tower. At the west end of Dorking’s High Street, one turns up the Horsham Road, then at the fork on the right a board beacons the course to Leith Hill by a line of deep lanes along its east side, after a time skirting the edge of the Redland Woods, inside of which a footway may be taken. Had the pedestrian kept further along the Horsham Road, from Holmwood Common a couple of miles out, he might strike up through those woods to reach the upper way as it comes near the village of Coldharbour. Two or three miles of walking would be saved by taking the train on to Holmwood station, from which pleasant avenues mount through private grounds to Coldharbour.

This village stands 800 feet high, on a shoulder of the hill, about a mile from the tower, not yet in sight on its rugged head. Opposite the inn turns up a sandy lane, on which cyclists will have to push, winding to the bare knoll crowned by the tower. A better road, edged by the amenities of a park drive, leads round the southern face to the hotel. But those who depend on vehicles sit in no need of guidance. Henceforth I address myself to the amateur or miniature Alpinist, who does not shirk a walk of some dozen miles or so. To him the road above mentioned may be suggested as best for coming down, perhaps by failing light and with stiff limbs.

The way I should choose for walking up Leith Hill from Dorking is by a valley opening about two miles west of the town, at which end is the Dorking station of the South-Eastern line. From the Box Hill station of this railway and the Dorking of the Brighton line, which puzzlingly adjoin one another beyond the other end, an omnibus plies to Westcott, by a pretty road past Bury Hill and Milton Heath, above that most picturesque old mansion, Milton Court.[A] From the Church on Westcott’s sloping Green one holds on pretty straight by a lane joining the high-road near the gate of the Rookery, a mansion known as the home of Malthus, that reverend bogey of sentimentalists like Cobbett. His father before him was also a literary notability, and author of the “improvements” which made this demesne celebrated. One need not be shy of turning into the lordly avenue and by the rhododendron walks that lead up the ornamental waters of the Pipp Brook, for boards show a permitted way past the house, while, alas! on my last visit a placard at the gate bore the warning Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, a notice, to wit, that these choice grounds are destined to go the way of all eligible building sites within reach of infection by Cobbett’s “wen.” Above the house, one gets out of the park over a high bank, beyond which comes a change both of estate and watershed, for the Pipp Brook flows to the Mole, whereas the slopes westward drain into the Tillingbourne, tributary of the Wey.

The way thenceforth is not quite so plain; but one cannot go far wrong by taking a green lane to the left and keeping pretty straight south up a central ridge-way till a glimpse of the tower is gained in the wood. Did one hold rather too much to the left, the worst of it would be wandering into the road at Coldharbour. Holding more to the right, one comes into a deep hollow above Wotton, where the ponds and cascades of the Tillingbourne lead up to Broadmoor, a model village among meadows opening out in the woods. The narrowing hollow takes one straight to the tower by a beautiful and gradual ascent; but this route is not the best in wet weather. It properly belongs to the next line to be indicated, the base of which is Wotton, lying about midway between Dorking and Gomshall station.

Wotton is famous as the seat of John Evelyn, the diarist, and author of Sylva, who put his knowledge of trees so well in practice, that his hand is still seen not only about this Wood town but in other garden grounds of the county. Blackheath was an alias of the parish, which it perhaps better deserved before he set an example of planting the hill with his favourite firs; yet the estate must have been already well timbered, according to the account he gives of its sylvan wealth. On the high-road, up a stiff ascent beyond the Rookery, comes the inn called “Wotton Hatch,” beside the Park gate. Opposite this a way turns down to the Church, which lies below the north side of the road, beautifully embowered on a knoll, with the Deerleap Wood beyond it, and the coombe of Pickett’s Hole as invitation for a steep climb on the Downs.

In the Evelyn chapel of this church, “the dormitory of my ancestors, near to that of my father and pious mother,” is the coffin-shaped tomb of John Evelyn, of whom his epitaph may tell without falsehood how, “Living in an age of Events and Revolutions, he learnt (as himself asserted) this Truth which, pursuant to his Intention, is here declared—That all is Vanity which is not Honest, and that there is no solid Wisdom but in real Piety.” Of the other family monuments the most noticeable is Westmacott’s memorial to Captain George Evelyn, with an inscription by Arnold of Rugby. In the churchyard stands the tomb of William Glanville, on which is still performed a ceremony devised by this kinsman of the Evelyns, to keep his memory green among successive rising generations. Dying 1718, by his will he directed forty shillings apiece to be paid to five poor boys of Wotton, below sixteen, who on the anniversary of his death should repeat by heart, with their hands laid on his gravestone, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Decalogue, also as a further proof of scholarship reading 1 Corinthians xv., and writing legibly the first two verses. The Church porch in John Evelyn’s time was a school where, he tells us, he himself got the elements of learning, before not going to Eton, from which he was scared away by fear of the rod.

