CHAPTER VII
GUILDFORD'S ENVIRONS
The prettiest town Cobbett ever saw.—Semaphores and the THING.—The Road on the Ridge.—Newlands Corner.—The Father of the Forest.—Pilgrims to St. Martha's.—A quiet churchyard.—Mr. Allnutt's poem.—St. Catherine's and the Hammer.—Worplesdon.—Sutton Place.—The Weston Rebus.—Lady Susan, the Tame Wild Sow.—The earliest mention of Cricket.
Cobbett's is the most attractive description of Guildford and its environs. "The town of Guildford," he writes in Rural Rides, "taken with its environs I, who have seen so many, many towns, think the prettiest, and, taken all together, the most agreeable and most happy-looking that I ever saw in my life. Here are hill and dale in endless variety. Here are the chalk and the sand, vieing with each other in making beautiful scenes. Here is a navigable river and fine meadows. Here are woods and downs. Here is something of everything but fat marshes and their skeleton-making agues. The vale all the way down to Chilworth from Reigate is very delightful." He has as many praises for the neighbourhood on the other side. "Everybody that has been from Godalming to Guildford knows that there is hardly another such a pretty four miles in all England. The road is good; the soil is good; the houses are neat; the people are neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows, all are beautiful. Nothing wild or bold, to be sure, but exceedingly pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion, as it happened to be with me." Would the scenery have pleased Cobbett better if it had been "wild or bold"? Probably not, since he calls Hindhead "the most villainously ugly spot on God's Earth." Cobbett liked smiling pastures and well grown crops. His prettiness is good timber and clean farming.
In Cobbett's time, there were no suburbs to Guildford; to-day the suburbs grow. Pewley Hill, south-east of the town, which old pictures of Guildford show you bare downland, is hardly so much spotted as hidden by undistinguished villas and dreary brick. Perhaps it would please Cobbett as well as it pleased him ninety years ago. Pewley Hill in his day stood naked to the wind, except for the semaphore and its buildings, and Cobbett deeply hated the semaphore. To us, who have the telephone and telegram, there seems nothing hateful in it (unless we hate the telephone), but to Cobbett the line of semaphore towers between London and Portsmouth stood for all that was dreadful in war, debt, jobbery and alarums. He could see nothing attractive in the cleverness and despatch of a system which enabled news to be sent from London to Portsmouth in a few seconds. (It took three-quarters of a minute to signal the hour of one o'clock from Greenwich to Portsmouth and back again to Greenwich). All he saw was bloody war and money wrongly spent. Thus, of one of the line:—
"This building is, it seems, called a Semaphore, or Semiphare, or something of that sort. What this word may have been hatched out of I cannot say; but it means a job, I am sure. To call it an alarm-post would not have been so convenient; for, people not endued with Scotch intellect, might have wondered why the d—— we should have to pay for alarm-posts and might have thought that with all our 'glorious victories' we had 'brought our hogs to a fine market' if our dread of the enemy were such as to induce us to have alarm-posts all over the country!" The semaphore north of the road from Guildford to Farnham urges him to even higher flights:—
"What can this be for? Why are these expensive things put up all over the country? Respecting the movements of whom is wanted this alarm system? Will no member ask this in Parliament? Not one! not a man: and yet it is a thing to ask about. Ah! it is in vain, THING, that you thus are making your preparations; in vain that you are setting your trammels! The DEBT, the blessed debt, that best ally of the people, will break them all; will snap them, as the hornet does the cobweb; and even these very 'Semaphores' contribute towards the force of that ever blessed debt."
Semaphore House still stands upon Pewley Hill, a modern villa; opposite it, which would infuriate the old reformer if he could see it, War Office Ground, marked off with barbed wire and minatory notice-boards. A hundred years hence, perhaps the fort on Pewley Hill will be exhibited as one of the curiosities of nineteenth-century Guildford.
Pewley Hill is dull enough in itself to-day, when the down grass has gone and the bricks are multiplying, but it leads to some of the wildest and oldest and sweetest of all scenes in the county. You must go over Pewley Hill to come to the downs, and the downs between Guildford and Netley, by Newlands Corner, above Albury and Chilworth, are for me, at all events, the loveliest spot in Surrey. There are other heights in Surrey with wider views of scenery; there is Hindhead with its almost complete circle of horizon, from Nettlebed by Henley to the Devil's Dyke above Brighton; there is the road above Reigate, which looks out over a thousand roofs and miles of well farmed fields; and there is Leith Hill, the highest of all hills in south eastern England. But the stretch of downland running from Guildford to Newlands Corner has a charm that belongs to none of these. It is not merely the peace and sunshine of the broad path along the ridge, with its downland flowers and Chalk Hill Blue butterflies; not only the width and extent of the view over the Weald, though it is of all views in Surrey one of the loveliest—unlike the flatter panoramas of Leith Hill and Reigate in that it is a view not only of fields and meadows, but of tree-clad hills, shouldering into fainter greens and greys away to Hampshire and Sussex. The enchantment is something else; the closeness of touch with so much that is dim and old; the nearness of so much that cannot be reached in changing towns, on modern roads. For this is unchanged, untouched, unsoiled, part of the great Way that brought the merchants of Cornwall riding to the Roman port of Rutupiæ in the Isle of Thanet with tin mined in the Cassiterides. The valley below may have changed from forest to meadow and plough, but the green road along the ridge remains what it was before ever it felt a Roman wheel. No fresher air nor clearer sunlight lies on any Surrey downs than on those broad aisles of shaven turf, lichened whitethorns and wind-bent yews.
Newlands Corner has seen more than one battle. Mr. St. Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator, and one of the earliest founders of rifle clubs in the country, has his home on the downs close by, and Newlands Corner, the centre of the rifle clubs of Surrey, has been the scene of assaults and the counter-attacks made by Volunteer cyclists against defending bands of riflemen. The riflemen have held their own under the severest fire; Ministers and distinguished soldiers have watched them.