XX

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From Godalming the old coachmen had an easy run until they passed the hamlet of Milford, in those days a very small place indeed, but grown now to the importance of a thriving village, standing amid level lands where the road branches to Chichester. Once past Milford, however, they had need of all their skill, for here the road begins to rise in the long five miles ascent of Hindhead, and they found occasion for all their science in saving their cattle in this long and arduous pull through a stretch of country that for ruggedness has scarce its compeer in England.

Up to this point the villages and roadside settlements are numerous; but now we leave the “White Lion” at Moushill behind, the more ordinary signs of civilization are missing, and long stretches of heath and savage hill-sides become familiar to the eye. On the right of the road lies Thursley Common, a perfectly wild spot occupying high ground covered with sand hummocks and tangled heather, and wearing all the characteristics of mountain scenery. To the left stretches Witley Common, in the direction of artist-haunted Witley and beautiful Haslemere, and in the distance are the sandy hillocks known as the Devil’s Jumps.

No road so wild and lonely as the Portsmouth Road, from the time when mail-coaches first travelled along it, in 1784, until recent years, when houses began to spring up in the wildest spots. From Putney Heath to Portsdown Hill the road runs, for more than three-quarters of its length, past ragged heaths, tumbled commons, and waste lands, chiefly unenclosed; and the sombre fir tree, with its brothers, the larch and pine, is the predominant feature of the copses and woodlands that line the way. See what a long list the wayside commons make from London to Portsmouth. To Putney Heath succeeds Wimbledon Common, Ditton Marsh, Fairmile Common, and the commons of Wisley and Peasmarsh, all this side of Godalming; while those of Witley, Hindhead, and Milland, with the bare and open downs of Rake and Chalton, and the remains of Bere Forest, render the remainder of the way one long expanse of free and open land.

THE DEVIL’S PUNCH BOWL.

THE DEVIL’S PUNCH BOWL

Hindhead is the culminating-point of all this agriculturally barren, but artistically delightful, country, and to see Hindhead aright requires the grey and tender mists of late autumn. This road, in fact, is seen at its best, from start to finish, in the last days of October or in the first weeks of November, when the red sun sets in the early evening like a huge fiery globe across the wastes and the darkling coppices, and gleams like molten metal between the tall straight trunks of the melancholy fir trees that stand like dumb and monstrous battalions deployed across the tangled crofts. So much has been said and written in praise of Hindhead, that I have known people to come away from it with a disappointed surprise. They looked for a deeper profundity in the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and saw but a cup-like depression (marked on the maps as Haccombe Bottom), where they expected to find the beetling cliffs and craggy precipices of the Pyrenees, with, perhaps, the Foul Fiend himself waiting below amid the scrub and the heather for any one more adventurous than his fellows who should essay to climb down and investigate the scene. I will allow that the tourists who come here at mid-day of some blazing summer, and gaze with an air of disappointment at what some reckless writers have called “these awful depths,” have a right to their dissatisfaction, for the Punch Bowl is least impressive at such a time, when never a shadow throws aËrial perspective into the view, nor mists hide with a delicate artistic perception the prosaic fields which the merely utilitarian instincts and industry of the farmer have created from the surrounding waste. The imagination is curbed at this bald statement of facts under a cloudless sky, and I may confess that a first sight of this famous spot under similar conditions sent me away with no less a sense of disappointment. But try the same scene on an autumn evening, when a grey-blue haze in the atmosphere meets the white ground-mists, and your imagination has then a free rein. There is no telling at such a time what may be the depths of the Punch Bowl; and as for the houses that stand upon the topmost ridge of Hindhead, why, they wear all the appearance of romantic castles, in which not nineteenth-century villadom dwells, but where dare-devil barons of Rhine-legend, or of the still more terrible Mrs. Radclyffe type, exercise untrammelled their native ferocity, even unto the colophon of the third volume.