The Park of Wotton, with “its rising grounds, meadows, woods, and water in abundance,” might well be styled by its best known owner “one of the most pleasant seats in the nation.” The mansion, still belonging to his descendants, a good deal enlarged and altered since he made it “the raree-show of the whole neighbourhood,” contains part of his collections, portraits, manuscripts, and other memorials of him, and such a treasured relic as the prayer-book used by Charles I. on the scaffold; but there is no admission to strangers, except occasionally in summer by tickets issued at a Dorking library. One has, however, a right-of-way through the lodge gate, presently leaving the drive by a path passing close beside the house and up into the woods for Friday Street. A little to the east of this line, reached by a lane behind the inn, is the already mentioned way up the ornamental waters of the Tillingbourne hollow. But the untired wanderer, who can steer a course without beacons, will do well to make for Friday Street, a little hamlet so ancient that it is supposed to have had the Saxon goddess Friga as a godmother: the name occurs again some nine miles to the south, across the Sussex border. This group of hermitages lies charmingly in a deep glen half filled by a sheet of water, from the top of which goes up another way to the tower; but in case of doubt it would be well to bear left into the Tillingbourne’s course.

The shortest way from Gomshall station to Friday Street, about three miles, is by Abinger Church, standing above the west side of this hollow. On the main road, half a mile east of the station, one reaches Abinger Hammer, a name left by the now extinct iron working. On the green here, take the right-hand byroad for Felday, then at the top of its first slight rise, a path to the left running pretty straight over fields to a solitary farm, behind which a lane leads on to the churchyard of the high and dry hamlet styled Abinger Hatch. The church of Abinger has been well restored, but preserves some ancient features. On the Green beyond are the parish stocks, said to have been used almost within living memory. The inn here has been smartened and enlarged of late years, a hint how strangers appreciate the charms of a seclusion that begins to be broken in on by building. Hence one turns left to descend into the hollow of Friday Street. The road to the right is for Felday, whence, on the west side of Leith Hill, mounts one of its most lovely approaches.

Thus, by one way or other, has been gained the crest, through woods among which it is often hid till one be close upon it. Standing on that craggy knoll, one at last has a clear view to the south, and from the top of the tower can overlook, it is said, a baker’s dozen of counties, spread out all round as on a map, shaded and dotted and streaked with heights, woods, streams, villages, churches and farms, melting away or running together in the distance like the smoke from a myriad of English homes. In the foreground lie the leafy lowlands of the Weald, bounded by the line of the South Downs, through a gap in which the sea might come into view, weather permitting. Points that may be made out in the circular panorama are Ditchling Beacon and other crests of the South Downs; Crowborough Beacon and Frant Church on the Forest Ridge of Sussex; the Kentish Downs; the Crystal Palace; the huge ant-hill of London; the Chiltern Hills in Bucks; Windsor Castle at one end of Berks, and at the other Inkpen Beacon, highest point of the chalk Downs; Highclere and Butser Hill in Hants, and Blackdown and Hindhead on the edge of Surrey. The travelled Evelyn calls this the best prospect he ever beheld; and if he may be

suspected of local prejudice, John Dennis, that gibbeted victim of Pope and Swift, is found breaking out into enthusiasm over a scene which he declares to surpass the finest in Italy. All the stranger, in Hone’s Table Book, reads a complaint of such a scene remaining in obscurity, “unknown to the very visitors of Epsom and Box Hill.” That reproach is certainly out of date in our active generation. Here one ought to produce a poetical description; but, so far as I know, the bards who must have often looked from Leith Hill seem to have been struck dumb by admiration of a landscape in which are lost so many—

Should it be the reader’s fortune to stand here by the light of the setting sun, he may presently have to consider how to get off this eminence. The steep road southwards falls to Ockley, which has a station two or three miles away; and there is another on the same line about as far off at Holmwood, the path to which is indicated beside the inn at Coldharbour. The road by Coldharbour to the more frequent trains of Dorking is plain. The tracks down the Tillingbourne to the Gomshall-Dorking valley road were better not be attempted in the dark. But if a refreshed climber had still half a day before him, good shoe leather under him, and a stout heart for stiff ups and downs, I would invite him to follow other crests of the sand ridge westwards; or at least to visit Leith Hill’s neighbour, Holmbury Hill, about two miles in that direction.

