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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 |