The wild grandeur of Hindhead and the gloomy depths of the Devil’s Punch Bowl are rendered additionally impressive by the memory of a particularly brutal murder committed here, in 1786, upon an unknown sailor, who was walking to Portsmouth to rejoin his ship.

HINDHEAD. After J. M. W. Turner.

A WAYSIDE CRIME

On the 24th of September in that year three men—Edward Lonegon, Michael Casey, and James Marshall—were tramping to Portsmouth in search of employment, when they met the sailor near Esher. He treated them to drink, and offered to bear the expense of their journey, and they continued together down the road. At the “Red Lion,” in Road Lane, beyond Godalming, where they stopped for refreshment, they were observed by two labouring men who chanced to be in the house, and who, later in the day, followed in their footsteps when returning home. On coming to the Devil’s Punch Bowl they noticed something lying below, amid the heather, that looked like a dead sheep, but on climbing down to examine it, they found it to be the dead body of the sailor they had seen drinking in the “Red Lion.” His villainous companions had knocked him down and killed him, “each agreeing to have two cuts at his throat,” and after stripping the body they had rolled it into the hollow.

An alarm was raised, and the three murderers were overtaken at the hamlet of Sheet, near Petersfield, where they were actually selling the clothes of their victim in a public-house. Arrested here, they were tried at the Spring Assizes of 1787, held at Kingston-on-Thames, were sentenced to death, and hanged on April 7, their bodies being afterwards gibbeted on Hindhead, the scene of their crime. For years afterwards the place was known as Gibbet Hill, and, indeed, the country folk still speak of it by that name. The tall post of the gibbet appears in Turner’s view of Hindhead in the “Liber Studiorum,” and the road is shown winding amid the downs, with a coach in the distance. Turner’s view must be accepted with all reserve, as a view, for he never sank the artist in the mere topographical draughtsman; and the gibbet is quite an effort of his imagination, for even so early as Gilbert White’s time, it was shattered in a terrific thunderstorm, as the old naturalist relates.

But although Turner has exaggerated the ruggedness of Hindhead in his picture, the place is not at all gracious or suave. Cobbett roundly declared that it was “certainly the most villainous spot that God ever made”; and how wild it was in the seventeenth century, before even the old high-road was in existence, we may gather from an entry in Pepys’ Diary of August 6, 1668: “So to coach again, and got to Liphook, late over Hindhead, having an old man, a guide, in the coach with us; but got thither with great fear of being out of our way, it being ten at night.” Hindhead was in the direct line of signalling semaphores between Greenwich and Portsmouth before the days of the electric telegraph, and every day at one o’clock the time was passed down from the Observatory. People used to set their watches by the waving semaphore arms.

Until 1826 the old Portsmouth Road went along the very summit of Hindhead, and its course, although deeply rutted and much overgrown with grass, can still be readily traced near by the great cross of Cornish granite, erected here, 345 feet above the deepest depths of the Devil’s Punch Bowl, by Sir William Erle, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, in 1851, in memory of the murdered sailor. The Latin inscriptions, In luce spes, Post tenebras lux, and others, do not seem particularly appropriate to either the place or the occasion.The old highway followed the very brink of the Punch Bowl, and was in winter-time extremely dangerous for coaches. To avoid the chance of accident a new roadway was constructed some sixty feet lower, with a substantial earthen embankment on the outer side, to prevent any unlooked-for descent into this precipitous gulf.

THURSLEY

The headstone which was set up to mark the spot where the sailor was murdered has been removed, and placed beside this newer road, where its position renders its legend peculiarly vivid and terrible, although it is couched only in the plainest and least affected of phrases. One side is shown in the illustration, the other repeats the date of its erection, and invokes a curse upon “the man who injureth or removeth this stone”; but whether or no the man who thus invites the wrath of heaven would have included the Ordnance Surveyors, I cannot say. Certainly they have “injured this stone” by carving upon it the Governmental “broad arrow.” The body of the murdered sailor was buried at the little village of Thursley, some two miles distant, and there, in the churchyard, shadowed by dark fir trees, stands a gruesome tombstone, an unconscionable product of local art, with a carving in relief of the three murderers in the act of dispatching their victim. Beneath this melodrama, the circumstances are recounted at great length, and some halting verses conclude the mournful narration.