Let us descend, then, into the valley between, bearing a little northward to strike the choice village that now knows itself as Holmbury St. Mary, but for country-folk around is more familiar under the old name of Felday, and part of it on the O.S. map is belittled as Pitland Street. This out-of-the-way place has raised its head since such a good judge of scenery as Mr. Louis Jennings could speak of it as a “wretched, half-deserted spot,” a “group of depressing habitations,” “very like a Hindoo village in Bengal,” with a “mean sort of house” for church, and “a melancholy roadside inn called the ‘Royal Oak.’” But other eyes took a more sympathetic view of poor Felday, whose “few scattered cottages” have come to be lodgings sought after by such æsthetic Londoners as will pay fancy rents for hovels on Arran or Dartmoor, while the slopes around this Cinderella of Surrey hamlets have been but too much encroached on by smart new mansions. Among early settlers here was the architect G. E. Street, R.A., who, as a shrine for his wife’s tomb, replaced that humble house of prayer by what, at the height of his powers, he put forth as a model village church, beautifully adorned inside with coloured windows from his own designs, and with shows of Italian sacred art that do not please strict Protestantism.

Here opens a new fan of woodland walks. The road southwards leads to Gomshall station in about three miles. The best way from Felday to the top of Leith Hill is through a park gate beyond the “Hollybush,” then diverging on the right of the drive as an embowered lane where boards marked “private” keep one from straying till a road is reached, across which an open slope leads to the tower. Up the glade behind the village the footway splits into several tracks, and the middle one, trending right, passes a lonely umbrella-shaped fir, round which a path, now bearing left, runs along the ridge to the camp at the end of Holmbury Hill, that, only a hundred feet lower, has almost as fine a view as Leith Hill itself.

On the west side of the Holmbury hollow, paths take one over into a larger valley, through which runs another road from Gomshall. Beyond this road rise the steep grassy sides of Pitch Hill (844 feet), then the adjoining height westward is marked by the far-seen and far-seeing Ewhurst windmill. The village of Ewhurst lies about two miles to the south, on the Weald edge; and about as far again, south-west, is Cranleigh, growing round its railway station and its old Church, behind which a path runs up to the heaths and woods of the ridge. Northwards one looks across the Tillingbourne valley to the Downs, for once surpassed in height by that grand group of sand tops to the south of Gomshall and Dorking.

The tramp who is in no hurry, and has an eye for country, may walk the ten or twelve miles to Guildford by keeping round the heights of the sand ridge above Cranleigh, bearing north-west for Wonersh, where a high-road and a pretty byroad drop into the valley of the Wey. If he turn down too soon on this side, he will be brought up by the line of the Guildford-Brighton railway. On the other side—where the Guildford-Redhill line, the course of the Tillingbourne, and the high-road below the Downs bound his wanderings to the north—he might lose himself among the beautifully broken ground of Hurtwood, Farley Heath, and Blackheath, but with glimpses now and then of St. Martha’s Chapel on its hill as beacon of the straightest route to Guildford, for which he can hardly go far wrong, when he remembers how it lies in a gap of the Downs beyond the sand formation. Had the stranger begun his walk from Leatherhead, following the valley of the Mole to Dorking, and ended it thus at Guildford, this half-circle would have taken him through the cream of Surrey in one stride of seven-leagued boots.

But to the unwearied wayfarer, I have yet another hint to give for a divagation on which a free wheel will serve him better than on the sandy heaths. Across the Guildford-Brighton line he might turn into what is called the “Fold country,” a corner of the Surrey Weald bordered south by the north-west edge of Sussex, and west by the L. & S.W. line to Portsmouth. This is one of the most unsophisticated parts of the county, in which runs the abandoned Wey and Arun Canal, besides streams unknown to fame. The affix of its quiet villages, Alfold, Dunsfold, Chiddingfold, is said, not without question, to mean felled; but there can be no doubt about the Fernhurst, Siddinghurst, Killinghurst and other hursts that mark clearings in the woodland, with old farmhouses and scattered cottages, which often show quaint fire-dogs and grate-backs as relics of the iron-working once busily plied around these quiet nooks. From Cranleigh to Haslemere station will be nine or ten miles as the crow flies; where one can’t be very confident of not losing one’s way a little in the lanes that tack through the woods from hamlet to hamlet, but may steer towards the long, dark cliff of Blackdown for Haslemere, lying beneath its west end. Guide-books and roadbooks are apt to shirk the mazes of this secluded district, through which, by one help or other, a course can be laid past many folds and hursts to the Zermatt or Chamouni of Surrey’s rival Alplet, Hindhead.

