, I have half a mind to inflict upon him some account of this expedition, as raised to all the dignity of history, and all the interest of exploration, in the reverend gentleman’s now rare volume. But it might seem too like ancient history to a generation of impatient readers, who know the Lord Mayor’s State barge only from the heading of their Illustrated London News, and perhaps do not know how the Corporation’s Admiralship has passed into the farther reaching hands of the Thames Conservancy. “Suffice it, therefore, to say that though the party were three successive days—two of which included fifteen hours—upon the water; yet, such was the fine and ever-varying nature of the home scenery around them, which was itself sufficient to engross the attention, as the Thames made its azure sweeps round slopes of meadow land; so diversified were the occupations of reading, working, and conversation—conversation which, always easy and intelligent, was often such as to discover memories containing ample registers of miscellaneous snatches and fragments of sentiments, both in prose and verse, which were sometimes applied with considerable tact and address to passing scenes; so well and interestingly, in short, were the several successive hours filled up”—that one must break off the chronicler’s long-winded sentence with his own admission, that “it would be difficult and tedious to detail all the particulars” of that civic voyage.

I do not aspire to emulate this author’s stilted gait on the trip from Staines to London, but I invite the reader to plod with me along the tow-path; that, as he is aware, will pass from one side to another, a matter hardly understood by an observant American writer, who made note how “one shore of the Thames, sometimes the right, sometimes the left, it seems, belongs to the public.” From the Bells of Ouseley to Staines Bridge the tow-path has been in Surrey; now it crosses to the pleasant river front of the town, the Surrey side being blocked by private paradises and boating-houses. To Chertsey, the next Surrey town, we might, indeed, cut across by a road that at one point comes close to the river; but the more inviting way is the path on the Middlesex bank, and at one of the locks we may have the luck to catch a steamboat plying in summer between Kingston and Oxford on a river, of which that old poet might say more emphatically in our generation:—

Though with those streams, he no resemblance hold,
Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold;
His genuine and less guilty wealth to explore,
Search not his bottom, but survey his shore.

The riches of the shore here are chiefly in trim gardens and flat fields, by which the tow-path leads windingly, yet spares us Father Thames’ most wayward aberration, the mile-long loop of Penton-Hook, across the mouth of which we cut by the lock in a couple of minutes. Before reaching this from Staines, is passed on the opposite bank a surprising collection of bungalows, shanties, and tents, one of those settlements of genteel gipseying that have grown up on the banks in our time. Beyond the lock, we come to the Middlesex village of Laleham, in whose churchyard lies Matthew Arnold, born here in his father’s pre-Rugby days. Below this leafy place, beginning to be overlaid by builders’ plans, road and tow-path run together beside Laleham Park towards Chertsey Bridge, the Surrey bank being fringed by willow copses, much sought for floating flirtations and picnic teas. But to reach the older part of Chertsey, one had better cross by the ferry at Laleham, and take a mile of straight hedgerow path over the Abbey Mead, passing a crumbling fragment, all that now represents what was once the richest of Surrey’s monasteries, as it was the first founded in the county by St. Augustine.

Nowadays there is not much air of ecclesiastical dignity about Chertsey, rather of quiet prosperity in the long thoroughfare that crooks itself nearly two miles from the station to the bridge, connecting the new quarters that have sprung up at either end. The lion of this straggling town is the house on the right side of the way up to the station, marked by a tablet recording how “here the last accents flowed from Cowley’s tongue”; but such a relic has gone down in value since the days when Abraham Cowley ranked among the first flight of British poets. A name more familiar to this generation is that of Charles James Fox, who had his country retreat at St. Ann’s Hill. Another notable neighbour of Chertsey was Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton. About three miles behind the town, past Botley’s Park, Potter’s Park, and Ottershaw, the now rich woods of Anningsley make a monument to that earnest philanthropist, who fixed his home here on poor sandy land that he might give employment in improving it by plantations. His death came about through too consistent carrying out of his principle that animals can always be managed by kindness; he was killed by being thrown from an unbroken colt; then the wife whom he had chosen with so much scrupulosity, after pupils trained for that post had failed to pass his examination of trying ordeals, showed herself a worthy helpmeet by spending the rest of her life in heart-broken seclusion.

Pleasant walks may be taken by those parks to the Basingstoke Canal and the valley of the Wey, a few miles behind Chertsey. But no one who has an hour to spare here should miss the ascent of St. Ann’s Hill, which lies a short mile to the west on the road leading out near the railway station. The grounds, with their grotto, “Temple to Friendship” and such like, are of course private; but at the “Golden Grove,” notable by a tree bearing up a platform in front, one can turn off the road for a public path leading over the hill. Though only about 200 feet high, this richly-wooded eminence looks far over the Thames valley; and through the foliage at the top vistas have been cut framing such prominent landmarks as Windsor Castle, the Holloway College, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Richmond Hill, the Crystal Palace, and the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court, till it had ceased to obtrude itself on so many points of view to the west of London. There are traces of an old encampment that gave this hill the forgotten name of Aldbury; and hidden among the trees is a “Nun’s Well,” from which perhaps it was re-christened after a now vanished chapel of St. Ann.

A couple of miles above Chertsey, between the Thames and the big village of Addlestone, swells up Woburn Park, its grounds once celebrated as a ferme ornée, but now a nursery of the young idea, where prospect-hunters are out of bounds. Round it one may take a pleasant path from Chertsey Bridge, leading over the green level of Chertsey Mead, and curving into the Weybridge Road, where it crosses a Bourne not far from the canalised course of the Wey. This path cuts off the bends of the Thames tow-path, which as far as Weybridge keeps the Middlesex bank. But if one were going from Chertsey Bridge to Walton Bridge, more than half the distance is saved by taking the fairly straight road through Shepperton in Middlesex. Travellers on wheels are willing to give a wide berth to the Thames bendings, cyclists indeed being warned off the tow-path; and the modern Great Western Road, like the old Roman way to Silchester, does not touch Surrey till the bridge at Staines has been crossed.

Thus Weybridge, lying off direct roads, entangled between the Thames and the Wey, seems not so well known as it deserves to be. Richmond excepted, I declare this the pleasantest riverside town in Surrey. It stretches roomily from the river to the railway, with one end in the lush meadowland of the Thames valley, and the other rising on the heath and pine-wood scenery so characteristic of West Surrey. I once met a honeymoon couple from the North who were pining among the tame richness of England, but their spirits revived at the “Hand and Spear,” near Weybridge station, which I prescribed as a tonic in their case. Here, behind the railway, begins the wooded ridge of St. George’s Hill, the top of which was an ancient camp, and one of Cæsar’s supposed stations in Surrey. Nearly the whole of this long height is a private enclosure, but it has been liberally set open to ramblers who will do no mischief. In a central glade among the pine woods is even provided a Swiss Châlet for refreshments; then a little south of this, where

the ridge makes a sudden drop, opens a clear and wide view to the Downs. The southern gate of the park lets one out on a road between Byfleet and Cobham; and the winding tracks through the woods lead down on either side to varied scenes, on the west the mazes of the Wey, straightened out by its canalised arm, on the east an expanse of common and fir woods falling to the alluvial bed of the Mole.

It is no wonder, then, that many Londoners—too many, says the last comer—have built themselves villas on the dry upper slopes of Wey bridge, while the older part of the town on the river bank is better known to transient visitors of aquatic tastes. A link between the two quarters is the spire rising near the bridge over the Wey to mark the oldest part of all. The rebuilt church contains a tomb by Chantrey for the Duchess of York, whose residence at Oatlands is also commemorated by a pillar on the Green, a second-hand monument that once ornamented the Seven Dials of St. Giles. Another royalty, Louis Philippe, for a time found sepulchre in the Roman Catholic chapel here, till the bones of this exiled family might be removed to their native land.

Oatlands Park borders Wey bridge on the east. If the general reader be surprised that Drayton, in his account of what Milton styles “Royal-towered Thames” couples Oatlands with Hampton Court and Richmond, that is because readers with so much to read forget how this, too, has been a palace, which made one stage of King Charles’s long journey to the scaffold; and his youngest son, as born here, was Henry of Oatlands. In the park stood two yew trees, some hundreds of yards apart, between which legend draws its long bow in measuring by them a feat of Queen Bess’s archery. The mansion is now an hotel; and the grounds have been encroached on for building plots. A century ago it belonged to George IV.’s military brother, that Duke of York whom Charles Greville, in his critical way, calls the only one of the royal princes bearing the character of an English gentleman; and he touches on the Duchess’s extraordinary love of dogs, parrots, and monkeys. The graves of her hundred pets still ornament the park, which has also to show such a costly grotto as was dear to Georgian “improvers.” Another feature of these grounds is the Broadwater Lake, representing a former course of the Thames. The tongue of land beyond was once Middlesex, but by alteration of the channel has been thrown into Surrey.

To this side the tow-path crosses at Weybridge, and one can double the distance to Walton by following the bends of the river opposite Shepperton and Halliford. Near Walton Bridge is reached a scene of historic note, for Cowey Stakes here has been taken to be the ford by which Cæsar crossed the Thames on his pursuit of Cassivelaunus. What will be more obvious to the wayfarer is a very modern encampment of tents, with other shelters and conveniences, including a floating bath, which has sprung up of late years near the Middlesex end of Walton Bridge. The town of Walton-on-Thames stands mainly back from the river, its station being a mile behind. It has no such wild background as St. George’s Hill, but lies pleasantly mixed up with groves and parks, and seems a snug place of retreat for quiet-minded Londoners. Walton Church was the scene of Elizabeth’s cautiously Anglican view of the Sacrament:—

Christ was the Word who spake it,
He took the bread and brake it;
And what that Word did make it
That I believe, and take it.

This church boasts the tomb of Lilly the astrologer, and monuments by Chantrey and Roubiliac; then near it is to be seen the house of the regicide Bradshaw, now split up into cottages. In the churchyard is buried “bright, broken Maginn,” Thackeray’s “Captain Shandon,” who set so many tables in a roar.

But the literary and historic memories of such places may not much concern those who have come out for a day on the river. Each of these Thames-side towns is a haven for escaped Londoners, often familiar with little more of them than the boat-houses on their banks, and the inns, some of which seem too eager to make their hay while the sun shines. Each has its fleet of boats, moored thickly together in whole rafts, its clubs, and its annual gala day of the local regatta. On a fine Sunday or Saturday afternoon every lock is packed with youth and beauty, set off by gay colours and airy costumes. Every reach within railway ride of London may be found lively with a jumble of craft of all sorts, from Canadian canoes to Venetian gondolas, tiny yachts, skiffs, tubs, outriggers, punts, ferry-boats, eights, fours, “dongolas,” “randans,” pairs, rowed, poled, tugged, towed, or idly moored, like the big house-boats whose cramped luxury gives a lazy refuge from cares and taxes. Among all these the barges of business move like surly and clumsy tyrants; and water-scorching machines sweep through the fluttered crowd as wolves in a sheepfold. Steamers and motor-launches have replaced the State barges in which Lord Mayors and such-like used to progress in the days when to be a “jolly young waterman” was more of a trade than a pleasure.

Those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James—

were winged by mercenary arms. It seems well that the golden or gilded youth of our generation are more active, taking their amusement moult tristement, as might be judged by an unsympathetic foreigner. An English writer has found fault with Thames boats as “built for woman and not for man, for lovely woman to recline, parasol in one hand and tiller ropes in the other, while man—inferior man—pulled and pulled and pulled as an ox yoked to the plough.” But that is hardly fair now that girls boyishly take their turn at the oar, even exhibiting the spectacle of whole galleys deftly womanned by crews of water-Amazons. The only right left to man here is the panting and perspiring toil of the tow-path, to which he bends devotedly like “the captives depicted on Egyptian monuments with cords about their necks.” Such slavery may well be preferred to the aid of those exorbitant and foul-mouthed hirelings who infest the river banks in search of a job, which to Edwin makes a labour of love, so Angelina be drawn along cool, at ease, grateful, and admiring. With his dynamic energy, contrast the contemplative, perhaps misanthropic, and apparently celibate joys of the angler, throned upon his punt or posted on the bank, as he has been ever since Pope’s day—

The patient fisher takes his silent stand,
Intent, his angle trembling in his hand:
With looks unmoved, he hopes the scaly breed,
And eyes the dancing cork, and bending reed.

Below Walton, the Thames winds quietly on between banks that again suggest a quotation from Denham—

No stupendous precipice denies
Access, no horror turns away our eyes.

The panorama is one of green meadows, garden grounds, shady islands, cuts and creeks, Sunbury Lock, boat-houses, inns, water-works, racecourse enclosures, and hints of villages lying back from the river; but Hampton Church stands out on the bank; then a string of islets brings us on to the mouth of the Mole opposite Hampton Court. This palace of popular resort, with its galleries, courts, gardens, and park avenues, its barracks, its many houses of entertainment, and its terminus of London tramways, is in Middlesex; but its station is across the bridge in Surrey; and if one wanted matter to fill a few pages, one might fairly include a description of its treasures. But so much has to be said of the Surrey side, that we had better pass on with one look at this monument of old England, touched with graces of continental taste.

The tow-path, that has been in Surrey since we left Weybridge, again crosses to pass with princely breadth under the wall of Hampton Park. But on the Surrey side also, we are not kept far from the river, for, after a diversion through Molesey, the road comes to the bank by the old church of Thames Ditton; then, through the outskirts of Long Ditton, it joins the much-wheeled Ripley road, which in front of Surbiton becomes a waterside esplanade beseeming that most respectable London colony that has the name of being affected by west-end tradesmen and the like “warm” citizens. Such, at least, is the reproach brought against it by satirical scribblers, who perhaps live at Peckham or Camden Town, envious at heart of Surbiton’s social amenities as described in the instructive life of “Mr. Bailey Martin.” Another novelist suggests how Surbiton wants nothing but a pier to look like a seaside resort, with its parade, bandstand, and so forth, along which, by two miles of houses, we come into the ancient borough of Kingston, that makes a core for so much villadom.

