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 That reproach is certainly out of date in our active generation.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—
Happy hamlets crowned in apple-bloom,
And ivy-muffled churches still with graves.
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.