VIII

HINDHEAD

I HAVE confessed to Leith Hill as the corner of Surrey that smiles for me above all others; but there are those who will call out on one for not preferring the severer beauties of Hindhead. This is, of course, a matter of taste, to some extent of upbringing. I was mainly reared in a country where stern and wild aspects of nature are cheaper than the lush charms of the South, that to my countrymen may appeal with a certain attraction of rarity. One has heard of a Swiss guide whose admiration was excited by a wide prospect of London chimney pots. A Corsican gentleman once undertook to show me what he called one of the finest scenes in his island, which I found too much like a market-garden. Cobbett, for his part, roundly abused Hindhead as “the most villainous spot God ever made,” by which he seems to mean that the roads were rough and the soil not suited for growing the “Cobbett corn” or the acacias which, with different degrees of success, he was trying to naturalise in his native country, when he carried on the trade of a nursery-gardener along with that of an uprooting journalist. For once, he has a laugh against himself in his Rural Rides, with the story of how he tried to get from Liphook—or was it Liss?—to Thursley without crossing the abhorred moor, yet after all blundered in the dark on to the top of it, though he had taken a local guide, as Pepys was fain to do for the passage of that Surrey St. Bernard.

Our age has a new heart for such open heights as border the Portsmouth road between Thursley and Liphook. At its highest point, about 900 feet, the road passes along the brow of a wide and deep depression known as the Devil’s Punch Bowl, round which stretches of bracken, gorse and heath, broken dells, ponds and pine-crested ridges, fall into the valleys by slopes and hollows rich in green lanes, in tangled coppices, in old cottages, and in other picturesque “bits,” the whole airy swell making a smaller and drier edition of Dartmoor. This once thinly populated moorland could not but attract artists and authors, who began to settle here

in what they hoped to find a congenial wilderness. Mr. Birkett Foster and Mr. Edmund Evans, the colour-printer, were, so far as I know, the first colonists who built adjoining houses for themselves beside Witley station. George Eliot came to live close by them at the “Heights,” after long searching for a home on the Surrey commons. The neighbourhood began to be so much affected by literary and scientific people, that the nickname Mindhead was suggested. More than one leading London consultant made his holiday retreat hereabouts, not keeping to himself the secret of the dry clear air in which delicate invalids can sit out of doors under winter sunshine. The merits of Hindhead as a health resort were advertised by Professor Tyndall building a house near the top, where he found himself able to spend the winter as well as on the Bel Alp. Mr. Grant Allen deserted the Riviera for Hindhead, from which he dated his “Hill-Top” novels, and here found many hints for “Moorland Idylls.” The local colour of one of Sir A. Conan Doyle’s romances betrays how he joined a colony where only successful novelists may now aspire to find house-room.

Twenty years ago, Hindhead had a loose scattering of villas and cottages round the Royal Huts Inn at the cross-roads, its post-office being at Grayshott over the Hants border, which was the only thing like a village. Now mansions and bungalows are more or less thickly strung upon those old roads, and on new ones, with shops appearing here and there in what before long may be spoken of as streets. The “Huts,” improved into an hotel, has half a dozen rivals, from the mansion-like “Beacon” to the “Fox and Pelican” model public-house; and Glen Lea, oldest of Hindhead pensions, sees fresh competitors springing up every year. Houses are dear and lodgings hard to find in the fine season. As in the case of Davos and other health resorts whose merit lay in their untainted air, the place has been overbuilt from the curative point of view; and it begins to attract a gayer society than the early Crusoes of this bracing heath, on which such notable persons have staved off their latter end; while the works of so many writers show how they have been at least sojourners hereabouts.

Mrs. Humphry Ward at one time lived near Haslemere; and any one familiar with its environs can take a good guess at the locality of Robert Elsmere’s Surrey parish, into which its squire’s stately mansion may have been transposed from Loseley or Sutton. Mrs. Oliphant must have been here, since The Cuckoo in the Nest, one of the best of her later novels, evidently deals with the neighbourhood, making a curious medley of real and fictitious names, and hardly doing justice to the scenery. An account of Hindhead a century ago is presented in an older novel called the King’s Mail. Then Mr. Baring-Gould’s Broom Squire opens with that grimly authentic romance Hindhead has of its own, the murder of a luckless sailor, commemorated by a stone at which Dickens makes Nicholas Nickleby sit down to rest on his weary tramp along the Portsmouth Road. A tomb in Thursley churchyard shows a rudely-carved representation of the crime, with this inscription—

The Huts Hotel exhibits a series of quaint pictures illustrating this tragedy. The murderers were hanged on what is still called Gibbet Hill, the highest point of the moorland, looking over to Haslemere from the edge of the Punch Bowl. The gibbet was soon blown down; then on its site a granite cross with a nobler inscription was erected by Chief Justice Sir William Erle. This spot, nearly 900 feet high, is the main point for picnic parties; and it seems time to tell the reader how to reach it.

