THE reader is now to be conducted on and about what, to my mind, makes the bouquet of the county’s scenery. Leith Hill is the highest point not only of Surrey, but in this corner of England, the topmost knoll on its southern brow being 965 feet above the sea, crowned by a tower that adds nearly 100 feet to the natural elevation. The tower was built in the eighteenth century by a local squire named Hull, apparently a “character,” who had himself buried in it, to the scandal of his neighbours. It has since been restored and opened by the present proprietors, the Evelyns of Wotton. Till lately it was garrisoned by an old dame who tramped up daily in tourist weather, and kept a supply of rudimentary refreshments, grateful to those who had made a hot ascent. But such a simple Brockenhaus is now supplemented by a small and snug hotel on the shelf below, which may be reached by wheels; then from it there is one stiff tug up the steep bank, the approaches from behind being less arduous.

It is only on the southern side that Leith Hill makes a clear show of its height. The northern slopes are gentle, falling gradually for three or four miles into the Holmesdale valley. The broken contours of the sand show richly clad with woods, parks, commons, heather, bracken, patched too with quagmires and ragged gravel pits, seamed with lanes and hedgerows, so that all the most shaggily picturesque features of Surrey come here mixed together, in contrast with the smoother and barer outlines of the chalk Downs, like a mastiff lying side by side with a collie. The native wildness of this hill has been a good deal cut and polished, indeed; and a thick setting of private grounds, while throwing its rough facets into relief, has the fault of barring access by certain enviable nooks. But the upper part is left free; and by right-of-way or the liberality of owners, several lines of approach are open from different sides.

What may be termed the standard way up, the plainest and easiest, is the road from Dorking, a mainly gentle rising of some five miles to the

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.