As an independent town, this, with its excrescences, Surbiton, Norbiton, Malden, is second for size in Surrey, overgrown only by Croydon; and Kingston has also a Middlesex Lambeth in its transpontine quarter, Hampton Wick. It is so far the county seat that the Hall of the County Council has been built here; while it no longer shares with Guildford and Croydon the dignity of assize town. There was a time when it might boast of higher rank, for in the tenth century the Saxon kings were crowned at this Rheims or Scone of South England. It seems always to have been a place of importance through its ford, then through a bridge which was long the next one above London Bridge. When a hostile attack on London failed from the Southwark side, the enemy had nothing for it but to march all the way round by Kingston, as Sir Thomas Wyat did to little purpose. In the Civil War a

bridge of boats came to be thrown across the river at Putney. The first movement of this war was about Kingston, a place worth seizing as key of the road to Portsmouth, so in turn held by Royalists and Roundheads; and almost the last sharp encounter between the two parties was a running fight that ended in the outskirts of the town. London citizens of that day must have had stirring news, when more than once they heard of hostile forces so near their gates as at Hampton and Hounslow. The wayfarer on Wimbledon Common is still apt to be startled by the sight of train-bands slinking in knots from copse to hollow; but these are only our Boy Scouts practising the devices of modern war; and presently, we know, they will go home in peace to their tea. It was otherwise when Captain Hew-Agag-in-pieces, or the doughty Sir Hudibras, could not take his family on a trip up the river without the risk of falling into the hands of malignant Philistines, its banks a paradise lost to Milton, while perhaps Denham or Herrick might have safely ventured—

With soft-smooth virgins for our chaste disport
To Richmond, Kingston, or to Hampton Court.

Near the end of Kingston Bridge, now crossed by a tramway, stands the restored Church, which has the distinction of being one of the largest in Surrey, and contains old monuments, besides a show of modern memorial windows. The chapel where the Saxon kings were crowned has been destroyed; but the rough stone on which they traditionally sat is reverently enclosed in the market-place for all to see but not to touch. Could it speak for itself, this might tell strange tales of forgotten superstition, like that other boulder in Westminster Abbey, uneasy seat of Scottish kings, that must have travelled so far by land and sea since it made Jacob’s pillow. By a recently “restored” statue of Queen Anne before the Town Hall, Kingston also shows special devotion to the memory of that truly dead sovereign. Such are “the memorials and the things of fame that do renown this city”—as it might claim to style itself; and the market-place whereabout they stand makes often a lively and picturesque scene, on which the quasi-cockney mingles with the true rustic.

Kingston is a headquarter of Thames boating, and its population must to a considerable extent be made up of such “Jacks” as are the camp-followers of this exercise. It is also fortunate in lying close to three royal parks that have all become practically public pleasure-grounds. The pleasantest way down the river is by the high edge of Richmond Park; but below also one may take the tow-path, now on the Surrey bank; while a middle way is the road passing over Ham Common. The Middlesex bank is almost entirely taken up by private grounds; though at Hampton Wick there is a tea-garden resort reached by a path from the road behind. In the secluded back-water opening here there used to be a capital bathing station, the nearest to London; but this has now been closed by the excessive modesty of suburban senators; and not till the shades of dusk may the youth of Teddington sally forth to make a noisy Arcadia of the tow-path. Teddington lies in Middlesex, between Hampton Wick and Twickenham, where the spread of villadom has not yet wholly overwhelmed market-gardens, like that cultivated lovingly but at a loss by the author of Lorna Doone.

At Teddington (Tide-end-town?) is the last rushing weir, and the Thames current is for the last time bridled by a lock, not counting that half-lock at Richmond. Henceforth, without ceasing to be a pleasure-stream, it attends more strictly to business, and its voyagers have to reckon with the tide. Above Teddington, the river is frequented rather by more or less practised oarsmen; but on the Richmond reach we may find a larger proportion of land-lubbers splashing manfully as best they can; and on public holidays, it might be safer not to mingle in the throng of lasses and lads who are trying their prentice hands at aquatic pursuits, prices being then raised as the standard of experience is lowered.

All the building is still on the Middlesex side, where Twickenham has pleasant homes to show, as also celebrated ones like Pope’s Villa; but the main part of the town lies hidden away behind Eel Pie Island. The Surrey tow-path is bare, but for Ham House, whose famous avenue, beyond Twickenham Ferry, opens on to the bank, here a broad bowery sward, with room for all the engaged couples of Petersham and Richmond to keep aloof from each other. Eyes less preoccupied will be attracted to the trees and lawns of Orleans House and Marble Hill across the river, then arrested by the noble brow of Richmond Hill that seems to bar our way on.

Richmond, of old known as West Sheen, was once a royal residence, and its Green shows a fragment of the palace in which Elizabeth and other sovereigns died. Most of Richmond’s antiquity has disappeared, down to the renowned Cobweb Cellar, swept away two or three years ago, beneath a rebuilt tavern; but much of the place still wears a dignified look of Georgian old fashion, borne out by the narrow, bent main thoroughfare that on a Saturday night will be more crowded than the Strand. The newer streets above are quiet and genteel enough; but all the quarter between the station and the front of busy boat-houses lays itself out for strangers brought by four railway lines from London; and the streets here are thickly set with houses of entertainment of every rank, including confectioners to provide the “maids of honour” cheese-cakes that are at Richmond what whitebait is or was at Greenwich. These two places long made rival goals of London junketings up and down the river; but automobiles now ply farther afield, carrying their best customers past the Richmond hotels, so that the renowned “Star and Garter” had to close its doors, to be reconstructed as a hospital for disabled soldiers.

The great sight here, of course, is Richmond Hill, to which a gradual ascent leads from the bridge, or from the bank above the boat-houses a steeper one up the slope laid out as a beautiful public garden, its highest part a shady terrace, commanding that rich landscape over which gazed Jeanie Deans, in her heart perhaps preferring the view from Arthur’s Seat. “A huge sea of verdure, with crossing and intersecting promontories of massive and tufted groves, was tenanted by numberless flocks and herds, which seemed to wander unrestrained and unbounded through the rich pastures. The Thames, here turreted with villas and there garlanded with forests, moved on slowly and placidly, like the mighty monarch of the scene, to whom all its other beauties were but accessories.” Flocks and herds, indeed, are not so visible in our day; but the hundred barks and skiffs seen by Scott, may appear multiplied by tenfold on the reach of the river extending at our feet.

Passing on before the transformed “Star and Garter,” and through the gate of the Park, from this corner of it one has the same outlook—

... Here let us sweep
The boundless landscape: now the raptured eye
Exulting swift to huge Augusta send,
Now to the Sister Hills that skirt her plain,
To lofty Harrow now, and now to where
Majestic Windsor lifts his princely brow....
Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around,
Of hills and dales, and woods and lawns and spires,
And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all
The stretching landscape into smoke decays.

Richmond Park is nearly nine miles in circuit, at its Robin Hood Gate almost adjoining the wilder expanse of Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common. It is a royal demesne, but by degrees, one of them a “village Hampden” lawsuit, it has come to be treated as a public pleasure-ground. Quite recently King Edward crowned former concessions by giving up game-preserving in the many thickets that shade its swards, stocked with herds of not too shy deer. In a central hollow are ponds that serve for skating. Every part is now open except the enclosures of several residences within the park, which are tenanted by royal favour. The White Lodge on the farther side was the youthful home of the Princess of Wales. Pembroke Lodge, near the Richmond Gate, was granted as retreat to the veteran statesman Earl Russell, having originally been built for that Countess of Pembroke young George III. loved in vain. On a mound here Henry VIII. is said to have watched for the rocket from Anne Boleyn’s scaffold on Tower Hill, as signal of his being a not disconsolate widower.

On the riverside below Richmond Green, for public recreation is also given up the old Deer Park, over which the Chinese pagoda beacons us towards Kew Gardens. The Observatory here has now, through disturbance caused by the vicinity of electric lines, lost its function of testing delicate instruments. Along the road by the Lion Gate of the Gardens, Richmond and Kew almost run into each other. As usual, it is twice as far by the pleasanter path on the bank, which passes outside the Park and Gardens, with views across the river upon St. Margaret’s, then on Isleworth, on the grounds of Sion House, the home of an English Duke, but at Lisbon its keys are or long were kept by the sisterhood banished hence at the Reformation; then on the wharves and slums of Brentford, county town of Middlesex, where the Brent makes shamefaced confluence as a canal. Thus we come to the new Kew Bridge and Kew Green, which still keeps a look of the dignity it wore as a favourite residence of George III.; even in our own day it has housed a branch of the royal family at Cambridge Cottage. The place is a great resort of his present Majesty’s subjects, for whose refreshment appear many tea-houses and taverns. The grounds of Kew Palace are now thrown into the gardens, that,

open at all reasonable hours, make such a famous sight. Every Londoner knows the Palm-Houses, the Botanical Houses, the show of aquatic plants, and the gallery of Miss North’s paintings from all over the world. But what many a visitor may pass unnoticed is what Richard Jefferies judged the best show of all, the enclosure called the Herbaceous Ground, “a living dictionary of English wildflowers,” to which “the meadow and the cornfield, the river, the mountain and the woodland, the sea shore, the very waste place by the roadside, each has sent its peculiar representatives,” so as here to present an essence of wild nature, and an epitome of the hills, woodland banks, and hedgerows of Surrey.

Thomson poetically speaks of Richmond as the place where “silver Thames first rural grows”; but in prosaic fact the Surrey bank below Kew may often be found a bushy solitude, sometimes a sloppy one, when overflowed by high tides; and on the other side, the villas of Gunnersbury once passed, the advance of Chiswick is masked by trees and market-gardens as yet occupying a tongue of flat land, round which the river makes a southward bend. The tow-path takes us on beside Mortlake, reached at its “White Hart” haven of London omnibuses, and beneath the railway bridge, so crowded when this is the goal of the University boat-race. Did one care to explore Mortlake, in the Roman Catholic cemetery, behind the station, would be found an extraordinary modern tomb, a huge stone tent decorated with crescents and stars more conspicuous than crosses, beneath which Sir Richard Burton rests after his many travels. In the church is buried Dr. Dee, that “last of the magicians,” who was indeed one of the first of our mathematicians. Farther back Richmond Park is gained through the amenities of Sheen, now dwindling before the builder; but there is still a pretty patch of Sheen Common.

The river front of Mortlake almost touches that of Barnes. Here it is the turn of Surrey to throw out a flat promontory of market-gardens, across the neck of which one can make a short-cut to Putney or to Barnes Common. Keeping the bank, one has rather a dull walk round by the ferry to Chiswick Church, then opposite Chiswick Mall and the old-fashioned riverside front of Hammersmith, where the bridge would bring one fairly into London. The London County Council’s scheme to run regular steamers so far did not command the success it deserved; but in the fine season ply occasional excursion Argoes, holding on up to Kew or still farther.

The river now becomes imprisoned in water-works, wharves, and piers; and at low tide it reveals unlovely stretches of mud below the scrubby withs that bind this shorn Samson’s writhings. Yet still, besides craft of business, it may be found alive with boats, including police-cruisers commissioned against boys surreptitiously bathing from a bit of rubbish-strewn wilderness on the Middlesex bank, that in a few years will be overflowed by the tide of houses creeping up behind. Meanwhile, why not leave those unshamed urchins alone, whose aquatic gambols till lately made a cooling sight from the opposite tow-path? One or two of them were drowned every year, it is said; but the sum of life saved by our grandmotherly councillors must fall far below the amount of health, cleanliness, and cheerfulness stolen on such waste spots; and it might well be considered what will become of this country a generation after its youth has been schooled and policed out of exulting to risk life, limb, and skin.

I forget what last-century autobiographer mentions a party of schoolfellows landing to bathe a little higher up in the grounds of Brandenburgh House, then occupied by the Margravine of Anspach, and being surprised by her unserene Highness in person, who, armed with a riding whip, took the young Adams at sore disadvantage. This vivacious Amazon had been widow of Lord Craven, who built another house, called Craven Cottage, just below the osier-fronted waste at present awaiting reclamation. The Craven Cottage grounds have been fortified and garrisoned by a club that carries on the business of drawing enormous crowds to bet and roar over the performances of professional athletes, their din suggesting another hint as to the welfare of the next generation. But we may take hope to see how manfully the striplings of Putney and Hammersmith ply oar and sculls in what else might be their hours of ease; as everywhere within reach of the capital, that sympathetic visitor, Mr. John Burroughs, could admire “young athletic London, male and female, rushing forth as hungry for the open air and the water as young mountain herds for salt.”

Ramblers on the Surrey side get a tantalising glimpse of expensive pastimes, for the tow-path leads them beside the grounds of Barn Elms, home of more than one notability in the last three centuries, now arena of the Ranelagh Club’s sports. At the end of this enclosure is bridged what looks like a muddy back-water, but is the mouth of the Beverley Brook, so idyllic as it flows by Wimbledon Common to Roehampton; then beyond we come to the boat clubs and taverns of Putney, facing the grounds of Fulham Palace, now turned into a public park along the river wall.

Putney is a suburb of much respectability, rising on to heights of gentility at the back, and merging with the super-gentility of Roehampton’s palatial villas. In future this birthplace of Gibbon may also be known as abode of the poet Swinburne. At present it has an annual hour of clamorous fame as starting-place of the University boat-race. In the past it made an appearance in history as headquarters of Cromwell’s army during the autumn of 1647, while negotiations went on with the Parliament at Westminster on one hand, and with the King at Hampton Court on the other. The church, then used as a council hall, has one fine old feature in the chantry of Bishop West; and the way in which it faces the corresponding tower of Fulham has provoked a legend of their having been built by two giant sisters, who, as in the case of St. Catherine’s and St. Martha’s Chapel near Guildford, are credited with using one hammer between them, which they flung backwards and forwards across the river.

Putney, as yet unfettered by tramways, is closely linked with London by motor-buses plying all the way to northern and eastern suburbs, as well as by trains of more than one line. But now the tow-path fails us, and we must take ship to keep an eye on the Surrey shores. A little below, the river will touch the four-mile-circle from Charing Cross. Once more it is bordered by trees and lawns, but these belong to Hurlingham Club and to Wandsworth’s new park; and it has far to go before reaching green fields again on the shores of Kent and Essex. Shades of its prison-house close in upon it fast, beginning with the group of grimy wharves and mills amid which ends the bedraggled Wandle, turned to many a task from its source to its mouth. The old buildings of Wandsworth have been vanishing like the Mayoralty of Garratt Green behind it; but it has still some quaint nooks, and the true Surrey feature of its open Common.

The next steamboat stage is by Battersea Reach, where it takes an artist’s eye to catch the points of beauty dear to Turner. Battersea Park faces the restored dignity of Chelsea. A huge railway arsenal covers the site of those Nine Elms that have long gone to make coffins for the dancers in Vauxhall Gardens. Doulton’s pottery works look across to the Tate Gallery. Lambeth Palace is passed, then St. Thomas’s Hospital stares from wakeful eyes at the House of Parliament. Below Westminster Bridge, Surrey is to give a site for the Hôtel de Ville of our County Council; but as yet the bank here makes a shabby contrast to the clubs and hotels of the Middlesex side. St. Paul’s looks down upon Southwark, which has now a Cathedral Church of its own in St. Saviour’s, with its old monuments and new memorial windows. This lies at the end of London Bridge, beyond which the tanneries of Bermondsey have hidden the very site of its once famous Abbey, opposite the Tower of London. The last Surrey parish is Rotherhithe, where Captain Lemuel Gulliver could find a pleasant retreat after his voyages, when it was known as Redriff; but now the name of its Cherry Orchard pier seems a mockery, till one searches out the groves and garden-beds of Southwark Park, hidden behind a front of wharves and warehouses. A dull change this from the green meads of Egham or the slopes of Richmond. But a painter in words, too early lost to his Surrey home, George W. Steevens, can show colour, life, and romance in those avenues of dingy buildings and naked masts.

Always the benign sun-and-smoke clothes them with softness and harmony; it softens their vermilion advertisements to harmony with the tinted azure of the sky and the vague grey-brown of the water. Brutal business built them, to ship and unship, and be as crass and crude as they would, but the smoke turns them into the semblance of sleepy monsters basking by the river they love. Presently the tall sky-line breaks and drops; let in between the monsters appears a terrace of tiny riverside houses, huddled together as in a miniature. There is a tiny tavern with a plank-built terrace rising on piles out of the water, a tiny shop all aslant, a tiny brown house with a pot-belly of a bow-window. It all babbles of Jack and Poll, of crimps and tots of rum, and incredible yarns in the bar-parlour. Next, between the dusky wharves, an Italian church-tower soars up out of a nest of poor houses; the sun catches its white face and transfigures it. Then, the dearest sight of all—ships appearing out of the land, fore and main and mizzen, peak and truck, halliards and stays, and men like flies furling top-gallant sails above the roofs of London. As we open the region of the docks we are in a great city of ships—big steamers basking lazily with their red bellies half out of water, frantic spluttering tugs, placid brown-sailed barges, reckless banging lighters—and behind all this, clumps and thickets and avenues of masts and spars and tackle stretching stretching infinitely on every side. The houses have melted all away, and London is become a city of ships.

Here we go on shore from Father Thames, that

sober and steady as he looks, leads so many a British stream to end its skittish, froward, and headstrong youth by running away to sea:—

And round about him many a pretty page
Attended duly, ready to obey;
All little rivers which owe vassalage
To him, as to their lord, and tribute pay:
The chalky Kennet and the Thetis grey;
The moorish Colne, and the soft sliding Breane;
The wanton Lea, that oft doth lose his way;
And the still Darent, in whose waters clean
Ten thousand fishes play and deck his pleasant stream.

Further on in his catalogue of rivers, Spenser gives the Mole a whole couplet to itself, well known to guide-book writers in search of copy. But one rubs one’s eyes to find him omitting Surrey’s principal tributary, so compliant, too, in yoke of rhyme,—the Wey, a clansman of the Welsh Wye, and also of that disguised “Thetis grey,” which turns out to be the stream flowing into the Thames at Cookham, on maps styled Wye, though a high authority suspects that it adopted this good old British name only by suggestion from its course beside Wycombe, even as the men of some broken clan might wrap themselves in the tartan of Campbell or Macdonald.

III
DOWN THE WEY

THE chief river flowing through Surrey is one which Pope shows himself not infallible in mislabelling “the chalky Wey that pours a milky wave.” But as the Amazon is not altogether a Brazilian stream, so the Wey has its rise in other counties; and still further to compare great and small, there might be some question as to its main source. One branch springs on Blackdown in Sussex, flowing round Hindhead; another comes less deviously from beyond the Hampshire Alton, rising beside White’s Selborne. The latter has more honour in maps, so let us take this up where it enters a bulging south-western corner of Surrey near Farnham’s pleasant market-town, whose antiquity is vouched for by a scattering of old houses and cobbled ways about the long main street. Here the Wey crooks through green meadows, on which oast-houses and stacked hop-poles, if not a show of trailing vines, reveal the rich gault soil making this corner of the country an oasis of hop cultivation, especially in the woodbine variety. It is but natural, then, that ale should be a renowned product of Farnham, which has also, at the outlying village of Wrecclesham, a notable manufactory of green pottery known as Farnham ware. If I am not mistaken, the hop-fields appear to have shrunk of late years hereabouts; but still Farnham would make a scene for that story of a learned stranger preaching on the evidences of design as evinced in the study of optics, and being duly complimented by the churchwarden: “capital sermon of yours, sir, about the ’opsticks; we mostly calls ’em ’oppoles in these parts; but we knew what you meant!”

The lion of the place is its Castle, originally built in Stephen’s troubled days, and now making a lordly abode for the Bishops of Winchester. Its most prominent appearance in our annals is during the Civil War, when it was held for the Parliament by George Wither, and for the King by a more loyal bard, Sir John Denham, but was partly blown up by the namesake of another poet, Sir William Waller; then it came to be dismantled under Cromwell. Restored and modernised, it still preserves the ivied Keep enshrining a flower garden, Fox’s Tower, the stately hall, the ancient servants’ hall and kitchen, the chapel with its rich carvings, said to be by Grinling Gibbons, and other old features to put a prelate in no danger of forgetting his historic dignity. The park, with its elm avenue, open to the public, is a noble expanse sloping up towards Hungry Hill, by which one passes from this home of peaceful state to the dusty purlieus of Aldershot Camp.

Below the Castle, on the opposite side of the high-road, stands the Parish Church, among whose memorials the most interesting is the tomb of William Cobbett beside the porch. Inside the building also is a tablet in his honour, as could hardly have been foreseen by that porcupinish Tory-democrat, whose quills were so readily roused at the very name of a parson. He is believed, not without question, to have been born at the “Jolly Farmer” Inn, near the station; and he died at Normandy Farm, on the north side of the Hog’s Back. Amid his crabbed grumblings and cross-grained whims, his heart always warms at the recollection of boyish toils and pranks about Farnham, his early entrance on life as an unschooled bird-scarer, his games of rolling and sliding down the sandy sides of Crooksbury, his bird’s-nesting sport on its tall trees, his trotting after the hounds, and his malicious trick of drawing a red herring across a hare’s scent to revenge himself for a cut from the huntsman’s whip.

Another memory honoured at Farnham is that of Augustus Toplady, author of “Rock of Ages,” better known than “Rural Rides,” who was born here, 1740. Izaak Walton was a sojourner at the Castle, and must have had many a day on the Wey, as in his old age on the Itchen. A writer of our own time connected with Farnham was “Edna Lyall,” more than one of whose novels contains sympathetic descriptions of the scenery around “Firdale,” the quiet market-town that “wound its long street of red-roofed houses along a sheltered valley, in between fir-crowned heights.”

But more resounding names are familiar in this neighbourhood. Just outside of the town, down the Wey, lies Moor Park, the seat of Sir William Temple, whose saturnine dependant Swift here ate the bitter bread of servitude, and at least began A Tale of a Tub, that would make such an inspiring model for Cobbett, the gardener’s boy, who on his runaway trip to Kew spent all the coppers he had left on a copy of it, curiosity being for once stronger than hunger. For a time Moor Park was turned into a Hydropathic Establishment. A recent owner tried to shut up the old right of way through it, but was sturdily withstood by the Cobbetts of this generation; and one can walk unquestioned right beside the house and garden, where Temple’s heart is buried under a sundial; then on past the cavern keeping green the name of Mother Ludlam, a mistily white witch, whose caldron is still shown in Frensham Church. Thus may be reached the farther gate near the Wey, beside which a restored cottage is pointed out by vague tradition as the abode either of Swift or of Stella, or as their meeting-place.

Across the bridge here opens the gate of another park, in which are enclosed the remains of Waverley Abbey, the finest ecclesiastical ruins in Surrey, not very rich in such treasures. This was the first Cistercian monastery in England, whose scanty remains stand tangled in greenery, a beautiful sight, and still substantial enough to indicate its fallen grandeur. Recent excavations by the Surrey Archæological Society have been well rewarded. The eighteenth-century mansion kept the old monks’ garden, in which Cobbett worked as a boy, and got his fill of fruit, for, he says, the produce could never have been consumed unless the servants lent a mouth. A visitor to the neighbourhood was Sir Walter Scott, who carried away the name of Waverley as a fruitful seed. His famous novel has nothing of the Abbey save its name; but Sir Nigel, a lively work of one of our generation’s romancers, Sir A. Conan Doyle, has brought this skeleton of a great religious house to life for us as it was in Plantagenet days.

In the centre lay the broad Abbey buildings, with church and cloisters, hospitium, chapter-house and fraterhouse, all buzzing with a busy life. Through the open window came the low hum of the voices of the brethren as they walked in pious converse in the ambulatory below. From across the cloisters there rolled the distant rise and fall of a Gregorian chaunt, where the precentor was hard at work upon the choir; while down in the chapter-house sounded the strident voice of Brother Peter, expounding the rule of St. Bernard to the novices. Abbot John rose to stretch his cramped limbs. He looked out at the green sward of the cloisters and at the graceful line of open Gothic arches which skirted a covered walk for the brethren within. Two and two, in their black and white garb, with slow step and heads inclined, they paced round and round. Several of the more studious had brought their illuminating work from the scriptorium and sat in the warm sunshine, with their little platters of pigments and packets of gold-leaf before them, their shoulders rounded and their faces sunk low over the white sheets of vellum. There, too, was the copper-worker, with his burin and graver. Learning and art were not traditions with the Cistercians as with the parent Order of the Benedictines, and yet the library of Waverley was well filled both with precious books and with pious students. But the true glory of the Cistercian lay in his outdoor work; and so ever and anon there passed through the cloister some sunburned monk, soiled mattock or shovel in hand, with his gown looped to his knee, fresh from the fields or the garden. The lush green water-meadows speckled with the heavy-fleeced sheep, the acres of cornland reclaimed from heather and bracken, the vineyards on the southern slope of Crooksbury Hill, the rows of Hankley fishponds, the Frensham marshes drained and sown with vegetables, the spacious pigeon cotes, all circled the great Abbey round with the visible labours of the Order.

An active youth, like the hero of this tale, might have followed the windings of the Wey below Farnham, whence it sets out as with a bold design of tunnelling the Hog’s Back, but is content to turn away after piercing the railway. The heedful pedestrian had better not try to keep by its green banks. From Farnham station he has a pretty walk by a road that in half an hour brings him to the Waverley end of the bridge. For the longer way to the other side, he takes the Hog’s Back road, turning off on a byway marked “Moor Park.” Above this left bank, opposite Waverley Abbey, rise the well-wooded slopes of Crooksbury, that to Cobbett’s untravelled eyes seemed such

a mighty mountain; but he may often have scampered up it in a few minutes. From the top there is an open look-out upon the line of the Hog’s Back to the north; in other directions the view is much impeded by the tall trees, ranked in sharp lines, that from some points suggest a gigantic yew clipped to a pattern.

An hour’s walk by road through the foot of these woods would bring us back to the much meandering course of the river at Elstead, but at the cost of leaving out Tilford, where comes in the branch from Blackdown. One should by all means turn off on the right to this picturesque village, with its islanded green, its old bridges, and its “King’s Oak,” reputed as marking the boundary of the Abbey lands in Stephen’s reign. Such great age for this landmark has been questioned, but it shows so plainly the burden of time that a colleague and successor has been provided which will authentically chronicle the date of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Tilford Church, not very attractive outside, has a reredos in memory of Charlotte Smith, that now forgotten novelist, who died a century ago at Tilford House, said to have been known to another author still well remembered in nurseries, Dr. Watts.

From Tilford open beautiful rambles by Frensham Ponds on to the heaths of Hindhead, also to be gained from Elstead by way of Thursley and the Punch Bowl. On the other side of the river, fine commons rise up to the Hog’s Back. Between these swelling and bristling heights, we follow the green valley of the Wey, that below Elstead again ties itself into knots of vagary, then beyond the Somerset Bridge begins to behave more prettily as it enters the park of Peperharow. To the left side stands Lord Midleton’s mansion, near the Church, restored from the designs of Pugin, and enriched with interior ornamentation that make it one of the finest in this part of Surrey. On the other side, at the south edge of the Park, in Oxenford Farm, which keeps its fragment of real antiquity, Pugin reproduced an old English grange; and not far off the same architect built a shrine for Bonfield Well, one of old medical repute. As may be supposed from the fact of a parish church standing in the middle of this demesne, there is a public way through it, coming out at the village of Eashing, where one should not neglect to visit the picturesque old bridge, now guarded against parochial vandalism by the National Trust.

