Eric Parker

The prettiest town Cobbett ever saw.—Semaphores and the THING.—The Road on the Ridge.—Newlands Corner.—The Father of the Forest.—Pilgrims to St. Martha's.—A quiet churchyard.—Mr. Allnutt's poem.—St. Catherine's and the Hammer.—Worplesdon.—Sutton Place.—The Weston Rebus.—Lady Susan, the Tame Wild Sow.—The earliest mention of Cricket.

Cobbett's is the most attractive description of Guildford and its environs. "The town of Guildford," he writes in Rural Rides, "taken with its environs I, who have seen so many, many towns, think the prettiest, and, taken all together, the most agreeable and most happy-looking that I ever saw in my life. Here are hill and dale in endless variety. Here are the chalk and the sand, vieing with each other in making beautiful scenes. Here is a navigable river and fine meadows. Here are woods and downs. Here is something of everything but fat marshes and their skeleton-making agues. The vale all the way down to Chilworth from Reigate is very delightful." He has as many praises for the neighbourhood on the other side. "Everybody that has been from Godalming to Guildford knows that there is hardly another such a pretty four miles in all England. The road is good; the soil is good; the houses are neat; the people are neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows, all are beautiful. Nothing wild or bold, to be sure, but exceedingly pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion, as it happened to be with me." Would the scenery have pleased Cobbett better if it had been "wild or bold"? Probably not, since he calls Hindhead "the most villainously ugly spot on God's Earth." Cobbett liked smiling pastures and well grown crops. His prettiness is good timber and clean farming.

In Cobbett's time, there were no suburbs to Guildford; to-day the suburbs grow. Pewley Hill, south-east of the town, which old pictures of Guildford show you bare downland, is hardly so much spotted as hidden by undistinguished villas and dreary brick. Perhaps it would please Cobbett as well as it pleased him ninety years ago. Pewley Hill in his day stood naked to the wind, except for the semaphore and its buildings, and Cobbett deeply hated the semaphore. To us, who have the telephone and telegram, there seems nothing hateful in it (unless we hate the telephone), but to Cobbett the line of semaphore towers between London and Portsmouth stood for all that was dreadful in war, debt, jobbery and alarums. He could see nothing attractive in the cleverness and despatch of a system which enabled news to be sent from London to Portsmouth in a few seconds. (It took three-quarters of a minute to signal the hour of one o'clock from Greenwich to Portsmouth and back again to Greenwich). All he saw was bloody war and money wrongly spent. Thus, of one of the line:—

"This building is, it seems, called a Semaphore, or Semiphare, or something of that sort. What this word may have been hatched out of I cannot say; but it means a job, I am sure. To call it an alarm-post would not have been so convenient; for, people not endued with Scotch intellect, might have wondered why the d—— we should have to pay for alarm-posts and might have thought that with all our 'glorious victories' we had 'brought our hogs to a fine market' if our dread of the enemy were such as to induce us to have alarm-posts all over the country!" The semaphore north of the road from Guildford to Farnham urges him to even higher flights:—

"What can this be for? Why are these expensive things put up all over the country? Respecting the movements of whom is wanted this alarm system? Will no member ask this in Parliament? Not one! not a man: and yet it is a thing to ask about. Ah! it is in vain, THING, that you thus are making your preparations; in vain that you are setting your trammels! The DEBT, the blessed debt, that best ally of the people, will break them all; will snap them, as the hornet does the cobweb; and even these very 'Semaphores' contribute towards the force of that ever blessed debt."

Semaphore House still stands upon Pewley Hill, a modern villa; opposite it, which would infuriate the old reformer if he could see it, War Office Ground, marked off with barbed wire and minatory notice-boards. A hundred years hence, perhaps the fort on Pewley Hill will be exhibited as one of the curiosities of nineteenth-century Guildford.

Pewley Hill is dull enough in itself to-day, when the down grass has gone and the bricks are multiplying, but it leads to some of the wildest and oldest and sweetest of all scenes in the county. You must go over Pewley Hill to come to the downs, and the downs between Guildford and Netley, by Newlands Corner, above Albury and Chilworth, are for me, at all events, the loveliest spot in Surrey. There are other heights in Surrey with wider views of scenery; there is Hindhead with its almost complete circle of horizon, from Nettlebed by Henley to the Devil's Dyke above Brighton; there is the road above Reigate, which looks out over a thousand roofs and miles of well farmed fields; and there is Leith Hill, the highest of all hills in south eastern England. But the stretch of downland running from Guildford to Newlands Corner has a charm that belongs to none of these. It is not merely the peace and sunshine of the broad path along the ridge, with its downland flowers and Chalk Hill Blue butterflies; not only the width and extent of the view over the Weald, though it is of all views in Surrey one of the loveliest—unlike the flatter panoramas of Leith Hill and Reigate in that it is a view not only of fields and meadows, but of tree-clad hills, shouldering into fainter greens and greys away to Hampshire and Sussex. The enchantment is something else; the closeness of touch with so much that is dim and old; the nearness of so much that cannot be reached in changing towns, on modern roads. For this is unchanged, untouched, unsoiled, part of the great Way that brought the merchants of Cornwall riding to the Roman port of RutupiÆ in the Isle of Thanet with tin mined in the Cassiterides. The valley below may have changed from forest to meadow and plough, but the green road along the ridge remains what it was before ever it felt a Roman wheel. No fresher air nor clearer sunlight lies on any Surrey downs than on those broad aisles of shaven turf, lichened whitethorns and wind-bent yews.

Newlands Corner has seen more than one battle. Mr. St. Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator, and one of the earliest founders of rifle clubs in the country, has his home on the downs close by, and Newlands Corner, the centre of the rifle clubs of Surrey, has been the scene of assaults and the counter-attacks made by Volunteer cyclists against defending bands of riflemen. The riflemen have held their own under the severest fire; Ministers and distinguished soldiers have watched them.

On the downs by Newlands Corner, near the great trackway of the trading Britons, stand some of the finest yews in England. To one of a group of trees, a monarch whose descendants count their centuries in a ring about him, belongs a noble poem. Mr. William Watson, under the shade of its branches, wrote The Father of the Forest. These are the opening lines:—

Old emperor Yew, fantastic sire,
Girt with thy guard of dotard kings,—
What ages hast thou seen retire
Into the dusk of alien things?
What mighty news hath stormed thy shade,
Of armies perished, realms unmade?
Already wast thou great and wise,
And solemn with exceeding eld,
On that proud morn when England's rays,
Wet with tempestuous joy, beheld
Round her rough coasts the thundering main
Strewn with the ruined dream of Spain.
Hardly thou count'st them long ago,
The warring faiths, the wavering land,
The sanguine sky's delirious glow,
And Cranmer's scorched, uplifted hand.
Wailed not the woods their task of shame,
Doomed to provide the insensate flame?
Mourned not the rumouring winds, when she,
The sweet queen of a tragic hour,
Crowned with her snow-white memory
The crimson legend of the Tower?
Or when a thousand witcheries lay
Felled with one stroke, at Fotheringay?
Ah, thou hast heard the iron tread
And clang of many an armoured age,
And well recall'st the famous dead,
Captains or counsellors brave or sage,
Kings that on kings their myriads hurled,
Ladies whose smile embroiled the world.

The pilgrims' road, as I have tried to show elsewhere, separates from the Way again at Guildford. The old British track probably kept to the northern ridge; the pilgrims who visited Guildford may have left by the same road, but they turned away across the valley to the little chapel of St. Martha, which stands on a hill two miles south-east of the town. The pilgrim's track to the chapel, vanished in parts, becomes plain enough when it crosses the road which now runs from Guildford to Chilworth west of the chapel by perhaps half a mile. Here it is a wide smooth path of the finest down grass, cropped close by rabbits, with which all this breezy hill must be alive by night. Nearly at the top the path breaks into sand, which must have tested the less elastic of the travellers to the shrine pretty severely, but the sand breaks again into an open plateau of as fine grass as the path below. On this plateau stands the little church, alone in the sun and wind.

Sixty years ago St. Martha's was a ruin; as unhappy a little building as St. Catherine's on the hill beyond the Wey. It was restored in 1848, and has taken out of the past a quiet and serenity that set it in the old years, in tranquil sunshine, in the peace of English Sundays. All the winds blow about it; it is alone in its acre of smooth down grass; within its churchyard wall are the graves of country labourers and their children, lowly mounds hardly seen, without the memory of a name, at one with the purpose of the earth they dug and sowed. Pine trees stand round the open space of the hill; bluebells in May spread a film under them; beyond the grasses, heather and ling die from August purples to the bronze of autumn. The Surrey hills are to the south and west; farthest on the horizon is the faint blue of the Sussex downs.

There are early Norman walls and arches in the restored chapel. St. Martha's may be one of the three churches which Domesday assigns to the manor of Bramley, belonging to Bishop Odo of Bayeux. A less trustworthy tradition is that Stephen Langton is buried there; the lids of the old stone coffins found in the chapel when it was restored probably account for that legend. Martin Tupper accepted the legend as history.

St. Martha's chapel has inspired more than one poet, Tupper among them, but none have written with more charm on the lonely little building than Mr. Sidney Allnutt, in a poem which was published in the Spectator last year. Here are six stanzas out of many:—

A little chapel grey with years,
And bleached with sun and rain,
One solid four-square tower it rears
Above strong walls which still oppose
Firm front to elemental foes
That rage at them in vain.
Far southward from St. Martha's Hill,
And to the east and west,
The downs heave up green shoulders, till
The distance with its magic blue
Envelops every other hue,
And crest is lost in crest.
Safe sheltered by the encircling downs
The chequered valleys show
Their tapestry of greens and browns,
Made rich by fields of golden grain,
And threaded by a silver vein
Where Wey's clear waters flow.
A churchyard bare of shrub or tree,
All open to the sky,
To every wind of heaven free,
Lies round the chapel, carpeted
With soft, sweet turf where happy dead
In dreamless slumber lie.
For, far removed from camp or mart,
Beneath the sacred sod
Of that blest hill they sleep apart:
Forgotten by the world below,
After life's spendthrift toil they know
The rest that comes from God.
And, oh, it must be good to sleep
Within that churchyard bare,
While turn by turn the seasons keep
A bedside watch, and God may see
Safe in St. Martha's nursery
His children pillowed there.

