Surrey

“ The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling—pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farm-houses, so mellow in colour, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness but a paradise. ”

“ From Frensham village a road runs straight across the common to the south-west corner of the Great Pond, but the prettiest road to the water is by the side of the Wey. The Wey runs here deep and clean, edged with forget-me-nots through all the summer, winding and straightening through serene and shining pastures. There is nothing quieter in all Surrey than this little path by the tiny river, with the bank on one side rich with roses and elderflower, and on the other the sunlight gleaming on the chestnut coats of the cattle moving slowly through the sedge. ”

“ But beyond compare are its old cottages, the red brick and timbered farmsteads, and the ancient manor-houses of this corner of Surrey, whose ruddy walls, or green and lichened roofs, exercise the palettes and the pencils of artists innumerable. Surrey farmhouses have their likeness nowhere else, and in no other county shall you seek with equal certainty of success these characteristics, or those clustered chimneys that make every humble home of these valley roads and sequestered bylanes an old-world-mansion, dignified and reposeful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Surrey is a picturesque region, where lazy rivers wind their way to the sea between green banks, through wide, fertile valleys at the foot of wooded hills. Everywhere woods and streams, and ravines crested with yews and ancient oaks. ”

“ Our fancies are stirred, as we gaze on proud Windsor, by the thought of Surrey.
What a view it is from the round and regal tower, over which, when our loved and honoured Queen is in state residence, floats our “glorious Semper Eadem, the banner of our pride!” Let us mount with our artist to the summit of the keep. The view is wide and winsome. Surely earth has not many things to show more fair, though the prospect is distinguished rather for soft beauty and placid loveliness than for grandeur or for wildness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Beautiful indeed is this portion of the county of Surrey. Between Farnham and Godalming the river Wey, whose surface is here never disturbed by the frailest boat, winds down a valley of great loveliness. Steep hills descend to its waters, clothed with fine trees and close bushwood; the mossy interspaces being glorious with a profusion of wood-anemones primroses and hyacinths in the early part of the year, and of purple foxgloves in the ripe summer. For a considerable distance no road is visible to one following the river, nor any sign of man's presence. ”

“ On one side the stream is Surrey, on the other Hampshire. Where the two counties meet there is a vast extent of heath-land—brown desolate moors and hills so dark as to look almost black.
It is wild, and its wildness is of that kind which comes of a barren soil. It is a country best appreciated by those who, rich or poor, take life easily, who love all aspects of nature, all weathers, and above everything the liberty of wide horizons. ”

“ In Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, too, occurs in its perfection the quaint and picturesque custom of hanging external walls with tiles, the relative softness of which is favourable to the growth of lichens, and results in those brilliant bits of colour so dear to the water-colour sketcher. Every district has its own character, and the wise man will enjoy each in turn; no more expecting to find the brilliance of Surrey among the greys of Northamptonshire, than lamenting the absence of the soft tones of the Midlands among the wild moorlands of the North. ”

“ For Surrey and Lancashire, Yorkshire and Notts are the only four Counties a man can call "in it."
Trent-Bridge is astir with a fever of fidgets, the Tykes are all hurry, and worry, and flurry,
Old Trafford is all upon thorns, and, by Jove, what excitement there is at the Oval in Surrey! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded by his neighborhood. ”

“ If Shere is to be counted the prettiest Surrey village of all, I think it is the Tillingbourne which decides the choice. Six or seven other [Pg 110] villages occur, each with its own fascination; Alfold, deep among the primroses of the Fold Country; Chiddingfold, with its old inn and the red cottages set round the green; Compton, with its flower gardens and old timber; Thorpe, quiet among the elms; Oxted, lining the hill road under the downs, and the Bell inn at the cross-ways; Betchworth and its cottage roses; Coldharbour dotted over the sandstone ”

“ From all the vast stagings that are erected on the Surrey side, decorated with English bunting and covered with thousands of people, comes a glad swell of triumph, borne on the breeze, and striking despair to every American heart. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing, I grant, can be more luxurious than the gush of fresh air, the sweep of green fields, the fine old trees and the twilight of summer; but it is coming from streets, it is the very knowledge that your pleasure is passing as you enjoy it, that makes a month or two in the country so delightful. But toujours perdrix! the very poetry of Surrey's beautiful landscapes would become prose in time. As for social intercourse there is none. ”