The Godalming high-road, running by the south side of Peperharow, here deserts the Wey valley. Another road, crossing at Eashing, mounts up by the fine modern Church of Shackleford and over the heights of Hurtmore, to come down again to Godalming by the Charterhouse School. But the pedestrian should by all means keep a path near the left side of the Wey, passing under a high bank to the bend where, along a charming little bit of woodland, cleft by green gulleys, is reached a closed-in swimming-place. Beyond this first sign of Godalming he gets on a road again, below that hillside suburb that has grown up about the transplanted Charterhouse School.

Thackeray’s contemporaries would stare to see their old “Smithfield” seminary in its picturesque new surroundings, the chief buildings set on a hill, where they form a conspicuous landmark. Only foreigners may need to be told how Charterhouse is one of our oldest “public hives of puerile resort” fixed in the heart of London till a generation ago, when it set the example of swarming into the country, as has since been the tendency of other great London schools. From the original building, now occupied by Merchant Taylors’ School, was brought bodily the old archway, carved with idle names, Thackeray’s among them; but the rest of the buildings wear an air of still spick-and-span dignity. The Chapel is worth seeing, and so is the Museum, which contains MSS. and drawings of Thackeray, letters of John Wesley and John Leech, and relics of the South African war given by another alumnus, General Baden Powell, who laid the foundation of the cloisters leading to the Chapel, as a memorial of old Carthusians not so fortunate in coming back from that war. Since the school was moved from London it has flourished well; for long under the head-mastership of Dr. Haig-Brown, of whom it is told that when the Mayor of Godalming, in proposing his health, complimented him as a combination of the fortīter in re with the suavīter in modo, this pained scholar professed to be overwhelmed not only by the quality but by the quantity of such praise.

With so scholastic a garrison in its citadel, Godalming may now stereotype its spelling and pronunciation. Pepys writes it as Godliman; and by old-fashioned folk in later days it was vernacularly spoken of somewhat as Gorlmin. The main part of the town lies out of sight behind the other bank, below which a trout of over 12 lbs. was caught not many years ago; but coarse fish are the more frequent spoil of local anglers. Across the bridge the road takes us by the Church and up into the High Street, showing old inns, picturesque seventeenth-century dwellings, and a quaint Market House near the upper end. Above the station, on the farther side of the line, is Westbrook, the home of General Oglethorpe, the philanthropic founder of Georgia, which he designed as a refuge for poverty-stricken Britons and persecuted German Protestants.

Americans will admire this as a good specimen of the English market-town, old enough to be mentioned in King Alfred’s will. England has hundreds of such towns to show, but not many of them are surrounded by so beautiful a mingling of meadowland and woodland, of hill, heath, and water scenery, often illustrated by Creswick, Hook, and Birket Foster. In all directions there are lovely walks and drives. The water tower over the Charterhouse shows the heights above the Wey, across which go roads to Loseley, Compton, and the Hog’s Back. On the opposite side a more distant tower rises upon a swell of woods, parks, and heaths, through which is the way to Bramley and Wonersh. The high-road southward for Portsmouth goes along a well-wooded valley to Milford, where it mounts the broken and pitted heaths for Hindhead, while the fork to the left follows the railway to Witley and Haslemere. Perhaps the finest walk in this direction is along the wooded heights to the east of the railway, where can be gained High Down Ball, a bare knoll looking over the woods; then by Hambledon Common one can turn down to Witley station in the valley, or keep the heights—

where Hascombe vaunts
Its beechen bowers and Dryad haunts.

With such hints for divagation, let us resume our way down the river, henceforth navigable by barges and bridled by locks. Its course now is over the flat of Pease Marsh, towards the high chalk coast-line three or four miles ahead, shut in on either side by lower heights; and about half-way there opens a view of Guildford in the gap through which it will pass the Downs. On the right side was the junction of the now abandoned Wey and Arun Canal, its grass-grown trench making a peculiar and not unpleasing feature in the valley to the south-east, beneath the picturesque crests and clumps that hide Wonersh. The spire of Shalford Church welcomes us to another of the many “prettiest villages in Surrey,” where is the confluence of the Tillingbourne flowing down from Leith Hill between the chalk and the sand ridges, by whose varied heights we are now beautifully surrounded. We pass under St. Catherine’s Chapel at the crossing of the Pilgrims’ Way, which mounts among the woods to high-perched St. Martha’s, two or three miles on the right. There are roads on either side the river as it winds into the Downs, but the tow-path, unless in wet weather, makes the best way, bordered as it is by noble trees hanging over from private grounds. And so, beside a picturesque mill-race, we come into the lower end of Guildford, near the railway station, where the playful river for the first time finds itself imprisoned by buildings.

Guildford is Surrey’s county town, though so far shorn of its dignity that the County Council meets at Kingston, and much overgrown by Croydon, not to speak of the South London suburbs. There is no question as to its antiquity. It seems to have been a place of note in Saxon days; then, soon after the Conquest, a lordly castle was built here, that came to be visited by several of our Norman sovereigns. The town was so happy as not to figure much in history, and to this it may owe the preservation of so many old buildings. There is no southern county seat that looks its part better than Surrey’s, even since in our day its time-honoured features have been much overlaid by new ones, while everywhere it wears an air of roominess and thrivingness not always associated with the picturesque. Being only thirty miles from London, reached by three, nay four railway lines, it has become a favourite place of residence for business men and of retreat for officers, whose houses go on spreading up the dry and airy slopes of the Downs, above the old town rooted in the hollow of the Wey. Hence steeply-mounting, the broad main thoroughfare well displays its points of gabled roofs, projecting oriel windows and quaint doorways, more than one of the old houses, such as No. 25 and the Angel Inn with its vaults, being themselves notable sights. “Shall we go see the relics of this town?” If so, nearly all of them lie along or about its unique High Street, up which let us stroll, beginning from the bridge in the dip below the railway station, which is on the other side of the river.

Above the bridge stands up the tower of St. Nicholas, one of Guildford’s three parish churches,

which has been more than once rebuilt, but preserves the ancient Loseley Chapel, containing fine monuments of the More family. A little way up the High Street, to the right, in Quarry Street, will be found the old church of St. Mary’s, partly built of chalk mixed with flint and rubble, showing many remarkable points of interest and controversy for archæologists, among them a bit claimed as Saxon, some grotesque corbels, and the vaulted roof of St. John’s Chapel, ornamented with grim mediæval frescoes, which, like those in Chaldon Church, have become much obliterated, but it is now proposed to revive them. Their subject seems to be various marvels and horrors, mostly connected with legends of St. John; and they have been taken for the work of William of Florence, an artist employed by Henry III.

On the other side of High Street, a projecting clock face marks the Guildhall, dating from the end of the seventeenth century. This is a place to be visited, for behind its striking exterior are treasured several royal portraits, among them Charles II. and James II. by Lely, also some curious carvings on the mantelpiece of the Council Chamber, with a collection of standard measures of 1601 given by Queen Elizabeth. The woolsacks in the town arms commemorate a former renown for the making of cloth, also woven at surrounding villages, an industry said to have decayed through shortcomings on the part of the manufacturers. Aubrey asserts that Wonersh, now such a quiet village, flourished by making blue cloths for the Canary Islands, till the greedy clothiers hit on a trick of stretching out a web of 18 yards to 22 or 23, which led to their losing the market.

At the top of the ascent, on the right-hand side, is the High or Trinity Church, rebuilt in the eighteenth century, not very pleasing in itself, but enshrining some of the old memorials, as well as later ones. One of these, in all the absurdity of classical costume, shows the recumbent effigy of Speaker Onslow, who so long and so worthily filled the Chair of the House of Commons, and whose family are still Guildford’s great neighbours and patrons. The principal monument is the elaborate one to Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury (d. 1633), erected in the old church by his brother Sir Maurice Abbot, a Lord Mayor of London, to be beheld by Pepys among other tombs “kept mighty neat and clean with curtains before them.” This prelate stands high among the benefactors of his native town, though as a stalwart Puritan he has had hard things said against him. His chief claim to remembrance is as one of the body of scholars who translated or edited the authorised version of the Bible. Another of “that happy ternion of brothers,” as Fuller calls them, was Robert Abbot, who by long display of learning came to be Bishop of Salisbury—“but alas! he was hardly warm in his see before cold in his coffin.” As for George, the archbishop, “he did first creep, then run, then fly into preferment,” yet to have his wings painfully clipped after he had reached the highest post of the English Church. Shooting deer at Bramshill Park, near what was to be the rectory of his descendant, Charles Kingsley, this muscular Christian primate had the ill-luck to kill a keeper. Like the keen sportsman he was, King James made light of the accident, as one that might happen to any one; and a jury threw the blame on the victim; but the scandal was so great that it seemed well to grant a royal pardon to the right reverend manslayer. Even then, three Bishops-elect, Laud among them, declined to receive consecration at his blood-stained hands. The unfortunate Archbishop showed himself greatly concerned; he settled a pension on the man’s widow, who with such a dowry soon got another husband; and he kept a monthly fast for the rest of his life. The story goes that he never smiled again. For a time he went into retirement at the Hospital with which he had endowed Guildford, as an almshouse for the tradesmen whose decaying industry he strove to restore. But we hear of no remorse for what seems a darker offence than accidental manslaughter—the pains this Archbishop had taken, in 1611, to get two unfortunate men burned for their damnable guilt in disagreeing with him on a point of theology.

Abbot’s Hospital, standing just opposite the church, is one of the principal sights of the town, a building of stately picturesqueness that bettered its model, the similar institution founded by Archbishop Whitgift at Croydon. Passing through the noble archway adorned with the arms of Canterbury, and under the imposing tower with its domed turrets, the visitor finds himself back in a quiet nook of Jacobean England, where all seems in keeping with its motto, Deus nobis haec otia fecit. On the left of the gardened quadrangle are the apartments of the twelve brethren, on the right those of eight sisters, all bound not to practise forgery, heresy, sorcery, witchcraft and other crimes. Farther on are reached the Master’s house, and the entrance to the Hall and Chapel. The panelled Hall preserves its old fittings, and some portraits of sound Protestant divines, while in the coloured glass will be noticed the inscription of a quite mediæval pun, Clamamus Abba Pater. The most striking feature of the Chapel is the two painted windows telling the story of Jacob, in pictures with Latin legends, the first representing Esau’s hunting errand, that must afterwards have been a sore subject with that pious founder.

High Street, now mounted to its highest, goes on as Spital Street to fork eventually as the Epsom and the London Roads, both of them, indeed, leading to London. Beyond this, all is smart and modern, where an airy suburb straggles on to the Downs. But on the right of Spital Street was passed the Grammar School, founded at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and still preserving some of its old features that make it worth a visit. Its treasure is a library of chained books, several scores in number, surpassed only by those at Wimborne Minster and at Hereford Cathedral. Schoolboys of our generation may be more interested in an antiquarian discovery of Dr. W. G. Grace, who found a musty record of the Guildford boys playing cricket so far back as the time of Queen Bess.

To the last has been left that which is not the least of Guildford’s lions, its old Castle, standing above St. Mary’s, a little to the right of the Market as we came up High Street. Guildford Castle is believed to date from Henry II., but first comes to mention in King John’s time. What has been left of it by the power Edax rerum is mainly its grim keep, solidly planted on a mound that may have been the site of a pre-Norman fortress. Beside this, part of the area is prettily laid out as a public garden. Some curious bits of carving are to be noted in the keep. Within the gateway on the lower side will be found the Surrey Archæological Society’s Museum, not a very large one as yet, but containing a varied show of county antiquities. From the top of the keep there is a fine view of the Wey valley.

This view may be enlarged by mounting the lane behind, that leads to a much less imposing modern fort on the Downs, by which goes out the grand walk along them to Newland’s Corner, and on by the line of the Pilgrims’ Way. On the opposite block of the Downs, above Guildford, the cemetery affords another good prospect point, reached by taking the steep rise of the old Hog’s Back road leading up from the bridge below the station. Near the entrance of this finely displayed burial-ground, a marble cross marks the grave of the author of Alice in Wonderland, with whom Guildford was a favourite sojourn. “There must have been something remarkable about that gentleman,” an official of the place opined to me, “for a good many has asked me where he lies.” One spectacle is no longer available on this stiff ascent, at the top of which, as Defoe states admiringly, the gallows used to stand so plain in view “that the Towns People from the High Street may sit at their Shop Doors and see the Criminals executed.”

Fair scenes about Guildford will be spoken of under another head. Let us here hold on down the Wey, which henceforth takes two forms, now coinciding, then going apart, the canalised Wey Navigation, and the wilful loops that could not be made to fit the course of this water-way, for which they have suffered depletion, but in flood time can yet assert themselves by turning the low meadows into lakes. As in the case of Hogarth’s “Industrious Apprentice,” the canal has thriven so that it may be called the main stream, while it is seldom so straight-lined or business-minded but that its tow-path makes a pleasant riverside walk. This canalisation was carried out as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century, just after the Civil War, locks being then first introduced into England; and the opening of such a convenience for carrying corn and timber to London helped to bring back Guildford’s old prosperity.

Over flat meadows, the river goes out to the north, bending round the suburb of Stoke Park, then takes its course by a series of locks, bridges, and mills that make goals for boating parties. The first name of fame it reaches, some three straight miles from the town, is Sutton Place, standing back in its park that stretches down to the left bank. Loseley, above Guildford, is Sutton’s only rival as at once the stateliest and loveliest mansion in Surrey, taking a high place among the lordly halls of England. In the Reformation days, when donjon keeps could give place to orieled and gabled mansions, this was built by Sir Richard Weston, ancestor and namesake of the Wey’s canaliser. A peculiar feature is the use made of terra-cotta, on which, as on the windows of the Hall, is repeated the builder’s rebus, a bunch of grapes and a tun. It need hardly be said that such a house is rich in relics of the past. But indeed one cannot here speak worthily of what has had a whole sumptuous quarto devoted to it by Mr. Frederic Harrison,

who may well call it a landmark of English architecture, one of the earliest great houses not built with a design of defence.

