Eric Parker

Painters among heather.—The Devil's Jumps.—The Devil redivivus.—Cobbett at Thursley.—A superb belfry.—The Sailor's Grave.—Pig-iron and hammers.—The natterjack at eve.—A plank for bellringers.—Witley fifty years hence.—Mehetabel in the church.

Thursley lies nearly three miles north of Hindhead on the edge of the heather, and brings artists all the summer to paint its timbered cottages and glowing hills. Mrs. Allingham sketched as charmingly on Thursley common as by Haslemere; Birket Foster found a background of purple for his cottage gardens. Mrs. Allingham's sketch of Hindhead from Witley common, which runs up to Thursley from the north-east, is all the wild of this part of Surrey on a few inches of paper.

Thursley is Thor's ley or field, and has memories of the Danes. They left other names near: Tuesley, or Tuesco's field, lies towards Godalming, and Thunder Hill, near Elstead, is Thor's or Thunor's. Thor lives in local legends. Three strange conical hills, lying close together two miles or so west of Thursley, have been known since his day as the Devil's Jumps. Tradition draws a frightful picture of the Devil, horns and tail and all, jumping from hill to hill to amuse himself, until one day Thor caught him at it and knocked him over with an enormous stone. You can see the stone on the Devil's Jumps to-day.

The Devil jumped up again when I was last looking at the Jumps. I had climbed to the top of Kettlebury Hill, a mile away, and was looking out over those strange little lumps of rock and crimson heather, which puzzled Cobbett to the end of his days, when suddenly at my feet there started up a rabbit as black as a cinder, leapt wildly about the heather, and disappeared. There could have been very little doubt what that meant long after Thor's time.

Cobbett, riding in from Hampshire or Sussex, used to make Thursley his first stopping-place. But one thing he would not do, and that was to come into Thursley over Hindhead. He detested turnpike roads, and he detested Hindhead. He liked to ride through woods, or along lanes with trees meeting overhead. When he rides from Chiddingford to Thursley, he writes that "the great thing was to see the centre of these woods, to see the stems of the trees as well as the tops of them." Otherwise, the pleasure in riding was to pass fine turnip-fields, or bean-fields; anything rather than waste land. The heather on the hills might glow to crimson, and the bracken fade from emerald to bronze, without touching a chord in that sturdy farmer's heart. Hindhead, you read, "is certainly the most villainous spot that God ever made," and Cobbett will have nothing to do with it.

The last fifty years have altered and enlarged Thursley church, but it still retains the distinction, unique in Surrey, of its timber tower and steeple rising from the centre of the nave. Other churches in the county—Dunsfold and Alfold in the neighbourhood—carry their bell-turrets on ingenious constructions of timber, but there is no such collection in any other Surrey church of such superb beams as are to be seen at Thursley. The effect of these dark and majestic pillars of oak, some of them thirty inches square, with their great crossbeams, and their arches springing from the pillars across the nave, is one of astonishing splendour and power. Outside, the shingled turret tells the time with, instead of a clock, a fine old sundial.

To the north of the church stands a thing of terror. The full story of the murder of the "unknown sailor" belongs to Hindhead; but Thursley has his grave. It lies apart, in the centre of a stretch of green grass; above it, a stone too tall for quietness; no other grave shares that lonely lawn. Here is the queer, mis-spelt epitaph:—

When pitying Eyes to see my Grave shall come,
And with a generous Tear bedew my Tomb;
Here shall they read my melancholy Fate,
With Murder and Barbarity complete.
In perfect Health, and in the Flower of Age,
I fell a Victim to three Ruffians Rage;
On bended Knees I mercy strove t' obtain,
Their Thirst of Blood made all Entreaties vain.
No dear Relation, or still dearer Friend,
Weeps my hard Lot, or miserable End;
Yet o'er my sad Remains, (my Name unknown,)
A generous Public have inscrib'd this Stone.

Above the epitaph a rough carving shows the sailor kneeling to his murderers. Mr. Baring-Gould, in the Broom Squire makes Iver Verstage, the artist, laugh at the crudely drawn figures. But the horror of this grave, from which all the other quieter graves are gathered apart, has very little laughter in it.