About nine miles beyond Godalming, the Portsmouth road runs between the Gibbet Hill and the Punch Bowl, into which hollow leads a humbler footway from Thursley, lying about half a mile to the right where the road begins its long steady ascent. On the edge of the Punch Bowl, Nicholas Nickleby’s road has been brought down to a lower level, and the memorial stone with it; one must scramble up the sandy lane representing the old road to get the view from the cross. No description can do justice to this panorama, seen at its best on a still autumn day; and guide-book editors are here saved much trouble by an orientation-table, on the top of which, as on a compass face, will be found indicated the names, direction, and distance of all the chief points around.

From the Gibbet Hill it is nearly a mile on to the inhabited part of Hindhead, whose nearest station is Haslemere, three miles off, in the valley below, to and from which now plies an omnibus. From Haslemere to Farnham also runs a service of motor-cars that would give a good trip over this district, but without touching that highest and wildest point. Half-way up the ascent, near Shottermill Church and its fish-ponds, was a temporary home of George Eliot, who did some of her best work in this vicinity. Most of Hindhead’s visitors come by way of Haslemere; and in any case this is a place worth visiting for its own sake.

The picturesque character of the neighbourhood becomes very manifest at Witley, the station before Haslemere, where one might get out to make a gradual ascent of Hindhead by lanes on which it is easy to miss the way, unless by steering for clumps of wood high above the right of the railway some three miles on. Witley is also the station for Chiddingfold, a couple of miles south-eastward, whose picturesque old “Crown” Inn bespeaks former importance; and a factory of walking-sticks represents the iron and glass making that once flourished in this well-timbered district.

To the east of Witley station, Hambledon and Hascombe have some fine hill and wood scenery, rising to the height of 644 feet in the Beech Telegraph Hill, once a far-seen beacon point. To the north of this is Hascombe Church, whose lavish interior decoration makes it one of the sights of the vicinity. Severer features of interest are shown by Witley Church, standing a mile nearer London than the station. It contains a memorial of the murdered Duke of Clarence; and in the churchyard lies an ill-fated financier of our own time, under a costly tomb, with the inscription, “He loved the poor,” which seems suggested by the career of Robin Hood. On his home at Lea Park, above Witley, this notorious adventurer lavished so much of other people’s money, that there was some difficulty in disposing of a place which failed to be started as an hotel, even although baited with a golf course and other attractions of sport. In a better organised state of society, it should be purchased by the nation as free lodgings for authors and artists, who might help it to live down its past by illustrating or advertising a vicinity which George Eliot hit off as mingling the charms of Scotland with those of the green heart of England. Luckily, the wilder part of the grounds has been purchased by subscription, to be thrown into nature’s own demesne, freely available for public enjoyment, while at the same time the neighbourhood has lately had to complain of other bits of common being enclosed or stripped of their old trees.

The highway from Godalming to Haslemere comes by Lea Park, avoiding Witley; but from its station, on the opposite side of the railway line, one has another road, five miles of up-and-down windings, with lovely views; and it would be only some couple of miles out of the way to go by Chiddingfold and along the edge of the Fold country. But, indeed, every approach to Haslemere, road or path, is charming, and would be more so, if not so often shut in by new red mansions and cottages “with a double coach-house.” This Surrey border town, which was made a rather rotten borough in Elizabeth’s reign, fell away from such dignity, but in our time revived as centre of so choice a district, and has a busy station on the L. & S.W. Portsmouth line. The station lies beyond the roomy village or townlet, to which Hindhead pilgrims might well turn back for a glimpse of its broad street, forming a right angle at the modest Market Hall, junction point of byroads with the highway between Godalming and Midhurst. Its good old houses have been much overlaid by châlets and bungalows, for even in the valley here we are some hundreds of feet above the sea, and Haslemere has its own clientèle of health-seekers. The Church stands rather out of the way, across the railway line, but is worth a digression. In the nave, opposite the porch, a coloured window, the subject taken from Burne-Jones’s “Holy Grail,” makes a memorial to Tennyson. In the new part of the churchyard, near the gate, will be seen a curious mass of gorse and heather, which is Tyndall’s tomb, taking this form, it is understood, by his own desire, and rather painfully suggesting the remains of that “Screen” with which he disfigured the slopes of Hindhead in the unphilosophic design of fencing himself in against a neighbour.

On the farther side of the town, above the main street, will be found a remarkable Museum and Library presented to Haslemere by the late Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson, long its special patron: this institution should not be overlooked by those who have any interest in geology, as it excellently displays the natural history of the neighbourhood. The Recreation Ground on the same height offers a fine view across the valley to Hindhead, and northwards over the Fold country. Here we are on the steeper slope of Blackdown, which is rather higher than Hindhead, and still more wild, not as yet so much invaded by the builder. Past the Museum goes one of several ways up its sides, where an hour’s walk brings us finely over the border of Surrey; then beyond we gain the Blackdown plateau, one of the highest points of Sussex, from which Tennyson’s summer home looks to the South Downs, across the view “long loved by me.”