The house is almost contemporary with some of those exquisite châteaux of the age of Francis which are still preserved on the Loire. Like them, it possesses Italian features of a fancy and grace as remote from the Gothic as from the classical world. Like them, as was every fine work of that age, it is the embodiment of a single idea, of a personal sense of beauty of some creative genius; and thus it stands apart in the history of house-building in Europe, a cinque-cento conception in an English Gothic frame.... The house, too, has had the singular fortune to retain, at least on the outside, its original form, and to be quite free from later additions. Save that one side of the court has been removed, the principal quadrangle, as seen from within, is in every essential feature exactly as the builder left it. Nor, except by the removal or the renewal of some mullions, has the exterior on any side suffered any material change. It is not, like so many of our ancient mansions, a record of the caprice, the ambition, the decay or the bad taste, of successive generations. No Elizabethan architect has added a classical porch; no Jacobean magnate has thrown out a ponderous wing with fantastic gables and profusion of scrolls; no Georgian squire has turned it into a miniature Blenheim, or consulted his comfort by adding a square barrack.... This unity and peace, which seem to rest on the old house almost as on a ruin or a cloister whence modern improvements are shut out, are doubtless due to this: that from its building till to-day the place has remained in the same family, and that a family debarred by adherence to the ancient faith from taking active part in the world of affairs.

The Wey’s next turn is round the village of Send, where its navigable branch makes eastward, while vagrant channels stray off a little north to touch Woking. This name may seem familiar to London travellers, yet few of them will know where and what Woking is. The lively new town that has grown up so fast on the heaths about Woking Junction, stands nearly two miles north of the original village, huddled about the tower and tiled roof of its old church, a landmark conspicuous over the river flat. Even when Defoe made his tour, this place lay “so out of all Road, that ’tis very little heard of in England; it claims however some Honour from its being once the Residence of ... the old Countess of Richmond, Mother to King Henry VII., who made her last Retreat here,” and who, he might have added, had the singular fortune of being thrice a bride in her teens. The moated royal manor has long disappeared; but this back-water village preserves a Market Hall as token of former dignity.

When the branches of the Wey unite about a mile east of Old Woking, it is only to split up again in vagrant loops, tangled by the taking in of a tributary from the commons near Aldershot. The knot of tortuous channels here encloses one of Surrey’s rare ruins, the remains of Newark Priory, of which the south transept walls still stand in broken state, impressive rather than imposing, to be a favourite rendezvous of picnic parties. Near the ruins a large old timber mill makes another landmark of these watery meadows, overlooked from the north by a bank bearing up the little church of Pyrford, with its faded wall paintings and like hints of antiquity.

Lying some two or three miles by sandy roads from Woking or from Byfleet stations, Newark is perhaps oftener visited by way of Ripley, a mile to the south, a pleasant village about a spacious green, where the “Talbot” and the “Anchor” have taken a new lease through the favour of cyclists. With this fraternity the Ripley road came to be a so frequent spin, that the Vicar, willing to run with the times, opened a free stable for cycles at his parsonage, and set apart special seats for their riders, who have repaid such hospitality by contributing a memorial window. Another hostelry, frequented by golfers, is the “Hautboy” of Ockham, birthplace of the scholastic theologian of that ilk. This oakland village is separated from Ripley by Ockham Park, a demesne of Earl Lovelace, Byron’s grandson, who has another seat not far off at East Horsley, where its Clock Tower may be seen standing up in the woods along the south side of the Downs, that since we left Guildford have been drawing away from the course of the river.

Following the Wey from Newark Priory, again we find its industrious and its idle channels at cross purposes with each other, the latter making one particularly extravagant bend eastward, so as to infect with its own devious character the roads that must tack towards bridges. At the Anchor Lock, and its quaint old inn, one might turn off to the right, across a feeble branch, for the little church of Wisley, and by it push on to Wisley Common, with its fir-girdled lakelet on the Ripley road, and its “Hut” hostelry, a combination of a snug hotel and of a “Trust” model public-house. Beside this road, on the west edge of the common, a board shows the way among pine woods to a new feature of the Wey valley, the Horticultural Society’s Gardens, transplanted from Turnham Green, already a sight worth seeing, but not open without an order from a Fellow. The nearest stations are Effingham and Horsley, each about three miles off to the south-east; and over the common the high-road leads on in a couple of miles to Street Cobham, near which the Mole comes within a mile or so of the Wey.

Striking off from the Wey Navigation on the other side, for instance by a footpath from a bridge half a mile beyond the Anchor Lock, one could soon reach Byfleet station on the main line, beyond which are the golf links of New Zealand and the woods of Anningsley. Now the straggling river waters the scattered hamlets of Byfleet, in which parish Henry VIII. is said to have been nursed at Byfleet Park. The main village, half an hour’s walk from the station, lies below the wooded ridge of St. George’s Hill, that now stands up to the right as a last stronghold of the heaths and pines of Surrey on the edge of the Thames valley.

Here the Wey Navigation seems to swerve needlessly to the left, meeting the branch with which it makes a junction beside the railway line. This branch is the Basingstoke Canal, of late years fallen into disuse, and in parts almost dried up, or choked with weeds; but there have been rumours of its being restored to activity. The tow-path of the united canal gives hence a plain walk to Weybridge, safe from the “Gadarene grunt” of the motor-car. The old channel takes an extremely crooked course nearer the flank of St. George’s Hill, which at its southern end one might mount to pass through the private grounds as the pleasantest path to Weybridge station, a mile beyond which the Wey makes its last twist into the Thames. Thus ends a river that has led us through the heart of Surrey, itself a goodly stream, and often decked out in such rich green attire as would beautify the most frumpish canal.

IV
UP THE MOLE

THE second river of Surrey is the Mole, a more untamed stream than the Wey, not harnessed to any occupation unless angling and pleasure-boating by stretches, or here and there the turning of a mill. The name has been taken for a little joke of our ancestors, as denoting the way in which at one part of its course this river tries a trick of burrowing in hot seasons—

That, like a nousling Mole, doth make
His way still underground, till Thames he overtake.

But it seems doubtful whether the name of this retiring animal be as old in English as that of Molesey, the Mole island, where the river enters the Thames at what is now rather a chain of shady islands, a noted port of pleasure-boats; and the name Tagg, that has taken such banyan-like root here, seems also to have a smack of Saxon origin. The Emlyn is the Mole’s old alias, which has been connected with a Celtic word for “mill”; and when we compare the Latin Mola and Molina a more probable origin of the name may be suggested. But such a derivation also is scouted by one of the chief pundits of English etymology, who guesses rather that “Mole has been manufactured by backward inferences out of Molesey, and that this contains the genitive of a personal name”—perhaps some Tagg of primitive days.

To its obscure name poets have added such epithets as the “sullen” Mole, the “soft and gentle” Mole, and the “silent” Mole. The “sulky” Mole sometimes suggests itself; and the “wild” Mole would be not out of place in flood time. In its upper course it has ripples and rushes; and as it pushes through the chalk it may give itself up to the freaks of its “swallows”; but in general this “wanton nymph” takes a rather tame career on a flat arena, showing its friskiness chiefly by curving turns, or by cascades too neat to be natural; often, too, it varies its mood between weedy shallows and curdling pools; now it seems to sleep under a crumbling meadow bank; now it tries a run beneath a wooded slope, or steals out of a vault of trees to be half-buried in “weeds of glorious

feature”; then at last it creeps slowly over the Thames plain, like an idle scholar who knows what tasks await the end of its holiday independence. In the final mile or two it makes an attempt at a delta of two branches, that to the right styled the Ember river.

The Mole justifies its name in seeming shyer than the Wey, keeping clearer of towns, and being not made familiar to wayfarers by a tow-path. Much of its stealthy course, indeed, is imprisoned in private grounds, whose owners may be jealous of angling rights; the Mole has even been chained and brought into law courts. In following it upwards, we must often be content to keep near its bed, sometimes only to be stuck to by ordeals upon muddy banks, in thorny gaps, over barbed wire fences, or in face of threatening notices to trespassers; and even the footpaths that lead from church to church, or cut off angles of high-roads, are seldom so far left to themselves as to follow the windings of this vagrant river.

If, like the author of “The Farmer’s Boy,” he would spend—

One dear delicious day
On thy wild banks, romantic Mole—

I do not advise my reader to track the river from its mouth through East Molesey, though the police station here stands near such an Arcadian feature as a ford across the eastern branch. But behind the Hurst Park racecourse, opposite Hampton, he may take a road by West Molesey Church, that, straggling off southwards, soon ends in a fairly straight footpath, a mile on touching the left bank of the Mole at its old paper-mills. So far the path may seem not very attractive unless to lovers or philosophers; but beyond the railway it is enlivened by a prospect of the grounds of Esher Place on the farther bank. The gateway of ivied brick, so conspicuous here, is known as “Wolsey’s Tower,” a sturdy remnant of the Episcopal residence to which that proud Cardinal retreated after his disgrace, but found himself so unwell, perhaps from the dampness of an abode near the river, where “he wanted even the most ordinary parts of household stuff,” that he got leave to remove to Richmond for a time before being sent northward by the unrelenting king. The modern mansion has been built higher up, out of the way of floods and footpath starers.

Behind Esher Place is Sandown racecourse, which also has memories of ecclesiastical state and of the transitoriness of worldly things that might serve as a text to its pleasure-seeking frequenters, if they cared for texts “worth following.” This was once the seat of a Priory and Hospital, whose brethren were all swept away by the Black Death, and every trace of its buildings has long disappeared. By its enclosure ascends the high-road, passing near Esher station, almost a mile away from Esher; but that seems close proximity in this part of the county, where some places lie twice as far from the stations deceivingly named after them for want of a nearer title.

From the river bank let us turn up into Esher, on the high ground above it. If this be styled a village, it is a village of much dignity, beset by mansions and villas, and looking conscious of courtly patronage, for at the farther end it has the park of Claremont, residence of more than one royal family, and now occupied by the widowed Duchess of Albany. Here died the lamented Princess Charlotte, whose husband afterwards became the first king of the Belgians. Here ended the eventful life of Louis Philippe. In the Church, that raises its graceful spire beside the cross-road leading up from the river, there is a monument to King Leopold, also a bust of the late Duke of Albany. The old church, by the main road, was disused more than half a century ago; and the graveyard of the new one has had time to gather a good show of memorials, among them the tomb with recumbent effigies erected for himself in his lifetime by Lord Esher, Master of the Rolls. Samuel Warren, author of Ten Thousand a Year, is also buried here, as may be seen by any cycling Tittlebat Titmouse. The sisters Jane and Maria Porter lived for a time at Esher, as did William and Mary Howitt.

But the literary fame of Esher should rest on its identification with the Highbury of Jane Austen’s Emma, a matter which I am prepared to prove against those inconsiderate and presumptuous theorists who vainly put forward Leatherhead for such honour. The only scrap of evidence they have is the occurrence of the name “Randalls Park” near Leatherhead. It is a note of this beloved author—caviare as she may be to the general—that she did not put herself out of the way in christening her characters and scenes. Some of the names in Emma seem to have been suggested to her by tombstones opposite her seat in Chawton Church. At Esher Weston Green may well have prompted her “Mr. Weston”; and Weylands would easily become “Hartlands.” It might be thought far-fetched to connect Sandown with “Donwell Abbey,” if one did not know that there is a well of old note beside the racecourse, and that Sandown was originally a priory. Now for more positive marks of identity. “Highbury” is in Surrey, and on a hill. The description of the Donwell grounds (chap, xlii.) exactly fits the banks of the Mole, which lies a Georgian lady’s “twenty minutes’ walk” below the place. This is introduced as being a large village, almost a small town. The market town (iv.) is Kingston; and Cobham is spoken of as within a walk. It is sixteen miles from London (passim), where Frank Churchill rode to get his hair cut; nine miles from Richmond (xxxvii.); and seven miles from Box Hill (xliii.). The only one of these distances that does not quite suit Esher is the last; but then the mileage would no doubt be minimised to soothe Mr. Woodhouse’s fidgety concern for his horses; and who can say that they were not to be put up at the “Running Horse” of Mickleham, a mile or two short of the scene which Mrs. Elton desired to explore? But Box Hill is only three miles from Leatherhead; and if Frank Churchill sojourned there, he could surely have had his hair cut at Dorking, where, for all we know, Mr. Stiggins’s grandfather carried on a barber’s business in the High Street. By this demonstration, I claim to have for ever settled a controversy that has vexed generations of painful students, and seems to me too lightly passed over in Mr. W. H. Pollock’s book on the “immortal Jane.”

Had Miss Burney been the author of Emma, she would no doubt have made loyal mention of Claremont. This is a house with a history, even before it became a royal demesne. It was originally built by Sir John Vanbrugh, that playwright and architect of Queen Anne’s reign, who had such an unkind epitaph—

Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee!

He sold the place to the Earl of Clare, from whom came the name Claremont. The improvements begun under this peer were carried out on a larger scale by the famous Lord Clive, who rebuilt the house and had the grounds laid out by “Capability Brown” at enormous expense. Macaulay tells us how Surrey peasants whispered that the wicked lord had the walls made so thick to keep himself from being carried away by the devil; and Clive’s unhappy death would not go to silence such rumours. After passing through the hands of successive owners, this classical mansion was bought by the Crown about a century ago, and has served, as we saw, to house royal and princely families.

Though blocked up on one side by the Claremont enclosure, Esher has beautiful country open to it in most directions. The least pleasing scene is the upward course of the Mole, which recalls a Middlesex stream as it curves round by the big village of Hersham. It might now be followed viâ the high-road, the Ripley road of cyclists, that runs by the park wall, and below a pine-clad knoll on the other side, from which there is a good view over the river’s bends. Here the park ends, and one may turn off through the woods to the left, among which lies hidden the Black Pond, a characteristic specimen of Surrey “lochans.” About the road and eastward to the direct Guildford line, there opens some two miles breadth of woods and heaths, through which one may stray at will, Esher Common, Abrook Common, Oxshott Heath, and Fair Mile Common, all running into each other, with the park cut out of their expanse at the north end. Among the winding tracks and swelling pine banks of this fine wilderness it is easy to get lost, but the road and the railway on either hand will keep the wanderer not far out of his way for Cobham, the next place on the Mole, whereabouts Pepys, travelling south, went astray for two or three hours, before these roads were so well equipped with guide-posts.

