These heaths are skirted by our Brighton highway, which at Gatton Park, about three miles beyond the fork at Tadworth, approaches its grandest point. Through the cutting to lower its level, that gave such strange offence to Cobbett, it suddenly emerges on the steep brow above Reigate, passing under the Suspension Bridge of the Pilgrims’ Way, whence on the left a most leafy lane leads down to Redhill, the modern annexe of Reigate. A footpath runs along the cutting to the end of the Suspension Bridge, where are seats for enjoying the celebrated view from this brow; but from the open turf by the roadside the prospect is hardly diminished, embracing the whole south of the county. The Holmesdale Valley lies at our feet, with Reigate spread out in the foreground, backed by the sand ridge; far away to the east stretches the Weald of Kent; and the towers of East Grinstead stand up to the south-east, across the Sussex border, with Crowborough Beacon beyond. Chanctonbury Ring and the Devil’s Dyke on the Sussex Downs can sometimes be made out to the south. To the west, the Holmesdale Valley is continued between Leith Hill and the Chalk Downs on which we stand; then on that hand the featureless ridge of Hindhead will close the view in fine weather.
The descent to Reigate requires caution, imposed on prudent wheels by its steep turns, and on imprudent ones by the fame of the local police, who have made themselves a terror to scorchers. In the valley, beyond the railway station, the road pierces into the heart of Reigate by the unusual feature of a tunnel beneath the hillock on which stand its Castle ruins and the brand-new block of Municipal Buildings.
Reigate, now so disguised in villas and wooded grounds, and so swollen by the railway growth of Redhill on its east side, is no mere mushroom-bed of London homes, but an old chief town of south-eastern Surrey. Here was built a Norman Castle of the De Warennes, a rival to that of Bletchingley on the sand ridge beyond Redhill. Till the last Reform Bill Reigate had a member of its own, and two in olden days. When membership of Parliament was often felt a burden rather than a privilege, this neighbourhood was but too well represented, Gatton on the Downs above being one of the most notorious rotten boroughs, and Bletchingley another, that made a phosphorescent end with Lord Palmerston as its member.
The nucleus of the place is marked by a gathering of old inns and shops about the cross-roads, above which the site of the Castle has been laid out as a public garden. There is not much of the structure left, the chief sight being the sandstone caves underneath, which tradition, or perhaps no better authority than Tupper’s novel, Stephen Langton, makes the secret meeting-place of the barons conspiring to bring King John on his knees for the signing of Magna Charta. Still older legends haunt these caves, where rude carvings have been attributed to Roman soldiers quartered in them. Under other houses in or about the town there are caves or excavations said to be better worth seeing, but not always open to idle curiosity, one of them, indeed, being used for a rifle gallery. What will be apparent to the passer-by is a pleasant mixture of lawns, gardens, and clumps of fine foliage, among which footpaths lead one in view of these private amenities well displayed on the swells of the valley.
Reigate, then, may prove a spot to “delay the tourist,” certainly for the charms of its situation between the varied features of chalk and sand closely facing each other from either side. On the north a steep ascent leads to the celebrated Beechwood view, from which one may wander along the timbered Downs to Box Hill. Up the valley runs the road to Dorking, going out by Reigate Heath, where on a byway to Leigh is found the curious feature of a windmill turned into a little church. Beyond the town the sand ridge leads eastward to the broken expanse of Earlswood Common; on the west side of the road it is crowned by the clumps and knolls of Reigate Park, open to the public for striking prospects both north and south; and from this enclosure one may hold on along the heights to come upon the Mole winding through one of the most Surreyish corners of Surrey.
The Brighton road mounts straight up the sand hill, deeply cut under the edge of Reigate Park, below which the old Augustinian Priory has been transformed into a mansion, whose late owner, Lady Henry Somerset, made herself a high name both in England and America as a temperance reformer. By path to Redhill along the top of the ridge, or over Earlswood Common on its south side, one can now in a couple of miles strike across to the road through Croydon, soon to converge with that we have followed through Reigate. From Woodhatch, the latter drops on to the Weald, in four miles joining the other road at Povey Cross, twenty-six miles from London. A mile or so more brings us to the edge of Surrey, guarded by a “White Lion,” but no longer marked by the “County Oak,” whose time-seasoned timber has gone to make the screen of Ifield Church.
Henceforth this much travelled road belongs to Sussex. The last stretch of it in Surrey is not its most attractive part, from which, however, one could make a fine diversion among the branches of the Mole to the west, crossing over to the line of Stone Street. But our theme is the Brighton road, on which let us now skim backwards along the main branch viâ Croydon, that, more closely accompanying the Brighton rail, might be chosen by wayfarers bent on business or record-making.
Behind the convergence, this branch leads by the racecourse of Gatwick, then, across the Mole, by the new growth of Horley, that might be called the southernmost of London’s dependencies, if the same thing were not to be said of Brighton; but the old yews by the Church, and the “Chequers” and “Six Bells” inns speak for Horley’s unvillaed antiquity. To carry out the sporting character of the neighbourhood, Horley is headquarters of the Surrey staghounds, and at Burstow, to the east, are the kennels of one of three packs of foxhounds that hunt this edge of the county, where Mr. Jorrocks must have had many a day before he came to his mastership at Handley Spa. To the east here extends a part of the Weald little famed in the tourist world, yet containing such points as Burstow with its monument to Flamsteed, our first Astronomer-Royal; Thunderfield Castle, taken to have been a Saxon fortress; and the old mansion of Smallfield Place, by which the free foot or wheel might wander across to the East Grinstead road.
On the Brighton road itself—where the reader must bear in mind that his head has been turned Londonwards—he finds not much of interest till it comes to switchback over Earlswood Common, between an artificial lake and the palace of the idiot asylum. Thus it mounts the sand ridge, stretching towards Reigate in boldly broken scars and tangled hollows of the red sandstone that gives Redhill its name, here crowned by a circular clump to commemorate the Jubilee of 1897. On the other side this range invites a fine diversion, by either low or high roads, past Nutfield and Bletchingley to Godstone, on whose Green can be joined the road going southwards by Caterham.
Our business-like highway has now nothing for it but a long down and up through the main street of Redhill, in the central depression passing the big Junction and St. Ann’s Schools on the right, where, on the other side, the excrescence of Warwick Town has grown along the cross-road almost into Reigate. When the high-road gets out of Redhill, it is climbing the Downs, reached at Merstham below Gatton Park, and passed by a valley making the course of the Bourne, one of those English wadys so common in chalk countries, which, filled by the overflowing of some subterranean reservoir, may burst out in ravaging floods, as this one has often done. In the same hollow pass is pent up the railway that was apt to be choked by the trains of two lines, till the Brighton Company relieved the pressure by a new conduit from Earlswood to Purley.