Thursley Common once rang with the picks and hammers of an iron mine; it was one of the centres of a great industry of the Weald. The surface of the common is scarred with the pits from which the ironstone was dug; the hammer ponds lie in a string along a tiny tributary of the Wey. John Ray, in his Collection of English Words not generally Used, published in 1672, and printed in the Sussex ArchÆological Collections, gives an account of the methods of the old iron smelters. A stream, or a pond with a stream running through it, would be dammed, and the fall of water at the lower end would then work two pairs of bellows for the blast for the furnace and a wheel which raised and let fall a hammer. The fuel used was charcoal. Before the ironstone was put into the furnace it was "mollified" or broken up into small pieces by being burnt between layers of charcoal. Then it was put into the furnace, and when melted drawn off in long lumps, called pigs or sows. Then the sows were taken to the forge or hammer, and beaten into square "blooms," two feet long; then the blooms were beaten into "anconies," three feet long; then the "anconies" had their ends nicely shaped, and the iron was ready for market.

A very extensive "collection of English words not generally used" is contained in an inventory of tools supplied to William Yalden, when he took over the Thursley ironworks. Perhaps an ironmaster of to-day might recognise some of those I have chosen:—

Mr. Baring-Gould has described one of the natives of Thursley Common in the Broom Squire:—

I looked for the natterjack at eve, but did not find him. At Farnham, I am told, he is called a jar-bob. Thursley children like to catch a natterjack to sell.

Elstead is three miles away, on the northern edge of the belt of heather; a happy little village standing round a green, with a mill, a bridge, and a church with a wonderful ladder up to the belfry. This is actually a single vast plank of oak, black and immoveable, sloped up from a crossbeam and notched for steps. There are many magnificent beams in Surrey churches, but this is the finest ladder of all of them. It does not tempt ascent in days of more elaborate staircases; but it would not break under the heaviest set of bellringers that ever rung a change.

To the east is Milford, a good half mile from its station, and nothing much besides. There is a good natural centre to the village, with four cross roads and an inn, but no doubt Milford's future is to belong to Godalming. A few half-timbered and weather-tiled cottages, which have served as models for newer neighbours, some pollarded elms, a broad smooth road and dusty jasmine—Milford is the first village on the highway running south from Godalming, and on a summer Saturday is less a village than a road.

One of the four roads which branch off from Milford to the south runs to Witley. Witley will look more tranquil and more seasoned fifty years hence. To come into the village in the gathering dusk of a summer evening, as I saw it first, is an enchantment; nothing could throw a quieter spell than the brick and timber and tar and whitewash of the cottages, the flowers climbing up the old inn, and the familiar noises of a neighbouring game of cricket finishing in half darkness. But only part of Witley will stand the full glare of sunlight. The new cottages are finely designed, but they are too black-and-white and painty to group easily with the older, mossier buildings and the White Hart Inn, with its nobly ugly sign.

The church, bowered in ivy and roses, has some quaint inscriptions. One commemorates a forgotten office:—

A Sewer of the Chamber waited at the table and brought water for the hands of the guests—an office which suggests an obvious rhyme for poets writing of water-jugs. Another epitaph is a shining example of the proper manner of attributing to the dead an almost crushing superfluity of virtues. Sara Holney, first in Latin, and then in English, thus is lamented and extolled:—

"A better woman than here sleeps, there's none,
Sara, Rebecca, Rahel, three in one:
Religious, pious, thrifty, wise, fayre, and chast:
Soe many goods in one, who finds in hast?"

One more name attracts. Mehetabel, daughter of John Leech of Lea, died in 1816. She was doubtless a friend of Cobbett, who often rode by Lea, and greatly admired her father's trees. The first Mehetabel was the wife of the king of Edom, and the last, possibly, is the heroine of the Broom Squire.

Witley has perhaps been a little overshadowed by the tragedy of a late owner of Lea Park. I have heard descriptions of the new features of Lea Park, the lakes and fountains and a billiard-room, I believe, under water, but I have not seen them.

Before Hindhead drew authors and artists up the hill, Witley had its own settlement of workers living deep in Surrey country. George Eliot was at Witley Heights; J.C. Hook, who could not bear to be watched while he was painting, sketched Witley gorse and heather; Birket Foster long lived among the Witley pines; and Mrs. Allingham, who was at Sandhills, a house near by, has painted few more interesting pictures than her Lessons, Pat-a-cake, and The Children's Tea. At Witley she painted most of her studies of children indoors, in the nursery and the schoolroom; after she left Witley, she liked to set her cottage girls and boys among bluebells and apple-blossom out of doors.