Cobham is a two-fold, indeed, a three-fold place: Street Cobham, on the road, as its name denotes, and Church Cobham, a mile or so east, towards the railway station of this name, that lies a mile beyond, where the village has broken out afresh in our time. The road takes us over the bridge of the Mole, successor of one said to have been originally built by Queen Maud, when one of her maids was drowned in crossing the ford, “for the repose of her soul,” which probably implies a chapel at the bridge end, taking toll of Christian charity. To the left-hand side of the road, near the bridge, is Pains Hill Cottage, where Matthew Arnold spent his last years; there is a brass to him in Cobham Church. On the farther bank the road mounts by Pains Hill, a demesne once celebrated for its grounds, laid out in the landscape garden style of such “improvements” as delighted the Mrs. Eltons of Jane Austen’s day. But this is not our road, for the Mole now takes a curving course east to west, and to keep near it we must turn aside for Church Cobham. Here it comes nearest to the Wey, at Pains Hill there

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

Cobham Park now stands in the way of our tracking the Mole’s meanders freely. From near Cobham station I have held the bank round a great loop to the south, and along that mill-pond opening which makes such a show from the railway; but, to tell the truth, this vagary is hardly worth trespassing for. Anglers are understood to be well off for time and temper; but the pedestrian will save both by keeping on the road across the railway, which takes him down to Stoke D’Abernon Church and manor-house, forming a picturesque group by the riverside. The relics of this church are of no small interest, for besides its Vincent and Norbury tombs, it contains what is believed to be the oldest brass in England, to Sir John D’Abernon (1277), and another to his son (1327), with some old glass as well as modern memorial windows. From the station, shared between Cobham and Stoke D’Abernon, or from Oxshott, the next one towards London, we might make for D’Abernon Chase, only one name in a long stretch of woods and commons lying between the railway and the Kingston-Leatherhead road, across which are gained the slopes of Ashstead and Epsom Commons. But alas! in the heart of these woodlands Pachesham Park is turned into a golf ground, about which bristle warnings to trespassers, beside placards of “magnificent building plots.” Anyhow, this would be a divagation from the valley of the Mole, on either side of which a road, made devious by its bends, goes round about to Leatherhead.

A little beyond Stoke D’Abernon Church, one of these roads crosses the river, presently on its banks coming by another of Surrey’s antiquities, Slyfield manor-house, now a farm, notable for its carved staircase and fine ceilings and panelling. The road goes on southwards, swerving east over Great Bookham Common for Leatherhead. The Mole for its part makes another provoking loop to the north. I have nothing to say against the road, a very pleasant one as roads go. But the pedestrian may now take a via media across country by turning down the left bank of the river beside Slyfield, and presently bearing off right across fields, on a mounting path that leads pretty straight into a lane, growing into a road before it passes under the Leatherhead-Guildford line, which points straight to Leatherhead. From the road bending in this direction, one can gain the town along the bank of a mill-pond that might claim rank as a lake; or holding on to the embankment of the Brighton line, one there finds a path leading by a cricket-field up the course of the Mole.

But it would be a pity not to turn aside into the ancient town of Leatherhead, displayed in full to wayfarers from Epsom to Guildford, its chief thoroughfare guiding them to the bridge at which stands the old “Running Horse.” This is taken to be the very tavern which Skelton, Henry VIII.’s learned tutor and doggerel poet, hoarsely sang of as keeping an open door—

To travellers, to tinkers,
To sweaters, to swinkers,
And all good ale drinkers.

But Skelton’s hostess is more than once said to dwell “on a hill” beside Leatherhead, and so to describe the riverside situation of this house seems a license not to be granted even by poetic sessions. A little way down the stream the cyclist might wash off his dust in a mill turned into a quaint swimming-bath. Leatherhead has fewer signs of antiquity than of prosperity, surrounded as it is by large houses, one of them St. John’s School for the sons of the clergy, a former headmaster of which had a son of his own known to novel readers as “Anthony Hope.” The two stations are close together on the east side of the town, where a path leads down the bank of the Mole. On the other side is the Church, a mainly fourteenth-century one, with some noticeable coloured glass, lying beneath the yew-dappled slopes of Leatherhead Downs, which we shall presently come to by the Roman Road across them.

The high-road to Dorking goes out under the Church, to hold up the Mole valley. But the traveller not bound, Ixion-like, to a wheel, should by all means leave it by a lane just beyond the town, crossing the Mole and striking into the path above mentioned as turning off the Guildford road beside the railway. This path takes him near the river for a couple of miles, by the lower edge of Norbury Park, between its heights and those of Leatherhead Downs, a valley that becomes the finest stretch of the Mole’s scenery about Mickleham, judged by some the fairest spot in Surrey.

Here, too, come the renowned “Swallows” of the Mole, with which its name was rashly connected. This phenomenon is so much insisted on by old writers that one must take it to have been more frequent and on a larger scale in former days. Camden speaks of the river as disappearing for two miles near Mickleham so completely that flocks of sheep could feed over it. In our time it sinks only at points, or is reduced to a chain of pools, after a continuance of dry weather, its current being swallowed up in subterranean recesses, as happens notably in Derbyshire, and most markedly in the Karst region of Austria, taken as the typical stage for this freak performance of nature. An eminent geologist tells us how the chasm which lets the Mole through the Downs is honeycombed beneath by a mixture of broken masses of chalk, interspersed with looser drifts. “The Swallows are evidently nothing more than the gullies which lead to the fissures and channels in the chalk rock beneath. When the supply of water in the river is copious, these hollows will be filled from above faster than the water is discharged below, and the phenomenon disappears. But when the quantity sent down by the river is small, the subterranean channels drain off the water, and the bed of the river is left dry.”

Above the pretty village of Mickleham comes the most glorious bouquet of the Mole, where it makes a grand curve below an amphitheatre of woods, shown from the railway in a tantalising glimpse. The lofty and leafy bank to the west is one face of Norbury Park, that so well displays its noble timber on slopes both gentle and abrupt. Its most celebrated feature is the “Druids’ Grove” of yews, thus described by Mr. L. Jennings:—

The Druids’ walk is long and narrow, with a declivity, in some places rather steep, to the left hand, and rising ground to the right, all densely covered with trees. The yew begins to make its appearance soon after the little gate is passed, like the advance-guard of an army. In certain spots it seems to have successfully driven out all other trees. As the path descends the shadows deepen, and you arrive at a spot where a mass of yews of great size and vast age stretch up the hill, and beyond to the left as far as the eye can penetrate through the obscurity. The trees in their long and slow growth have assumed many wild forms, and the visitor who stands there towards evening, and peers into that sombre grove, will sometimes yield to the spell which the scene is sure to exercise on imaginative natures—he will half fancy that these ghostly trees are conscious creatures, and that they have marked with mingled pity and scorn the long processions of mankind come and go like the insects of a day, through the centuries during which they have been stretching out their distorted limbs nearer and nearer to each other. Thick fibrous shoots spring out from their trunks, awakening in the memory long-forgotten stories of huge hairy giants, enemies of mankind, even as the “double-fatal yew” itself was supposed to be in other days. The bark stands in distinct layers, the outer ridges mouldering away, like the fragments of a wall of some ruined castle. The tops are fresh and green, but all below in that sunless recess seems dead. At the foot of the deepest part of the grove there is a seat beneath a stern old king of the wood, but the genius loci seems to warn the intruder to depart—ancient superstitions are rekindled, and the haggard trees themselves seem to threaten that from a sleep beneath the “baleful yew” the weary mortal will wake no more.

Norbury, like other Surrey parks, had once a special renown also for walnut trees, among which an eighteenth-century owner saw reason to make havoc. At the end of that century the place belonged to Mr. W. Lock, friend and patron of famous artists, by whom the famous “picture room” had its walls and ceiling disguised with fictitious landscape scenes. This paradise is not accessible without permission; but there are rights of way through the park that open some of its sylvan treasures. One, as we have seen, leads above the Mole from Leatherhead. Another from the lodge and bridge at Mickleham runs up the slopes, in front of the house, and through a wood to the hollow below Fetcham Scrubbs, a down on which one can hold south by a path, becoming a road as it passes Polesden Lacy, then beyond winding as a leafy lane on to the thickets and swards of Ranmore Common.

But this beautiful digression would take one out of sight of the Mole and its wide prospects. Fortunate is he who from the brow of Norbury Park can with conscience clear of trespassing look down upon the Mole valley, now ringed in by the richest heights of Surrey—Ranmore, the outskirts of Leith Hill, the woods of Deepdene, Box Hill, and Juniper Hill, among which the river has cleft its way through the ridge of the Downs. Box, juniper, and yew all flourish on the chalk soil; and the lordly parks on these hillsides have fostered a profusion of beeches, chestnuts, cedars, and rarer timber that in the flush of spring or the gorgeous decay of autumn hang like rich tapestry round the green meadows, through which the straight line of the railway makes a chord for the arcs of the river.

The highway leads along the east side of the valley, passing the hollow between Juniper Hill and Box Hill, for which latter goes off a winding road, but on foot it is more directly gained by the arduous path behind the Burford Bridge Hotel. Just outside of Mickleham a path turns to the right which would take one through the Fredley meadows, across the Mole, and on to West Humble, where is the Box Hill station of the Brighton line. On a slope near this station is conspicuous the long front of Camilla Lacey, a house that hangs by a tale, for it grew out of Camilla Cottage, built from the proceeds of Miss Burney’s Camilla, the most lucrative of her novels in its day, though not so well remembered as Evelina. By this time she had married M. D’Arblay, one of a colony of French émigrés belonging to the constitutional

party, who from the excesses of their Revolution found refuge at Juniper Hall, on the other side of the valley.

Juniper Hall, behind its grand cedars, stands back from the high-road a short mile beyond Mickleham. It lies in the hollow, so as to have been nicknamed Juniper Hole by the lively novelist, and must not be confused with the mansion of Juniper Hill above Mickleham. The Hall in 1792 was let to a party of refugee nobles, who had such distinguished guests as Talleyrand and Madame de Staël, the latter making here what she calls a “delicious sojourn.” The Locks of Norbury Park were kind to those exiles; and so, as she could, was Fanny Burney’s sister, Mrs. Phillips, then occupying a cottage at Mickleham. Fanny became intimate with her sister’s friends, especially with the handsome General D’Arblay, with whom she exchanged lessons in their respective languages; then soon it came to exchanging the speech of the eyes. Dr. Burney was against the engagement from prudential considerations; but he did not play the stern father after the young couple, without his presence, had got married in Mickleham Church. Their only fixed income was the pension of a hundred pounds given by Queen Charlotte to her ex-slave. She now set about writing Camilla, which was so well subscribed for, that after living in a small cottage at Bookham the ingenious husband could build one for himself in the Mole valley. But here they spent only a few years of happiness. After the peace of Amiens General D’Arblay went back to France, where his wife had her turn of exile when the war broke out again.

This nook of Surrey is rich in literary associations. Polesden Lacy, on the heights behind Camilla Lacey, was at one time occupied by Sheridan, as Dorking tradesmen had sore reason to know. Dr. Aikin and Mrs. Barbauld of Evenings at Home stayed at Dorking for a season. At his house in the Fredley meadows “Conversation Sharpe” was often visited by writers and thinkers like Francis Homer and Sir James Mackintosh, who from his Indian exile looked back fondly on what he called the “Happy Valley.” The two Mills, James and John, were also familiar with Mickleham as a summer retreat; during half the year they went down by coach for week ends; and it seems odd to find the zealous utilitarian writing in 1836 how the railway is not yet decided on, “but we are still in danger.” Sharpe’s house was afterwards occupied by the popular poet Charles Mackay, father by adoption of the successful novelist Miss Marie Corelli. Among many illustrious guests of the “Hare and Hounds” at Burford Bridge have been Nelson and Hazlitt; and here Keats finished his Endymion, perhaps getting a hint or two from “thorny-green entanglement of underwood” on Box Hill, when “the good-night blush of eve was waning slow.” I am much mistaken if William Black also had not at one time the chance of making copy from such fine scenery. Matthew Arnold spent more than one summer at West Humble, where he mentions the Miss Thackerays as rusticating near him, also Herman Merivale, who “says it is the most enchanting country in England, and I am not sure but he is right”; only this critical poet, though privileged to fish in Wotton Park, is found sighing for stonier streams than the quiet Mole, which here indeed seems the antipodes of lakeland ghylls and forces. Grant Allen tenanted “The Nook” near Dorking, when he helped to bring up out of long neglect by the reading public the name of his neighbour, Mr. George Meredith, who then lived at Burford Bridge, beneath the Downs he has described so lovingly,—“springy turf bordered on a long line, clear as a racecourse, by golden gorse covers, and leftward over the gorse the dark ridge of the fir and heath country ran companionably to the south-west, the valley between, with undulations of wood and meadow sunned or shaded, clumps, mounds, promontories, away to broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills, and dimmer beyond, and farther the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil to the illimitable.”

That view was over the Holmesdale Valley, into which we are coming round a corner of the Downs. To this part of the Mole’s basin we shall return in tracking the Pilgrims’ Way and the Roman Road, that crossed each other between Mickleham and Dorking. The Mole does not touch Dorking, but turns towards Box Hill, its old name White Hill, which has been somewhat denuded of box trees since the days when it made a favourite excursion for Epsom Spa visitors and for picnic parties from so far off as Emma’s “Highbury.” But it is a grandly wooded face under which the river crosses the Holmesdale Valley, on the other side winding round the avenues of Betchworth Park, where stand the so-called castle ruins that represent rather a tumble-down mansion. Above the park it passes by the trim village green of Brockham, then opposite a huge chalk scar on the Downs crooks up the valley to Betchworth Church, at the east end of which is buried Captain Morris, that convivial lyrist of “the sweet shady side of Pall Mall,” who died near Brockham at the good old age of ninety-four, and the interior has a memorial to another unforgotten neighbour, Sir Benjamin Brodie, the surgeon.