If I had to choose a month and an hour to visit St. Martha's, it would be an evening late in April with the trees in the valley at their freshest and the song of blackbirds about the hill. Others, perhaps, would choose an August day, with the wind scented and the hill purpled with heather; perhaps, too, in August the rabbit-cropped turf is smoothest and greenest. Others may find the chief beauty of the hill in the bronze and yellow of the changing leaves of October; there are no hills where the beech glows with a deeper fire than over Albury and the Tillingbourne. Others even might ask for the vague, wet airs of midwinter, with the shouldering hilltops east and south and west faint and mysterious in the clinging mist, and never a house-roof to be seen. That is an effect of strange loneliness; but the abiding charm of St. Martha's is the peace of clear air, in the enchantment of low spring sunlight on the down turf and the quiet walls.

Once I saw a remarkable sight by St. Martha's. Incongruously enough, the wooded hillsides below the chapel are preserved as game-coverts; indeed, pheasants are shot quite close to the churchyard. There are rides cut through the wood in which broods of young pheasants are fed by their fostermothers' coops; and looking down one of these rides on a day early in August, I watched for some time a curious collection of birds feeding together in front of the coops. There were the young pheasants, of course, there was quite a crowd of small birds, finches chiefly, but a few thrushes and hedge-sparrows; there were seven or eight turtle-doves, five jays, and, queerest of all companions for doves and pheasants, a carrion crow. I thought at first he must be a rook, but there was no doubt about it. I looked up as I walked away, and over me sailed five herring gulls, high and slow.

St. Catherine's chapel, on the other side of Guildford, has not the same lonely charm as St. Martha's. It has never, like St. Martha's, been restored, and the hill on which it stands is sacred to nobody. Children climb about its walls and windows; cockneys scratch their names, and picnic parties bestrew the grass with paper. Yet St. Catherine's, in the days before pilgrimages ceased and shrines were left to moulder, perhaps heard as many Aves as her sister chapel on the hill beyond the Way. A country legend is common to both chapels. St. Catherine and St. Martha, in the wonderful days of the giants, were sisters who built chapels on neighbouring hills. They had but one hammer between them, and they hurled it high over the valley one to another, St. Martha catching it from St. Catherine, driving in a nail and hurling it back again.

North of Guildford to the west is Worplesdon Common, a stretch of heathery, rushy ground over which have gone many marches and manoeuvres, and north of the common is the home of Mr. Frederick Selous, the African traveller and naturalist. Mr. Selous throws his collection of trophies open to the public for a small sum, and his garden is known to the readers of the Field as the home of rare and shy birds. The owner has described, with callous disregard of the feelings of less fortunate ornithologists, the nesting operations among his bird boxes of half a dozen nuthatches.

To the north-east, a mile from the main road from Guildford to Ripley, is Sutton Place, perhaps the finest piece of domestic architecture in the south of England. Mr. Frederic Harrison has described it at length in his Annals of an Old Manor House. It was built by Sir Richard Weston about 1525. The architect is unknown, but the house is peculiarly interesting, partly because it is the best example of the use of terra cotta in the moulding combined with brickwork, and partly because it is one of the earliest houses in England built as a country home rather than a castle. Sir Richard Weston, the founder, was one of the ablest servants and greatest friends of Henry VIII, the more astonishing a friendship in that it was never broken. Henry VIII sent his friend's son to the scaffold, accused as a lover of Anne Boleyn; he went to the block protesting his innocence, and there was nothing to prove him guilty; his last words were a defence of the queen. His son, a baby when his boyish father was executed, married the daughter of Sir Thomas Arundell. Sir Thomas had suffered for treason, so that husband and wife were the children of parents who had been sent to the block. They entertained Elizabeth at Sutton; she would have a child's memory of the founder of the house, and doubtless praised the rebus in the terra cotta moulding, the "R.W.," the grapes and the tun.

Later representatives of the Westons at Sutton were the Salvin family, and it was one of these Salvins, I imagine, to whom Frank Buckland refers in his edition of White's Selborne. Captain Salvin lived at Whitmoor House, near Guildford, and was the happy owner of a tame wild sow. Lady Susan was her name, and this is how her master describes her:—

All English cricket owes a debt to Guildford. It is in the annals of Guildford that there occurs the first known mention of the game of "crickett." In 1598 there was a dispute over the rights of a plot of land near the north town ditch, and "John Derrick, gent., one of the Queen's Majestie's coroners of the county of Surrey, aged fifty-nine" was called to give evidence. He stated that he had known the land for fifty years and more, and that when he was a boy at the Free School at Guildford he and his fellows "did runne and plaie there at crickett and other plaies." The evidence is interesting, because he is not asked for an explanation. Everybody at that date evidently knew at once what cricket meant. Besides being a cricket ground, the land was used for baiting bears.