Highways and Byways in Surrey

by Eric Parker

Leisured churchgoers should choose a service at Crowhurst at sunset: September drives the sun at the right angle to light its dark oak and the great beams of the belfry. Many churches have windows built high in the west end, through which part of the splendour of the setting sun can filter; but this window is set low, and the red sky floods the church.

From the church to Crowhurst Place a mile away runs an interesting byway, the only one in Surrey, so far as I know, built by a private gentleman of permanent material, extending for a mile from his house to his place of worship. In the year 1631 the John Gainsford of the day, at the fine old age of 76, determined he would walk wet to church no more. He had a stone-flagged causeway laid from the manor-house to the churchyard, "it being before," as the Parish Register informs you, "a loathsom durtie way every stepp." He paid two workmen fifty pounds for the job, and the causeway is still to be picked out across the meadows.

Crowhurst Place.

The Gainsfords were one of the best, though not the greatest of the old Surrey families. They are first heard of in the reign of Edward III, when John and Margery Gaynesford had the manor of Crowhurst from John de Stangrave and Joan his wife—a delightful gathering of English names. One of them, in Tudor days, was Sheriff of Surrey, and well in the Tudor fashions: he had six wives. But he must have found them disappointing in their family duties, for the first five of them brought him fifteen daughters running, and it was only from the sixth and last that he got a son and heir. He was one of a long succession of Johns and Erasmuses, but the line failed at the end. There were never enough boys in the Gainsford families, and when at last the manor went to a daughter the spell was broken; the house was sold.

The Bridge over the Moat, Crowhurst Place.

Crowhurst Place was originally a timber house built in or near the reign of Henry VII, and according to tradition Henry VIII used to stay there on his way to visit Anne Boleyn at Hever Castle over the border. It was, and still is in some respects, an admirable example of the masonry and carpentry of the fifteenth century, but the destroying hand of later builders has removed part of the timber and filled up the gaps with brick and weather-tiling, so that its full character has been taken away. The great hall, with its glorious beams, was too much for the utilitarian. The waste of space distressed him. He therefore cut it in two by running a floor across the length of it halfway up, and subdivided his floor into bedrooms to accommodate the resident farmer's numerous family. It would be difficult to ruin a fine hall more completely.

But the house still has its own beauty, though it is the wild beauty of poverty and neglect. It stands half a mile from the road to the south-west of the church, approached by a rough bridle path. The first glimpse through the trees is of gables striped white and dark; a moat, befeathered and noisy with ducks, and a little wooden bridge crossing the moat to a side-door. Beyond lie great barns, a flagged courtyard and flagged paths, and round the corner a second bridge over the moat, brickbuilt and massive; and by the garden gate a mounting-stone, which it would be pleasant to think gave Anne Boleyn's royal wooer an easy step into the saddle. But it came later, perhaps.

Is it not possible that Crowhurst Place may be rescued as Tangley Manor was? It has the hall, and the kitchen and the oak panelling, and the great fireplaces for which we search all the house-agents' catalogues; it is moated, it has dined a king; there should be a ghost somewhere. But it rests apart, a farmhouse only. Brambles grow about it, such as should fence in a castle of sleep; above them timbered gables and tall chimneys to fit the cold and spacious hearths within. The fires that lit those hearths wait their rekindling.