One might now expect the Mole to be found running down the Holmesdale Valley, between the chalk and the greensand; but it seems seldom this river’s way to do what might be expected of it. Over a dip in the sand heights, it comes from the south, draining the wet Wealden clays beyond, where it is fed by more tributaries than there are forks of the Missouri. The main stream passes by Horley, and between the two arms of the Brighton road. But all the peaceful expanse of meadows, fields and woods stretching westward to the Horsham road, is seamed by its branching brooks, one of the largest the Deanoak, a name recalling the fame of this soil for oaks.

Among the vagaries of these modest streams, roads almost as crooked, or reaches of green path, would take us to secluded villages lying within a square of a few miles—Leigh (the way to which must be asked for as Lie, as Flanchford Bridge near it is Flanchet in the vernacular), sought out for its church brasses and weathered mansions come down to farmhouses, one of them in tradition a haunt of Ben Jonson—Charlwood, with its fine old church, distinguished by a noble screen and decayed frescoes—Newdigate, so “far from the madding crowd”—Capel, that has not so much to show, unless the adjacent station of Ockley, where under the face of Leith Hill we get into oftener sought scenes. All this edge of the county makes a pleasant rambling ground, with many picturesque spots that lie out of the way of guide-books. Were we bent on tracking up the various head-waters of the Mole, we must follow them over into Sussex, what seems the most direct stream trickling north near Three Bridges station, and the longest affluent rising in St. Leonard’s Forest, not far from Horsham.

V
THE PILGRIMS’ WAY

AMONG Surrey’s manifold roads, the doyen is one now little traversed by the whirligigs of time, but of immemorial antiquity and mediæval fame. This is believed to be part of a British trackway stretching from Kent to Cornwall, perhaps the road by which the metals of the west were forwarded towards distant lands, where ancient bronze implements have been unearthed thousands of miles from a tin mine. It is said that ingots of tin have turned up on the eastern stretches of this way. Tradition traces it at least from the straits of Calais to Stonehenge, that Canterbury of heathendom reared on a plain which, as the Pamirs knot together the great Asian mountain chains, is meeting-place of several chalk ridges, offering natural roads above the marshy and jungly bottoms. The road indeed may be older than Stonehenge, that might rise upon it, as churches and chapels came to be built along a section of it revived by Christian devotion. When its western end fell out of use, lost in wanderings across wide downs, the eastern stretch seems to have taken a new lease by throwing out a branch south, so as to join Winchester and Canterbury, respectively capitals of the throne and the altar in early Norman England.

Mr. H. Belloc, in his sumptuous volume, The Old Road, insists on the inevitable importance of these cities, each a fixed point of repair behind a group of bad ports, for one or other of which the seafarer must make as wind and tide served him to come to land about the Isle of Thanet or in the Solent. Each of the two cities stands up a river, where the tide formerly flowed higher than it does now, and anyhow is within easy reach of the open sea, while not too open to piratical attack, a situation paralleled in the case of Exeter and Norwich, Rouen and Caen, Lima and New York, Canton and Calcutta, not to mention a hundred other instances. The curved road passing along the Downs between these prosperous cities would have no lack of traffic; then, when Winchester ceased to be a royal abode, the murder of

Thomas à Becket consecrated Canterbury as a famous shrine, that for centuries drew devotees and idlers from the Continent, as well as from all over England. Many of these would be our erstwhile fellow-subjects in Western France, who conveniently landed at or about Southampton. By their feet was beaten hard the track now broken to the eye, but well preserved in memory as the “Pilgrims’ Way.” There would also be a stream of pilgrimage in the other direction, to the watery halo of Winchester’s older St. Swithin; and foreigners who had trusted themselves in our island might well make assurance doubly sure by visiting two “ferne hallowes” whilst in the way with them, all such spiritual spas being held good for the soul’s health.

At each end this road finishes in a river valley, where the pilgrims had their goal clear before them, and might halt, giving way to such a passion of penitent devotion as moved the Crusaders at the first sight of Jerusalem. But most of their track passes along the face of the Downs, commonly keeping on the sunny and dry south side, and some little way above the bottom, into which it may drop to seek a ford or other convenience, or again, with less apparent reason, ascends to the top, even crossing here and there to the other side. From shrine to shrine which were its stations, but avoiding the worldliness of towns, it may be traced with more or less clearness, as has been lovingly done by Mr. Belloc and Mrs. Ady, and in less minute fashion by the reader’s humble servant. Sometimes it is disguised as a modern road or absorbed in a park; sometimes its exact course is matter of conjecture or controversy; but short and long reaches of it are still plainly marked, thanks to the chalk, that has been easily trodden into half-natural terraces seldom inviting the plough on their steep contours. Often it is bordered by hedges of ancient yews, which, thriving on this chalk soil, seem associated with pilgrimage memories in their local alias of “palms,” probably palmer’s tree, a name grown so familiar that branches of yew are, or were, used in the county for Palm-Sunday decorations. There are fruit trees, also, growing wildly beside it, that may have sprung up from stones thrown away by mediæval pilgrims on their thirsty march. Another relic of them, in popular prejudice, is the large edible snail Helix pomatia, found on this line, said to have been introduced by French pilgrims, but more credibly attributed to a modern experiment at acclimatisation.

It was not only in fine weather that folk longed to go on pilgrimage. The day of St. Thomas’s martyrdom fell at the very end of December, when the gloom of our climate must have made a pious mortification to the spirit, like peas in a pilgrim’s shoes. But we know how the carnal man was moved to such jaunts rather—

When Zephyrus eke with his swoote breath
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender crops.

Later on, the chief celebration was the Feast of the Translation in July, when came the largest gatherings about the saint’s tomb—100,000 on one Jubilee occasion, it is said—while at all seasons there would be bands of impatient or belated pilgrims passing to and fro on their soul-saving or time-killing errand. Of no austere mood for the most part were these wayfarers, who went along with singing, revelry, and the telling of tales, less or more edifying; sometimes with roisterings that won them an ill name among scandalised rustics, always apt to be attended by a camp following of pedlars, minstrels, beggars, and knavish tramps. Pilgrimage was the tourist travel of the Middle Ages, undertaken with an eye to making the best of both worlds, to seeing life as well as preparing for death. One who set out for Rome got to be called a roamer, as a saunterer took his name from the sainte terre; then both these adventurers came to bear not the best of characters in the quiet countrysides through which they might spread plague and pox, as do the votaries of Juggernaut or Benares at this day. That very fleshly personage the Wife of Bath had been thrice so far as Jerusalem; and among her companions to Canterbury were such as could be styled “Epicurus’ own son,” or “a good fellow”; one who had no concern about “nice conscience,” and another whose “study was but little on the Bible,” besides rascally parasites of the Church. Chaucer’s company, of course, came from London by Watling Street, while this southern road would be the way from the west country, as well as for numerous troops landing at Southampton from France. But, indeed, the fame of St. Thomas shone far over Latin Christendom, in days when British pilgrims crossed the sea to the Spanish shrine of St. James at Compostella.

From Winchester to Farnham, the Pilgrims’ Way runs through Hants in the valleys of the Itchen and the Wey, and seems roughly represented by the present high-road. Let us take it up where it enters Surrey, soon reaching the long main street of Farnham, in which the “Bush” and the “Lion and Lamb” make halting-places for modern pilgrims to Winchester. At a humbler inn some way outside of the town I have found the Pilgrims’ Way quite an unknown name, mention of it being received with blank stares, and on the part of one elderly rustic with muttered comment on persons that “come poll-prying after other people’s business.” Yet it is to be seen from that house, and can be followed in a pretty straight line all along the side of the Hog’s Back.

Between Farnham and Guildford rises this block of Downs, which Polonius might well have judged “very like a whale,” a bold eight-mile ridge of sand crowned by chalk, along whose top, 400 to 500 feet high, goes an airy high-road dear to cyclists and pedestrians once they have mounted the long or steep ascents at either end. Taking the high-road from Farnham, just beyond the second milestone one finds a byroad forking on the right below the house called Whiteway’s End and the conspicuous red mansion of Downs End, on the butt of the bare ridge here dropping to the hop-fields beneath. This lower road, running level beside the fir-woods that swell up towards Crooksbury Hill, seems to have been the pilgrims’ beaten track, indicated to our generation by a post-office box at the corner where it leaves the present highway. There is no need to quarrel with the supposition that some troops may have chosen the higher road along the top of the Hog’s Back. I would have it understood as not my purpose to enter upon byways of controversy, but merely to lead the reader along the general line taken by the pilgrims, perhaps turning aside here and there for the sake of a better view.

The Pilgrims’ Way keeps down upon the sand, passing by the villages that edge a sweep of woods, parks, and commons gently sloping to the meandering Wey; and at several points one can mount steeply to the high-road on the chine, where telegraph posts are more apparent than houses. On the lower level this reach of the Way goes by or near three parish churches. The first of these is Seale, prettily perched in a wooded hollow beside the Hog’s Back, about a mile on. The next mile or so is marked by the manor of Shoelands, its name interpreted as taken from the shoolers or beggars that beset pious wayfarers, to whom indiscriminate charity counted as a means of salvation. Then another mile brings us to Puttenham, with its much restored Norman church. At the lower edge of a wood above, by which a lane goes up to a white lodge in the high-road, open some remarkable sand caves, believed to extend as a labyrinth of secret passages under the chalk, now inhabited by bats, as once by smugglers and outlaws like that Wild Man of Puttenham that makes such a grim appearance in Sir A. Conan Doyle’s local romance; but at present the only peril here seems to be from golf balls shot across the heath, where a flagstaff on a tumulus beacons our way onwards.

We have now taken leave of the hop poles that, as we came from Farnham, showed dwindling patches of gault beside the chalk. The sandy lane by which we reached Puttenham is an undoubted part of the Way, that passes half a mile to the north of the next church, being indeed far older than parishes or churches, which, however, might well be built on such a frequented thoroughfare. This church of Compton, older than À Becket’s martyrdom, is to archæologists one of the most interesting in the county through its puzzling peculiarities, notably the two-storied chancel, with a screen or arcade thought to be the oldest piece of woodwork in England. The situation is pretty, and the village worth a ramble among its bits of weather-worn antiquity. Such were the attractions that have always brought a sprinkling of visitors to Compton, now endowed with a new group of rare sights that on a fine summer day fill its byroads with cycles and vehicles. On the pilgrims’ track, the late G. F. Watts, R.A., made for himself a home named Limnerslease, and beside it set up Artistic Pottery works, with a hostel for the youths trained here, in no mere commercial spirit. In the same block of buildings, shortly before his death, he opened a Gallery containing many of his most important works, and a remarkable show of portraits, shut Thursday, free on three days in the week, a small fee being charged on the others: this exhibition is to be kept up as a monument of the artist who thus illustrated such a pleasant spot. A little farther down the road is the new village cemetery, which he enriched with a mortuary chapel, decorated mainly, it is understood, by the handiwork of Mrs. Watts. This structure, so prominent on a green knoll, is externally notable for its terra-cotta mouldings, and inside it glows with colour in relief, the walls being covered with figures, making a show of symbolic art such as no other village in England can boast.

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

the steep old road past the cemetery, or by the more winding gradients of the new turnpike to the left. He who has descended as far as Compton Church may hold on by a pleasant path through Loseley Park and past the gabled house lying about half a mile south of the pilgrims’ course. This Elizabethan seat of the More family is, Sutton Place excepted, the noblest mansion in Surrey, even in its incompleted state; and its hall, the carvings of the drawing-room, its collection of valuable manuscripts and royal portraits, its moated terrace, its mullioned windows, yew hedges, pigeon-houses, and other old-time features, have their due fame in guide-books and photographs. The house had a romance told in letters preserved here, relating the secret love and marriage of its daughter and the poet Donne. Such a connoisseur in ghosts as the late Mr. Augustus Hare assures us that Loseley keeps no less than three of them,—“a green-coated hunter, a sallow lady, and a warrior in plate armour,” of whom the last ought surely to feel himself rather an anachronism, yet he once appeared most inconsiderately to scare “the kitchen-maid as she was drawing some beer in the cellar.”

From the footpath through Loseley Park one must mount a little to regain the Pilgrims’ Way before it passes along a bold bluff overlooking the valley of the river, that now runs north into Guildford through a gap in the Downs. This height bears up the sturdy ruin of St. Catherine’s Chapel, which, built early in the fourteenth century, became a main station of the pilgrimage. Here, as at Shalford on the opposite bank, and at other points along their route, was the scene of a great fair, gathering together the parasites of these idle and not always impecunious travellers. General James, in his Notes on the Pilgrims’ Way, has suggested with some show of reason that Bunyan here got hints for his great work, such Vanity Fairs being kept up long after that earlier pilgrim’s progress had become a memory. It is believed that the inspired tinker found a refuge both at Guildford and at Shalford, where low marshy ground might well have been a “Slough of Despond”; and the actual name “Dowding (Doubting?) Castle” appears on the map of Surrey about a mile south of Tadworth. As for Delectable Hills, there is no want of them in the prospect from St. Catherine’s, where we see the course of our route leading by St. Martha’s Chapel up the Tillingbourne valley, between the bold chalk slopes and the broken crests of the sand ridge to the south.

Some question arises as to the next stage of the Way. The original road would naturally have turned up to Shalford, the Shallow ford, whose church spire, village stocks, and picturesque old mill invite wayfarers of this generation to a slight diversion. But the convenience of a ferry almost opposite St. Catherine’s must have straightened out the pilgrims’ track, that from this ferry runs on over a park sward, then across the high-road up to an avenue under whose shade path, lane, and overgrown roadway go side by side. It is necessary to insist on these details, as here for a space the track does not as usual cling to the side of the chalk range. Its line is continued by a lane along the north side of a wooded ridge called the Chantries, till it reaches an opening of broken knolls, among which one might go wrong. But after falling into the path over the Downs from Guildford, and crossing a sandy descending lane, one should look out on the left for a marked “Bridle road to Albury,” which leads straight up by St. Martha’s Chapel.