“ As Radmore motored along the Portsmouth Road through the warmly-beautiful autumn countryside, a feeling of exultation, of intense personal love for, and pride in, the old country, filled his heart. Why had he stayed in London so long when all this tranquil, appealing loveliness of wood, stream, hill and hollow lay close at hand? There are folk who deny the charm of Surrey—by whom this delicious county, with its noble stretches of wild, fragrant uplands, and wide, deep valleys, is dismissed as suburban. ”

“ Surrey is the largest artery emanating from the great metropolitan heart, and may well be regarded as receiving the earliest pulsations, in all ages, of the influences which stirred the people. The study, therefore, of such subjects as its topographical history presents cannot fail to instruct whilst it entertains, and to contribute to moral as well as to intellectual excellence. For the past is a torch to the present; biography is but the mirror of self-knowledge, and antiquity only our own footsteps in other shoes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there is no other road on which you can walk so far and see so much broad Surrey country open out mile after mile on either side, and from which you can watch so many changes of woodland and common and cultured fields, from the green and golden hops about Farnham to the wheat and oats above Seale and Puttenham, and the long potato drills in the chalk by Wanborough. But the view is [Pg 63] not the single beauty of the Hog's Back, though to walk high in the wind along open spaces is possible only on a few roads in the county. ”

“ Hitherto, our poets had narrowed their powers by moulding their conceptions by temporary tastes, the manners and modes of thinking of their day; but their remoteness, which may delight the antiquary, diminishes their interest with the poetical reader. Surrey struck into that secret path which leads to general nature, guided by his art: his tenderness and his thoughtful musings find an echo in our bosoms, and are as fresh with us as they were in the court of Windsor three centuries past. ”

“ Surrey thus appears to have received among its settlers some Goths of the same Northern stock as those who settled in Kent. From Kent to Surrey migration was easy. A great forest area separated these parts of Southern England during the period of the settlement, but there were two natural routes by which people from Kent could reach even the western parts of Surrey—viz., by the Thames and along the ridge of the chalk downs which extended from east to west, and, being incapable of growing trees, must always have afforded an open route. ”

“ The village itself is the pleasantest mixture of every style of Surrey cottage, brick and timber, weather-tiling, plain brick, plain wood, and a queer row of square white-stuccoed buildings which looks as if it had been dumped inland from opposite shingle and dancing seas. It only lacks tamarisk to be sheer Worthing. The village centres on its pond ”

“ Ockley itself is one of the pleasantest of Surrey villages, clustered about a broad green, beside which Stone Street has grown into a lordly avenue, shadowing what seems a Roman-like massiveness{166} of paving. About it, within the bounds of Surrey, green byways wind among swelling ridges and clumps of timber thick-set on the edge of the Weald. ”

“ The White Horse is a pattern of an old village inn, with panelled rooms and dark beams over its ceilings, and a parlour hung with oil paintings, with the air of the Surrey countryside blowing through them. Your host is the artist, and fellow artists come to the White Horse to sketch with him. It is the only inn in Surrey I know which also sells a guide to the neighbourhood, and a good guide too, so far as directions for finding walks among the hills and woods can make a guide-book. ”

“ Wanborough sends a rough but pleasant field-road up again to the Hog's Back, which from here runs another four straight [Pg 62] miles along the ridge to Guildford. This is certainly the noblest highway in Surrey, and, perhaps, the most characteristic of the county. You may often travel along it and yet not see the finest of the view on either side; in the summer, more frequently than not, the whole countryside north and south of the ridge is swimming in a blue haze which dims and muffles the horizon. ”

“ In October Surrey accompanied Henry VIII. to Boulogne to meet Francis I., and, rejoining the duke of Richmond at Calais, he proceeded with him to the French court, where the two Englishmen were lodged with the French royal princes. Surrey created for himself a reputation for wisdom, soberness and good learning, which seems curious in view of the events of his later life. ”

“ We miss the wild loveliness of Surrey commons, the rare picturesqueness of the rolling downs round Guildford and Dorking, but this Kentish land has a charm of its own, which grows upon you the longer you know it. These steep slopes and wooded hollows, these grand old church towers and quaint village streets, these homesteads with{128} their vast barns of massive timber and tall chimney-stacks overshadowed with oaks and beeches, cannot fail to delight the eyes of all who find pleasure in rural scenes. ”