In this neighbourhood, as in the Isle of Wight, amusing tales are told of the poet’s love of seclusion and the manner in which he repelled unwelcome visitors. But the reader, no doubt above listening to local gossip, may be waiting to know his way up to Hindhead from Haslemere. The carriage road from the station is plain, passing under the railway, skirting the village of Shottermill on the left, then turning up a deep hollow to reach the top at the “Huts.” At the new church on Crichmere Green, a little way beyond the railway arch, the foot traveller should take a deep lane that looks as if it had strayed out of Devonshire, and this will bring him on the heath, over which a track bears left for the Huts, or he must keep up rather to the right for the Gibbet Hill. The finest footway to the Gibbet Hill, about three miles, is by the road mounting behind Haslemere Church, at the top of the ascent reaching a common, from which the bare ridge of Hindhead appears full in view, to be gained by a rough road over two intervening hollows, with pine-clad knolls high to the right, a scene that suggests Bonnie Scotland rather than Happy England.

From the top, the view over Hindhead itself has been criticised as somewhat featureless, but for points like the isolated row of sand hills to the north-west, known as the Devil’s Jumps, from such a legend as has so often arisen about any uncommon shape of scenery. The Devil’s Punch Bowl, alias Haccombe Bottom, is indeed a most imposing basin, that shelters a larger population of squatters than might be guessed on a glance at its dark, wide hollow opening down to Thursley and the valley of the Wey. Beyond it, the villa settlement of Hindhead, with Grayshott as its nucleus, is marked by a new Water Tower, which has supplied a felt want, these houses having at first stood dependent on wells that sometimes failed them. Not that there is any want of water in clay bottoms below the sand. All around are found tarns and pools, still perhaps known as Hammer Ponds, beside huge furrows driven through the earth by old searchers for iron. The marshy ground below Thursley drains into several ponds like Pudmore, that figures in Mr. Baring-Gould’s story, as does the rock “Thor’s Stone,” haunted by a mythology older than legends of that devil who took such athletic jumps. High up on the heath, to the south of Grayshott, and about a mile to the right of the Portsmouth road, are the Waggoners’ Wells, a chain of lakelets among dark woods, pronounced by George Eliot an ideal scene for a murder, admired also by Tennyson, who is said to have written here his “Flower in the Crannied Wall.” On a lower level, to the north-west, beyond the Devil’s Jumps, close to the Wey and the Surrey border, lie the sparkling sheets of Frensham Great and Little Ponds, either of them able to style itself a lake. A large pond above Shottermill, beside the high-road from Haslemere, is used for fish culture. It was by a short tenancy at Shottermill that George Eliot made the acquaintance of this country, which she describes as unsurpassable in “its particular style of beauty—perpetual undulation of heath and copse, and clear views of hurrying water, with here and there a grand pine-wood, steep wood-clothed promontories and gleaming pools.” If one might take exception to any words of such a writer, running water in clear view is not characteristic about Hindhead, unless at the bottom of the Punch Bowl, or in the case of that branch of the Wey which she had beside her in the Shottermill valley.

Such are hints of the scenes opening out to explorers on what may at first sight seem a monotonous stretch of heath and pine-woods, with this good quality for feeble folks, that, once at the top, they can ramble some way without any trying ups and downs. “Eyes or no eyes,” its visitors cannot but be sensible of that “ampler ether,” those restoring breezes that blow over Hindhead, untainted by smoky towns or misty flats. Too soon passes its season of purple glory; but it has other charms that win on one by familiarity. Its very winter is apt to show a more cheerful face than on the sodden, muggy lowlands; then always it lies open to the painting of the sky, from crisp clear mornings, when “not yet are Christmas garlands sere,” till that evening of the year, when—

Keble, like other writers of our day, means by moor the heathy uplands that are the chief ornament of Hindhead. But Spenser’s “moorish Colne” hints to us how, in the south of England at least, this name has implied rather such marshy and rushy flats as, about Thursley, are still vernacularly called the “moor” par excellence. These lowerlying skirts have beauties of their own, and seldom fail to be at least patched with the richer material spread out to dry on the heights.

