Highways and Byways in Surrey

by Eric Parker

Nobody should go straight from Abinger Hatch to Leith Hill. You should turn aside to the left and let the road take you eastwards into the woods. Then you may come upon the tiny gathering of cottages called Friday Street with a suddenness which is a delight. You turn a corner of the road and you are in Switzerland. A little tarn, unruffled by any wind, mirroring a hill of pine-trees, lies below you; beyond the water is the blue reek of wood-fires; open grass runs to the edge of the lake, a light green rim to the dark of the pines. So do the little emerald tarns lie like saucers full of sky and trees in pockets of the Alps. The illusion wants but the tinkle of cowbells: it would be pleasant to present bells to straying goats.

From Friday Street to the tower on Leith Hill is a walk through the very depths of the wood. Heather glows in the openings of the pines, bracken brushes rain on your sleeve, bilberries ripen in the scented heat, and almost any path—though not the road—runs higher and higher to the open ground at the very top. At the top, nine hundred and sixty-five feet up, you are on the highest hill in the south-east of England.

Leith Hill is not for the multitude which climbs Box Hill. It is further from London, and further from a railway station. But it calls its own companies of travellers, and they are often large; the roads from Holmwood, which is the nearest station, are lined with notices indicating the right direction. When brakes carry excursionists from Holmwood, the brakes halt at the foot, and the visitors climb. The climb ends in a tower with a story. It was built by Richard Hull, eldest bencher of the Inner Temple and member of several Irish Parliaments. He built it, his Latin inscription informs you, for the enjoyment of himself and his neighbours, and six years later, in 1772, he was buried under it. Gratefully enough, the neighbourhood rifled the dead man's tower of its doors and windows; then, by way of compensation, to prevent more robbery, filled it half full of cement. It was left to the late owner of Wotton, Mr. W.J. Evelyn, in 1863 to restore the building and to add a staircase, and I believe the platform of the roof stands now exactly a thousand feet above sea level.

Friday Street.

The full view from Leith Hill has been described by a number of very fortunate persons. Aubrey was one of the first, and he estimated that the whole circumference of the horizon could not be less than two hundred miles. It is probably more. But did Aubrey ever see the full vision? If he did, he climbed the hill on a lucky day. English weather sends few days clear enough of mist to set a sharp outline on the Kentish downs, the Buckinghamshire hills and the slopes of Wiltshire, and the combination of transparent air and presence in the neighbourhood of a great height must be rare for ordinary men. Yet Leith Hill, even on the mistiest day, can give the true notion of height. The first day I climbed it was after a night of July rain. A wind had sprung up and seemed from the lower roads about the hill to have blown the distance clear. Then came an hour of hot sunshine, and the sudden view of the weald was of a sea of cloud. For two or three miles, perhaps, near the hill the oaks and elms, the roofs and the roads were plain enough. Beyond swam an infinite veil. But the sense of height, of detachment, remained.

I have never been on Leith Hill on the day of days, nor seen the spires of forty-one churches in London, which the Ordnance Surveyors counted in 1844, nor watched a sail on the sea through Shoreham Gap. But I was once there on an August day of sunshine and cold rain and wind, and saw all the southern view in a way I should like to see it again. I came to the hill from the west by Coldharbour, and black rain brooded over all the distance to the east. To the south-east the air was clear to the Kent horizon; north-east the glass of the Crystal Palace winked in the sun. Then the rain came down over the weald to the south and the west, and the cloud rode over the fields and dotted trees like the shower of rain in Struwelpeter, blotting out the villages and the Sussex downs one by one. Then behind the cloud drove up blank blue air, and to the west Hindhead and Blackdown and hills beyond them came clean cut in a cold wind that made my eyes water; Hascombe Hill stood up dark and far, and the Hog's Back to the north of it, edged like grey paper; I was lucky to see the Hog's Back so plainly, the vendor of tea and melons at the tower told me; she had seen the sea by Shoreham Gap that morning, but often went a week without seeing the Hog's Back. Below, to the south-west, Vachery Pond lay a gold mirror; Chanctonbury Ring faithfully marked the south as the rain drew past, and I left Leith Hill with the rain cloud riding down wind like night over the weald of Kent.

Among the Pines.

The unsatisfactory result of climbing a hill for a view is that you must come down again. Leith Hill is better than other hills for the reason that if you come down the best way, which is eastwards, you can climb up almost as high again on the other side of the dip and walk nearly a mile in the wind at the edge of a ridge overlooking half Kent and Sussex, and then come to the prettiest village of all the Downs. Friday Street is less a village than a handful of cottages, but Coldharbour has its church and its inn, the Plough, and its scattered roofs lie on the side of a valley of green brake and red sand. Coldharbour is almost as Swiss as Friday Street, and the paint of its inn as bright white as any in the sun of the Engadine. If Friday Street lacks the cowbells, Coldharbour would be complete with the grey turbulence of snow-water.