TOMBSTONE, THURSLEY.

‘THE KING CAN DO NO WRONG!’

Thursley itself is situated on an old road that branches from the newer highway upon entering Witley Common, and rejoins the ordinary route near the “Royal Huts” Hotel. The village is rarely visited by strangers. The old church stands in a commanding position, overlooking a wide tract of country, including the Hog’s Back, by Guildford, and the scattered ponds of Frensham. An old sun-dial on the tower has the inscription Hora pars vitÆ, and, like most of our clocks and watches, perpetuates in the numeral “IIII” the long-exploded fiction of the infallibility of kings. I wonder if any one remembers the origin of the substitution of “IIII” for “IV” on nearly all the dials, whether sun-dials or clock-faces, of civilization? Here is the story. The first clock that kept anything like accurate time was constructed by a certain Henry Vick, in 1370. It was made to the order of Charles V. of France, who was known as “the Wise.” Wise he certainly was, in some respects; but Roman numerals were not within the sum of his knowledge. When Vick brought the King his clock, he looked at its movements awhile. “Yes,” said he, at length, “it works very well; but you have got the figures on the dial wrong.” “Surely never, your Majesty,” said Vick. “Yes,” replied the King, “that IV should be IIII.” “But your Majesty is wrong,” rejoined that not very tactful clockmaker. “Wrong!” answered outraged majesty, “I am never wrong! Take it away and correct the error.” Vick did as he was commanded, and so to this day we have IIII where we should really have IV.

THURSLEY CHURCH.

SUN-DIAL, THURSLEY.

There is a certain interest bound up with the name of Thursley, for it affords an excellent example of the lengths to which antiquaries will go, to scent derivatives. Kemble, the learned author of a deep and scholarly book, “The Saxons in England,” derives the name of Thursley from the Scandinavian god Thor, whose equivalent in Saxon mythology was Thunor. The name of Thunder Hill, a height near the village, has the same origin; but the clinching argument of the neighbouring “Hammer Ponds,” which Mr. Kemble assumes to have been named after Thor’s hammer, spoils the reasoning of the theory altogether, for the “Hammer Ponds” are nothing but the remains of the old forges that were thickly spread over the surface of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex during a period from three centuries to one hundred years ago.

TYNDALL

Just where the road from Thursley rejoins the highway stands the “Huts” Inn, now enlarged and refurbished, and nothing less, if you please, in these days than the “Royal Huts” Hotel. “Ma conscience!” I wonder what friend Cobbett would have thought, and said. But, believe me, nothing less than this would serve the turn of Hindhead district now-a-days, for it fast becoming as suburban as (say) Clapham. Do you want a building-plot, carved out of a waste, where nothing has yet bloomed but the tiny purple bells of the heather or the golden glory of the gorse? Here, then, is your chance, for building-plots fringe the road where, indeed, the trim-built villa has not already risen. Professor Tyndall, who built a house for himself just here, in 1882, selected the situation both for its health-giving air and for its seclusion, but his example served only to advertise the attractions of the place, and the astonishing favour with which Hindhead is now regarded as a residence is directly attributable to him. No one was less pleased than himself at this sudden popularity of a district that had but a few years previously been a more or less “howling” wilderness, for “he was always curiously sensitive to the beauty of scenery,” disliked suburbs, and was also singularly sensitive to being overlooked from any neighbouring house. This preference for reclusion led to the building of the hideous screens which hid from his gaze an ugly house close at hand, and created so much angry controversy a few years ago: screens that to-day remain an unfailing reminiscence of the Professor. Sic monumentum requiris, circumspice, to quote the old tag.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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