It will soon be found how Hindhead runs into a neighbourhood of swelling heaths, such as Frensham Common, Headley Common, Ludshott Common, and Bramshott Common, over which one can expatiate for hours to the west. A couple of miles south of the Huts, the Portsmouth road crosses a here very jagged boundary of Surrey, reaching the “Seven Thorns” in Hampshire, and thence falling to Liphook on the edge of Woolmer Forest, which straggles on by the new Longmoor Camp to White’s Selborne. In the valley to the left, that is the course of the railway, runs the Sussex border, across which may be sought out scenes still more beautiful as more varied. Then on the north side lie another series of broken moorlands, by which the high ground slopes into the Wey valley—Milford Heath, Royal Common, Thursley Common, Kettlebury Hill, and Hankley Common, not to add minor names. Even Cobbett had kind thoughts of Thursley; and the author of Robert Elsmere, with an eye on this vicinity, if I err not, speaks the mind of our generation about the waste skirts of her hero’s parish:—

These quiet heaths and copses “saw another sight” during the Great War, when about Witley Common sprang up a huge camp, in which 30,000 raw soldiers could be trained for service at the front. Latterly, it was much occupied by Canadians, restlessly impatient allies, not altogether as welcome in the vicinity as in Flanders. Too many of them had nothing to do with their high pay but to waste it on liquor prohibited them at home, so the police, if not the publicans of Godalming, were glad to see the backs of these roisterers, who, once let loose upon the enemy, turned their high spirit to better purpose.

But, to be sure, tents and warriors are no novelty on Surrey commons, as will be shown in the next chapter.

IX

COMMONS AND CAMPS

COBBETT, so keenly appreciative of some aspects of English scenery, was only a little old-fashioned in his contempt for Hindhead. We know how writers of Johnson’s and Goldsmith’s school looked on such wilds, though Gray was already clearing the eyes of their generation, to which an elegant poet and philosopher lectured thus on the repulsive melancholy of the Highlands: “Long tracts of mountainous country, covered with dark heath, and often obscured by misty weather; narrow valleys thinly inhabited and bounded by precipices resounding with the fall of torrents, a soil so rugged, and a climate so dreary, as in many parts to admit neither the amenities of pasturage nor the labours of agriculture”—and the climax is, forsooth, “the grotesque and ghastly appearance of such a landscape by the light of the moon”—so much for the

principles of taste in vogue with our long-skirted and night-capped great-grandfathers!

Considering that Cobbett had been brought up among some of the finest commons in Surrey, it seems strange what dislike he shows for heaths, on which he bestows such epithets as “intolerable,” “wretched,” “blackguardly” and “rascally.” Normandy Farm, where he died, is also in a heathy district; and the name Cobbett Hill here would be taken by him as no complimentary monument. This grudge may be not only the view of the practical farmer, but an unconscious mental legacy from his forbears, who had reason to look on half-savage “heathers” as undesirable neighbourhood. In old days the “forest” moors as well as the good greenwood harboured a sort of outlaws, good for nothing but to be pressed as soldiers, when the sheriff could set on foot a strong rounding up of the retreats where they lurked, like the Doones on Exmoor. Almost up to our own day, out-of-the-way parts of the county were inhabited by rough crews, apt to take a “heave-half-a-brick-at-him” attitude towards outsiders. Certain villages, even, had long a bad name as rustic Alsatias. The commons and woods of Surrey often made camps for gypsies and other Ishmaelites, between whom and the constables of more civilised parishes there was a natural aloofness. To such prosaic agencies as the county police and schoolmasters, not to speak of roads and respectable houses of entertainment, our generation, more than it may guess, owes its secure enjoyment of “wild nature near London.”

The Surrey Commons, as we have seen, are sprinkled all over the county; but the widest stretch of them, extending also into Berkshire, almost covers Surrey’s western edge. The bed of “Bagshot sands” lying between the Hog’s Back and the Thames valley, Defoe speaks of as a dismal desert, over which indeed the traveller was once fain to hasten, keeping a sharp look-out for Bedouins in breeches. But the Sahara itself turns out to be not everywhere so black as it has been painted; and this Surrey wilderness has many an oasis of park and farm, gardened villages like Chobham and Windlesham, pine-crested knolls and tangled dingles, all the greener in contrast with their environment of dry slopes. The railway passenger between Weybridge and Woking can see for himself what grand fir-woods flourish on Defoe’s desert. The whole district fell into the bounds of the royal chase in days when trees made no necessary part of a forest’s character, so Pope has his eye on a wider scene than that to which the name of Windsor Forest is now restricted:—

“Even the wild heath” is lit up by indulgent condescension in a poet of that periwigged period. Still this corner has large stretches of obstinate heath, sandy swells, boggy hollows, and sheets of gravel, which, given up by Ceres in despair, have been taken on easy terms by Mars. About two generations ago the God of War became a tenant in Surrey. Ever since standing armies had to be lodged, they would be quartered from time to time on the wastes near London—Blackheath, dark with the frowns of Cromwell’s veterans when they beheld the fugitive of Worcester return in triumph; Hounslow Heath, on which the Roman soldiery were drilled in their day; and Finchley Common, where the Guards would now find scanty space for a bivouac. It seems to have been the Prince Consort who started or at least fostered the idea of camps of training and exercise on Surrey heaths. The first of these was at Chobham, in the summer before the Crimean War, after which was formed the more permanent camp at Aldershot. What a delightful novelty to Londoners was that military picnic may be seen in the faithful pages of Punch, setting forth the hardships of dandy guardsmen cramped in small room, the indiscreet curiosity of crinolined ladies, and the irreverence of small boys towards kilts and bearskins. After forty years of peace, the pomp and circumstance of war was something of a joke, as well as a sentiment, to that generation, as it was becoming for ours, till South Africa taught “duke’s son and cook’s son” what a serious business is the great game of kings, that may in future be stigmatised rather as the sport of newspapers.

