Eric Parker

“ One spot would demand the first, the only place. It would be where Waterloo Bridge touches the Surrey shore; where you may look south to a Surrey hill by Sydenham, and north to half the panorama of London, from St. Paul's to Westminster Abbey. There, on the first few yards of the bridge, above the little hill which shrinks the wide roadway into a neck and stops overladen drays like a wall, blows the aura of all London that crowds south of the river, all Surrey that belongs to the London Thames. The business of the town and the country mingles with the business of the river and the sea. ”

“ East Clandon lies under that broad ploughland, a mile from Clandon Park. Everything in East Clandon is what it ought to be, and everybody does what he ought to do. The timbered cottages are old and quiet; the barn roofs by the churchyard are long and lichened; the churchyard is bordered by a thick holly hedge, and about its graves, little clipped yew-trees stand like chessmen, perhaps meant to suggest a text; the cottage gardens are full of simple flowers and fruit-trees, and the cottagers work in them as if it were the best work to do, which doubtless it is. ”

“ Limpsfield is the other side of the railway. The centre is unlike old Oxted, for it is the church; but you cannot get a picture of Limpsfield as separate and self-contained as of old Oxted. Oxted sets itself on its hillside more charmingly than any village of the Surrey weald; you get the picture from halfway up the road to the station, and you should look at it when the sun is setting. Then the white ricks in the foreground loom larger, and the huddled roofs and gables age into another century; the blue smoke of wood fires drifts in the wind across the hill. ”

“ The Hog's Back has a treble charm belonging wholly to the roadway itself; its width, its spacious grassy rides on each side of the broad hard riband of metal that runs white and unswerving east and west, and most gracious of all, its deep and exuberant hedges. All along the road in a light wind you will get the scent of bed-straw and thyme and clover from the green border of the road, and in the short down grass find the plants that love chalk-ground, like the little blue milkwort, which spreads like a film over the higher slopes of the ridge in summer. ”

“ The carriage drive runs by oaks and bracken through which pheasants rustle, past a strange, tall column of black wood—a totem-pole brought from Queen Charlotte's Islands; then it rises to the edge of a ridge overlooking a wide and level stretch of pinewood and heather. In August, when the ling is out with the bell-heather, and the pines stand deep in fern and rushes, no lovelier carpet spreads under any Surrey hill. The road runs a white thread through it—a road best viewed from afar. The weight of wheels has ground the surface to powder. ”

“ There is no building quite so depressing as an empty school.
On a day of light mists one may see the view from the hill as Denham knew it, and as it was seen and known by Surrey nobles long before his day. For below the hill lies Runemede, and it needs the filmy gauze of mist to spread the meadows and trees of the Thames banks into a green carpet, untouched with the mark of the builder and the roadmaker. But Runemede is not seen best from the hill. Best, I think, you can measure that broad green floor by coming on it as King John might have come had he ridden or rowed from Windsor. ”

“ The porch has been renewed, and the room has gone.
Wotton House stands in a dip of grassland under noble trees. It is little like what it was in Evelyn's day, for fire has taken away part of it, and much that is new is added. The result is partly imposing, partly incongruous; but much of the best of the house has aged well, and the red-brick court and walled carriage-drive stand finely from their background. Behind the house is the terraced garden which Evelyn himself made, and beyond it a streak of water running between wooded banks away to the blue dimness of Leith Hill. ”

“ Lord Holland led his little band from Dorking to Reigate and fled back again. Last of the echoes of Stuart battles, Monmouth, after Sedgmoor, was driven through Farnham to lodge for one night of misery and fear at Abbot's Hospital in Guildford.
But the Way has another meaning and other memories. It is as the Pilgrims' Way that it is best known, and as the Pilgrims' Way that it has been written about and tracked and traced and surrounded with legend and story and the haunting melancholy of an old road once used and now half forgotten. ”

“ A May morning on the Wey Canal rings with singing. You can count scores of cuckoos gliding in the sun and calling from the budding branches; woodpeckers laugh from oak to oak; plovers tumble in the wind; herons flap up lazily at a bend in the stream, and flap lazily down again; snipe cut high arcs in the blue and drum down from the sailing clouds; perhaps from the very heart of the thicket the nightingale bursts into a pulsing riot of song. Surrey varies extraordinarily widely as a shelter and a nesting ground for birds, but most of its birds, I think, know the Wey Canal. ”

“ Hardly a mile to the south-east of Horley lies an enigma—Thunderfield Castle. There is no castle; perhaps there never was one. A moat of brown water, splashed with white duck-feathers; an irregular mound beyond, thick with brushwood, and an ordinary set of farm-buildings through a gate to the side—that is all that is to be seen of the castle to-day. Was it an old British camp? Almost certainly not, nor a Roman camp. Mr. Malden, the Surrey historian, thinks it may have been one of the numberless castles built by the quarrelsome de Clares to annoy the equally quarrelsome de Warennes. ”

“ But even Great Fosters, with all the charm of its gables, its chimneys and its mullioned windows, does not stand in quite such sharp contrast to the garishness of the Holloway buildings as the little village of Thorpe itself. Thorpe has been little written about. It lacks its sacred bard. But neither Shere, nor Gomshall, nor Thursley, nor Chiddingfold, which have been compared and criticised as the most beautiful of all Surrey villages, can surpass Thorpe for richness of peace of ancient homes and quiet brooding over the past. ”

“ You can push out from its ringing streets into green and quiet country, and find little old churches within a mile or two of the railway, as undisturbed as if no railway were yet running. You may leave the line at Purley, and within an hour's walk find yourself in the wind on the downs, among Anglo-Saxon barrows and immemorial yews; you may even be able (though not without thought) to exclude from a generous view of hill and valley the enormous lunatic asylums which fate and County Councils have piled and multiplied in this part of Surrey. ”

“ Farnham Castle, for seven centuries a Bishop's palace, links Surrey to the See of Winchester. The Farnham oasthouses and hop-grounds bridge the crossing from the fertile Hampshire border to the Bagshot sands and the wild and sterile moors of Frensham and Hindhead. The town, set in its cultured plot of vines and flower-beds, with its historic castle, its tranquil church, and the Wey watering the pastures under its walls, stands like a garden between the military rigidity of Aldershot and the wind that blows over the Thursley heather. ”

“ The school moved from Aldersgate to the hill above Godalming in 1872, and took the memories of Addison, Steele, and Thackeray with it in its museum and library. The Charterhouse buildings belong to the future. Centuries will add the grace of dulness to its new stone; trees will grow round its cricket ground, distance will set a haze round the names of its Surrey schoolboys; it will have venerable wood, there will be legends of the passages and the stairs; the doors will have been darkened by great men; there will be a film and a glory of years about its chapel. ”

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

“ Great beeches coil their roots about its edge—younger than the road if ever oasthouses stood by it.
Compton looks like a village presided over by a single mind. The cottages which add themselves to whatever is old in neighbouring buildings are designed to fit with a scheme; the cottage gardens are challenges of roses and phloxes, which shall be brightest. The black beams and jutting stories of an ancient timbered house stand above the road, an example and a guardian; the whole aspect of the village is of the quietest country. ”

“ Behind lies green pasture-land, rush and sedge, oak and alder; before you, the shoulder of a hill purple with ling, the long level of grey and silver water, dancing under the wind away to a far strip of yellow sand flecked with patches of white foam; high above that, burnt and blackened ridges of heather-ground and gorse. Frensham Pond has often been painted, but that is the view I should choose, as I saw it first. To one coming up from these green depths of pasture, the air blows across the water with the freshness of the sea. ”

