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—

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:—

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—

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.