Chobham, which gave its name to the camp in 1853, is not to be confused with Cobham in the Mole valley, nor with the Kentish Cobham renowned in Pickwick. This common takes its name from the village of Chobham lying to the south of it, about an hour’s walk from Woking Junction, still so far out of the way as to remain much of an old-world Surrey village straggling round its ancient Church, a little smartened in our time. The camp was mainly on its north-eastern skirts, with headquarters about the hamlet of Long Cross, half-way on the road between Chertsey and Windlesham. The nearest station then was Chertsey, from which cabmen fixed a sovereign as their fare on field-days. Prominent points were Flutters Hill, a swell of park-land, and Staple Hill, which to Lord Seaton, the commanding officer, recalled the ridge of Busaco by its crest of thin firs, like his regiment’s battle-blown ranks on that bygone day. Farther west, a cross on Ship Hill marks the knoll from which Queen Victoria reviewed her troops bound for the East. This camp was pitched for only two or three summer months, and its smoke has gone into the infinite azure, while overgrown traces of fieldworks on the heaths may raise sore controversies among future Jonathan Oldbucks. Controversy at the time with influential residents is said to have stood in the way of Chobham being permanently occupied by Bellona, always apt to be complained of as a demoralising companion to the rustic Venus; but the village has a Russian cannon to show as souvenir of its flirtation with the War Office.

A more dreadful campaign found its first scenes in this martial district, though luckily it is airy nothing to which a local habitation has here been given. The disaster of the Battle of Dorking pales into a shade before the lurid horrors of that War of the Worlds conceived by Mr. H. G. Wells’s teeming mind. According to his most blood-curdling history, the inhabitants of Mars find means of shooting huge projectiles across space, to hit the earth with such force that the heaths and pine-woods of Surrey take fire from the glowing impact. The first of these giant missiles half-buries itself in the Horsell sand-pits between Woking and Chobham, the second falls among the woods of Byfleet, and others follow in the same vicinity. What strikes one as an improbability is that the Martian gunners should fire with such precision as to get all their shots into the bull’s-eye of Surrey, but of course something must be allowed to an imaginative inventor; and one remembers how when a French romancer took a like daring flight of fancy, in which the world’s history was made to roll backwards as seen from a distant star, it happened that Paris stood always in the foreground of the picture.

Most ingeniously our author reports those projectiles, at first received with curiosity as matter for newspaper paragraphs, then with wonder and terror, growing to frantic panic when it appeared that, like the Trojan horse, they held hostile beings equipped with supermundane weapons and means of locomotion. The fate of Troy would be a mere squib beside the awful conflagration raised by such irresistible invaders, stalking across the country on their jointed stilts, picking up bank directors and baker’s boys as we gather blackberries, trampling down the British army like ants, scorching up everything about them by an invisible heat-ray, and poisoning the landscape by fumes unknown to our chemistry, while all the artillery that can be hurried up for the defence of London has little more effect on them than pop-guns. Nervous readers may cry out at the gruesome incidents of page after page; but no one can deny the cleverness with which scientific imagination has been infused through the realistic details of this grim story. Its most marvellously simple device is that by which the triumphant giants are got off the stage. When London has been left empty to the flames, when the Thames is choked up by the monstrous and prolific red vegetation of Mars, when the whole population of Britain are in mad flight, and civilised humanity is trembling all over our earth at what seems its inevitable fate, the most experienced novel-reader cannot for the life of him guess what is to be the necessary dénouement of deliverance; yet for overthrowing those Martian giants the author has in reserve means more ready and common than the pebbles of David’s sling. Old poets, in such a case, had to provide their heroes with flying chariots, clouds of invisibility, interfering gods and the like; but all such machinery appears clumsy beside the everyday natural wonders familiar to a biologist. Of this tale, equally winged by imagination and knowledge, I will only say further that it were best read on a sunny bank of Surrey, by no means beside a guttering candle amid the creakings and scratchings of some lonely moated grange.

At the opening of his chronicle, the narrator’s supposed stand-point is Maybury Hill, looking down on the Woking railway line, which might be taken as an eastern boundary for the district now in view, if the commons did not straggle over the line to the edge of the Wey valley. Here lies,