This chapel, such a prominent landmark on a 500 feet swell of heath and copse, seems to have had its name corrupted from “Martyrs’ Hill,” perhaps from Sancti Martyris, and to be really a shrine of St. Thomas, which would claim the special devotion of his votaries. The date of its building is unknown, but it contains an ancient coffin lid, supposed to be that of Cardinal Stephen Langton. At Tyting Farm below is an oratory of the twelfth or thirteenth century, taken to have been the residence of the priest in charge. The chapel itself, after long standing in ruins, was restored in the middle of last century, and Sunday services are held here. The week-day pilgrim will halt to enjoy the prospect of the Tillingbourne valley before him, edged to his left by the Downs, which a little way farther on have their famous view-point at Newlands Corner, said to be named from Abraham Newland, the most popular author of England in his time, as signing the Bank of England notes, then made at Chilworth in the valley below St. Martha’s, as Cobbett indignantly records. The Bank-note factory has gone; but still stand here the gunpowder mills which also excited Cobbett’s wrath; and here too was a well-known printing establishment, ruined by a fire. On the south side of St. Martha’s the view ranges over a hollow filled with commons, woods, and lakelets, like the Mere at Great Tangley, a timbered manor-house which tradition makes one of King John’s many hunting-lodges. Beyond this valley bristling heights run westward till they rise to the conspicuous point of Ewhurst Windmill, between which and St. Martha’s might be steered a six or seven miles’ course over one of the wildest and most lovely tracts in Surrey.

Here indeed a conscientious guide must hesitate how to counsel the pilgrim of the picturesque as to his progress among an embarrassment of scenic riches. There is hardly such another walk in England as that dozen miles or so along the top of the Downs between Guildford and Dorking. From St. Martha’s Hill, one ascends to the stretch named the Roughs, a beautiful wilderness of beeches, yews, thorns, holly and other chalk-loving copsewood tangled in bracken and bramble. On the further side of this ridge there is a straight way up from Clandon station, coming out at Newlands Corner (567 feet). Thence, keeping eastwards along the wooded edge, one might in a mile or so drop down again into the valley by a deep coombe leading to Shere. But all along one can hold on by what is often a broad turf-way set in woods, with tracks going off south to the Tillingbourne villages and the Dorking line, north to the stations of the railway between Guildford and Leatherhead, each of them base for rare rambles. One has only to keep the crest of the ridge, taking the successive names of Netley Heath, Hackhurst Downs, and White Downs, till the way opens out on the expanse of Ranmore Common, stretching over the end of this block of the Downs above the gap made by the Mole. Here, by Denbies Park, there is a charming descent to Dorking; or northwards one finds a network of grassy and leafy lanes leading across the ridge towards Leatherhead. But ridge has ceased to be the fittest term for a table-land of chalk opening out beyond Guildford to a belt several miles broad, dotted here and there by islands of other formation, and often roughened by patches of the wildest ground within a couple of hours’ walk of London tramway lines. As to the rutted sward-way along the Downs, usually a little back from the edge, its merit is romantic loneliness, hardly a house coming to view between Newlands Corner and Ranmore Common, where the crash of a woodman’s axe may recall American backwoods; but it has the defect of a want of prospects, shut out by lush greenery that suggests a valley rather than a height of several hundred feet.

The pilgrims of old days seldom took more trouble than they could help, and their way lay below, near the foot of the Downs, where, after Chilworth, Albury is the next village in the Tillingbourne valley. There is much to be said, and something to be seen, at this old bury on the heath, to the south of which is the site of an ancient camp occupied by the Romans. The Way, after running along the north of a wooded swell in the valley, on the other side of which lies the village, enters Albury Park at an ornate pinnacled fane popularly known as the Irvingite Cathedral. For Albury was the cradle of the sect known to itself as the Catholic Apostolic Church, of which the eloquent enthusiast Edward Irving was not the only or the chief begetter. That distinction rather belonged to Henry Drummond, banker, squire, and Tory M.P., a curious amalgam of business ability and fanatical fancies. At his Albury mansion he was in the way of gathering like-minded friends for study of the Scriptures, and among them, by much brooding over the prophecies, was hatched the new communion that claimed to be a return to gifts and hopes of the Primitive Church. The parson of Albury in those days was the Rev. Hugh McNeile, afterwards well known at Liverpool as a champion of sound Evangelical teaching, who sympathised with the early efforts of the movement, but withdrew from it when it began to take shape apart from the Church as by law established; and poor Irving was deposed by his own Presbyterian Church, while he fell into some suspicion even among his brother sectaries. Through the marriage of his daughter, Drummond came to be represented by the Duke of Northumberland, a family that inherited his part as patron of the body, gathering humbler adherents in a neighbourhood where Cobbett had found fault with the number of its “meeting-houses” and the proportion of its people gone crazy through religion. The elaborate services of the “Cathedral” are said to be still well attended. The parish church, near the mansion, was turned into a mortuary chapel and mausoleum by Mr. Drummond, who built a new one on a site more convenient for the village, itself mainly transplanted by him to a site more aloof from his house. Through the groves of the park, past the house, with its famous yew hedge, terrace, and the gardens, originally laid out by John Evelyn, ran the Pilgrims’ track, here losing its common character as a lonely hillside lane.

Another notable resident of Albury was Martin Tupper, that once widely-read proverbial philosopher whose fame enacted the tragi-comedy of the rocket and the stick. His name hardly got fair-play in a generation when to sneer at it became a commonplace with every criticaster, a kind of gentry apt to follow Mr. Pickwick’s advice as to shouting with the crowd. But to this much-bleating rhymester, thus shorn of his glory, the wind of criticism was tempered by most robust self-applause, as amusingly appears in his literary memoirs, illustrated by rills of the torrents of prose and verse flowing from a truly fountain pen. Some of his verses, indeed, as John Bull’s address to Jonathan, deserve not to be forgotten; and, while he had no patience with his neighbours the Irvingites, he is always warmly on the side of Protestantism, patriotism, and heart-of-oak sentiments. He claims, with reason, to have been a precursor of the volunteer movement, not only by his dithyrambic tootlings but by the practical foundation of an Albury rifle club. He especially “fancied himself” as trumpeter of this Holmesdale Valley and its history, as set forth in his romance, Stephen Langton; and he was the vates sacer of Albury’s “Silent Pool,” as he christened the Sherbourne Pond of rustics, haunted by the spirit of a bathing maiden to whom King John played Actæon, with the effect of drowning that scared Diana.

This deep chalk basin of crystal water prettily set in a wooded dingle is now one of the lions of the place, yet so secluded that many seekers pass it by unseen. It lies at the foot of the Downs beside Sherbourne Farm, to the left of the road coming down from Newlands Corner and forking on the right for the Irvingite Church; just short of the fork a lane turns left to a cottage where the key of the enclosure may be had. It has been lately stated in the newspapers that the Silent Pool was being sucked dry by water-works on the Downs; but since then I found it deep and clear and cool as ever. Can it be that all we read in newspapers is not always true?

Past the Silent Pool, the road leads between the Downs and Albury Park to beautiful Shere, with its lime-tree avenue, its quaint cottages, whose gables, brackets, and barge-boards make such tempting “bits” for the sketcher, its good old “White Horse” inn, and its picturesque church on the bank of the Tillingbourne, which offers here the unusual village luxury of a small swimming-bath. This village is associated with memories of the county historian, Bray, and of Grote, the more famous historian of Greece. Its charming environs have been so attractive to artists that a “Shere School” is noted among them. There is a house hereabouts that made the home of three R.A.’s successively. Vicat Cole was one of the early discoverers, also Mr. B. W. Leader, who still lives at Burrows’ Cross a little way towards the sand ridge.

A short mile on from Shere is Gomshall, whose “Black Horse” stands close to the station for both villages, as for the more distant charms of Abinger and Holmbury St. Mary. From the Tillingbourne, here harnessed to industry, also giving a subject to art in an often-painted mill, the Pilgrims’ Way now mounted on to the Downs, looking across to the park of Wotton and the sloping woodlands of Leith Hill. I have usually left the reader to imagine for himself the views from these heights; but here I may quote the description by that expert Mr. Baddeley, which figures in more than one guide-book.

Take the lane going off from the mill (near the Black Horse) up the hill. When the lane expands take path on left through the wood to a field with path going right up its steep incline. At top of field, before again entering the woods, a superb view eastward is obtained. Through a gap in the hills, between Box Hill and Deepdene, we look far away over the Weald of Kent. The crowning height of Leith Hill with its tower lies south-east, then the eye ranges over the valley between the Chalk and Greensand ranges to Holmbury and Ewhurst Mill. The South Downs appear in the blue distance to the left of the Hambledon Hills, and the irregular crest of Hindhead west of them. The whole is framed by the woods on either side of the field in which we stand. Entering the wood at top of this field, the path soon rejoins the cart-track from the lane that we left, and we reach the open meadows on the hill-top. Here the woods shut out any view. Proceeding westward along two meadows, at some farm buildings we take a path leading left into the woods over Shere, and in a few yards after entering these, obtain a view south and west that is even more beautiful than the one just described. From no point does the Vale of Chilworth appear to such advantage. Albury Park and the village of Shere are immediately below us, and far away we trace the vale past Chilworth to Shalford. Ewhurst Mill is again prominent due south, and the sweep round to Hindhead, already described, is continued to the Hog’s Back, seen stretching westward like a long green gable roof. The prominent feature is St. Martha’s Hill, with its chapel standing out as a lonely beacon in the distance. Charter House is seen to the south-west, the Devil’s Jumps being to the right of it, and the hills of Hants beyond.

Without troubling oneself why the pilgrims now sought a more airy road, one may get on to the Downs and follow the crest. Or a little farther along the Dorking road, opposite a pond, goes off a pleasant way behind Abinger Hall and across the stretch of wild common known as Evershed Rough, at the edge of which a cross marks the spot where Bishop Wilberforce of Winchester, riding across the Downs, was killed by a fall from his horse. Farther on, past the Deerleap Wood and Wotton Church, there is a rough scramble up the wooded coombe of Pickett’s Hole, or a more gradual road leads through Denbies Park, the drives of which are formally closed on the last day of the year, else open to pilgrims on horse or foot, but not to cyclists.

Thus we come to the final lofty expanse of Ranmore Common, where a graceful spire makes a far-seen beacon beside the upper edge of Denbies Park, whose mansion was the home of Mr. Cubitt, builder of Belgravia. Beyond this, the Downs are cut by the Mole valley, across which rises the bold promontory of Box Hill. How the Pilgrims’ Way crossed this gap makes again matter of question. Mr. Belloc is positive that the old road must have gone straight over the mouth of the valley, perhaps by that very lane in which the narrator of the “Battle of Dorking” had his baptism of fire. But tradition, supported by such names as Pray Meadow and Paternoster Lane, and by the ruins of a chapel in West Humble Lane behind the Box Hill station, avers that here the pilgrims turned to the north side of the Downs, making thus for Burford Bridge, a mile down the river.

By Burford at all events is our best way up to the top of that Cockney paradise, Box Hill. Lucky are the citizens with such a scene within reach of their picnic excursions, and luckiest those sound enough in wind and limb to make the straight ascent from the hotel up the steep chalk slope, reached also by a zigzag road from Juniper Hall. The face towards Dorking is covered by an enclosure of rich wood, open to any one taking refreshment at the Swiss Cottage just within its gate. Beyond this one is free to roam over turf slopes and among the groves, where indeed of late years part of the land has been acquired by the War Office for fortifications to figure in any future Battle of Dorking; so here and there the forbidding initials W. D. remind us not to trespass upon the demesne of a power that is master of twenty legions. It appears, indeed, that this plan of fortification is not to be carried out. Keeping as near the edge as possible, one comes round to a brow looking over the next stretch of the Holmesdale Valley, where the Downs are cut by an enormous chalk pit, the largest I know in the county, taking its name from the village of Betchworth below.

This yawning mouth has swallowed up the Pilgrims’ Way. To keep along the Downs, curving as an amphitheatre of some half-dozen miles on to Reigate, is no easy task. I have done it, and again I have failed to find a practicable path, since “W. D.” has in part closed the woods. A friend of mine who repeatedly achieved the adventure, reports that he never twice took quite the same line. Perhaps the stranger would save himself time and trouble if, at the “Hand in Hand,” he struck into the road that runs behind the ridge to fall into the London highway piercing its height through Pebble Coombe; then, from the edge of Walton Heath beyond, he may get back on to the Downs, in front of their coronet of woods. The Way, beyond that coombe, is traced by Mr. Belloc on rough high ground; but a line of yews slanting up from the picturesque village of Buckland with its church and court, a mile on in the valley, has been taken to mark its ascent to Colley Hill and the lofty park of Margery Grove. A mile farther on, it comes behind a beech wood on the brow overlooking Reigate, the view from which was dubbed by Cobbett’s dogged patriotism the finest in the world. This is now a public demesne of Reigate, a town lying just off the Way, though no doubt intimately connected with it, as shown by the Chapel of St. Thomas, once to be visited where now stands its old Town Hall. A little farther, immediately above Reigate, among the copses of the height lurks a new fort, inconspicuous as is the nature of such latter-day strongholds; and where the Way passes through War Office property as a shady lane, it has been clearly labelled by name so as to point it out to the meanest topographical capacity. It crosses the Brighton road by another modern feature, a suspension bridge, from the seats beside which the prospect is most often enjoyed by cyclists.

Here is reached Gatton Park, where the Way, after rising to 700 feet, betakes itself to the north slope of the ridge. Tradition and the O. S. map make it coincide with the byroad leading beside the north edge of the park; but Mr. Belloc maintains that it must have presently run through this enclosure. One may enter at the lodge gate and walk among its lakelets and timbered knolls to the east side, where are the mansion, the church, and the “Town Hall,” a sort of garden temple on a little mound, in which till 1832 one person proceeded to the election of two members of parliament. This notorious rotten borough, as