Mr. Belloc suggests, may have owed its privilege to former importance as crossing-place of roads north and south. The small church is a museum of ecclesiastical decoration, collected from far and wide by a former owner, Lord Monson, buried in the mausoleum adjoining the house. His mansion was designed on a lavish scale, carried out so far as the hall goes, which makes a rich show of coloured marbles, terra-cotta reliefs and frescoes, in imitation of a chapel at Rome; but it looks to be an artistic Tower of Babel, as if the builder’s ambitious plans had been nipped by the Reform Bill when it took away the special value of what Cobbett styled a “very rascally spot of earth.” A successor of this peer unfortunately lent his name to a too well-known financier; with the result that Gatton passed into the hands of a gentleman who boasts how he made his money from the mustard people superfluously leave on their plates, and of whom his Redhill neighbours have cause to think that he spends it with like liberality.
Beyond Gatton comes a descent into another gap of the Downs, filled by the pretty and prosperous village of Merstham, with its “Feathers” Inn, and its old Church on a knoll. In the valley, the high-road of Redhill and two railway lines have obliterated the crossing of the Pilgrims’ Way on to the next face of the Downs, which now sweep back a little farther north. For a short mile, we may be content to take a road along the foot; then a path slanting up the slope brings us back to the crest, where the Pilgrims’ track has been transformed as approach to new houses. Near these turns north a byway to the Church of Chaldon, lying a mile or so behind our route.
This secluded Church is notable for the best of such fresco wall-paintings as were a feature of other churches in Surrey. The work seems to date from the generation after Becket, but became overlaid by plaster and white washing, under which it was discovered on the Church being restored a generation ago. Since their exposure, the colours have somewhat faded, so the short-sighted visitor, unversed in mediæval symbolism, may be told how the lower part displays the torments of the wicked at the hands of hideous devils, beside a serpent writhing among the fruit:—
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe.
From this grotesquely dismal scene, happier souls struggle up the Ladder of Salvation to where on one side Christ is seen triumphing over the powers of Evil, and on the other St. Michael weighing souls in his balance. One of the figures below, holding a bottle, is interpreted as a temperance lesson, no doubt needed by some of the pilgrims, who must often have turned aside to profit by this pictorial sermon. The worst torment seems to be that of a millionaire of the period, who had perhaps not opened his money bags to relieve poor pilgrims.
For the Pilgrims’ Way we have only to keep the brow of White Hill, looking over to the southern ridge on which Bletchingley stands. After crossing the road from Caterham to Bletchingley, it is continued by a lane turning off beside a tower and past the mansion called Arthur’s Seat, to the War Coppice, once an ancient camp, but now, like the Cardinal’s Cap on White Hill, offered as a too eligible building site. Except by peeps, the view to the south becomes obstructed; and we look over the Harestone Valley, down which a pleasant path runs northward to Caterham. At Gravelly Hill and its Water Tower, new road-making seems to transmogrify the Way, that on the slope beyond must have taken a scramble into the deep hollow through which runs the high-road to Godstone. Perhaps the original track is represented by a narrow lane descending on the south face of the Downs.
Across that quarried hollow, we again ascend the Downs for their last half-dozen miles in Surrey. A little below the milestone goes off a charmingly devious lane up Winder’s Hill and along the south side of Marden Park, past its white shooting “Castle” so conspicuous on the brow, then the lodge gate, through which there is a bridle-way running to Caterham or on to the farther end of the park, two miles north. Evelyn tells us how this fine demesne was made from a “barren warren” and a poor farm in a hardly populated parish, by that “prodigious rich scrivener” of his own time, Sir Robert Clayton, a Lord Mayor of London, whose virtues, or at least his fortunes, are attested by the monstrous monument covering a whole chancel wall of Bletchingley Church on the ridge to the south. Here, admiringly says our authority on such matters, the wealthy citizen so changed the face of hill, valley, and “solitary mountain,” that before long Marden looked like “some foreign country” which would “produce spontaneously pines, firs, cypress, yew, holly, and juniper,” not to mention “an infinite store of the best fruit.”
The sylvan riches of Marden Park may be sampled from a lovely lane winding round the outside of its enclosure to gain the open edge of the heights. The Pilgrims’ Way here dropped to a lower level, passing by what is still called Palmer’s Wood and another wood on the face of the Downs, again hugely scarred by chalk cuttings. It next runs right through the middle of Titsey Park, where a Roman villa was discovered near its course. Titsey Place was the old seat of the Greshams, a name well known in City annals, whose monuments are preserved in the new church on the east side of the park. From this point eastwards the Way is a modern lane easily followed for miles.
The modern pilgrim may as well leave this lower road to be looked down on from the edge, along which he can hold on from Marden Park, by hints of War Office possession, and some lonely houses that mark an attempt at a new London settlement meant to take its name from Woldingham on the lower ground behind. Thus is gained the inconspicuous swell of Botley Hill, which appears to be the highest ground on the Surrey Downs (882 feet) but has no markedly prominent point to command a view, looking north across a somewhat featureless table-land to the towers of the Crystal Palace, and south over a more pleasing expanse of hills, dales, woods, and villages. Presently this prospect is interrupted by woods, behind which five roads meet to make the perilous descent by Titsey, as other arduous lanes and paths have been seen dropping down towards Oxted and Limpsfield. Still we may keep the edge, taking the Westerham road, almost half a mile along which, at Cold Harbour Green, the highest face of the Surrey Downs (880 feet) is marked by a clump of beech trees above a farm named Pilgrims’ Lodge. A little farther along the high ground stands the last Surrey Church, Tatsfield, looking far over the vale by which the Way now enters Kent.