“ No town in Surrey has two such old and orderly main streets as Farnham. Here and there modern taste for a noisy pattern has broken the quiet level; a bank has piled up a huge building of timber, handsome but out of keeping; the new Corn Exchange is out of keeping and hideous; and in 1866 municipal enterprise pulled down the old market house, which stood at the junction of the main streets and was a fascinating little building perched on pillars. But much that is ancient and simple in square red brick remains. ”

“ Albury, Shere and Gomshall are a more charming trio than any three that lie on the northern road, if only because of the woods about them and the clear trout stream that runs under their walls and bridges. The villages north of the ridge hardly have a good-sized pond between them. But the walk from Guildford to Leatherhead, which can be shortened at any railway station you please from Clandon to Bookham, is for all that a walk through delightful country and villages of unchanging quiet. ”

“ Windsor Castle stands up like a battleship on the horizon to the north-west, twelve miles away: west lie the rolling open spaces of Chobham Common and Bagshot Heath; south-west Guildford and Godalming stand over the shining valley of the Wey; Ranmer Church spire marks Dorking to the south: Leatherhead, Epsom, and the Crystal Palace almost complete the ring. I have never seen St. Paul's. But the abiding charm of St. George's Hill is not the view, which is surpassed by a dozen others. It is the deep quiet of the place ”

“ The Parliament tumbled the old castle in ruins, and as at Bletchingley, anybody who wanted to build a house or a barn helped himself from the stones. To-day the steadiest modern business fills the High Street and Bell Street, the two roads running west and south along which old Reigate lay. Here and there the quaint slope of a red roof, or the lichen on weather-worn tiles, has a hold on the past, and in Slip Shoe Street, itself echoing the days of pilgrimages, care and good paint have preserved the beams of delightful old cottages. ”

“ Walking in this part of Surrey, which is chiefly pasture, is apt to be a little monotonous, without a good view. One of the prettiest views near Horne is at Outwood, a little more than a mile to the north-west, on the way back to Horley. Outwood Common is delightful. Two great windmills, black and white, spread sails to the blowing air; below them, black and white like the mills, pigs nose quietly over the short grass, and geese strut cackling. To the north, beyond rich and tranquil fields, lie the grey-green wooded hills by Bletchingley and Nutfield. ”

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

“ The higher water is a broad, shadowy pool, cooled and darkened by alders meeting overhead and dipping in the water; below, the shallow water ripples over stones, as clear and black as a northern salmon stream. The difference between the Wey here and the Wey at Eashing or Tilford is, of course its bed. The Wey runs over as many beds as any little river in England; here it races over clean ironstone.
Loseley has a longer story than Peperharow, and Loseley House is a very fine old Tudor building, the best, perhaps, in Surrey, after Sutton. ”

“ The box-trees that name the hill are the finest in England. Box-trees love chalk, and here they drive their roots into the crown and scar of a cliff of chalk, so steep on one side down to the Mole that a stone could almost be thrown from the path round the ridge into the water. On the grass outside the box-grove the distance to the level valley below deceives even more strangely. It looks as if you could drive a golf ball straight from the hill on to the green ”

“ Crooksbury Hill juts up dark and commanding to the north; the level line of the ridge on the left, a few hundred yards away, is broken and humped with barrows; far away to the east lies Charterhouse, grey in the haze by Godalming; behind, to the south-east, the Devil's Jumps, three little squat, conical hills whose very oddity is one of their attractions. They edge the horizon like inverted pudding bowls covered with bracken, and with bell-heather kindling to crimson in the July sunlight. ”

“ The gallery is lighted as no London gallery is; the ceiling and walls are washed with old gold, which takes all the hardness from the spaces of sunshine playing through the roof. Mrs. Watts, I believe, added this charm to the gallery. Others besides critics owe her gratitude. Outside the gallery stand rows of pottery, the work of her pupils. Urns, vases, basins, cups, pedestals, fountains await translation to flower gardens. The birds of many Surrey lawns owe a debt to Compton for wide splash-baths of water to bathe in and drink at in the heats of summer. ”