XVI
MERSTHAM
Merstham is as pretty a village as Surrey affords, and typically English. Railways have not abated, nor these turbid times altered in any great measure, its fine air of aristocratic and old-time rusticity. At one end of its one clearly-defined street, set at an angle to the high-road, are the great ornamental gates of Merstham Park, setting their stamp of landed aristocracy upon the place. To their right is a tiny gate leading to the public right-of-way through the park, which presently crosses over the pond where rise fitfully the springs of Merstham Brook, a congener of the Kentish “Nailbournes,” and one of the many sources of the River Mole. To the marshy ground by this brook, and to its stone-quarries, the place owes its name. It was in Domesday Book “Merstán” = Mere-stan, the stone (house) by the lake.
MERSTHAM.
Beyond the brook, above the tall trees, is seen the shingled spire of the church, an Early English building dedicated to St. Catherine, not yet spoiled, despite restorations and the scraping which its original lancet windows have undergone, in misguided efforts to endue them with an air of modernity.
The church is built of that limestone or “firestone” found so freely in the neighbourhood—a famed speciality which entered largely into the building and ornamentation of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel at Westminster. Those wondrously intricate and involved carvings and traceries, whose decadent Gothic delicacy is the despair of present-day architects and stone-carvers, were possible only in this stone, which, when quarried, is of exceeding softness, but afterwards, on exposure to the air, assumes a hardness equalling that of any ordinary building-stone, and has, in addition, the merit of resisting fire, whence its name. From the softer layers comes that article of domestic use, the “hearthstone,” used to whiten London hearths and doorsteps.
Merstham Church is even yet of considerable interest. It contains brasses to the Newdegate. Best, and Elmebrygge families, one recording in black letter: