If I had to choose a month and an hour to visit St. Martha's, it would be an evening late in April with the trees in the valley at their freshest and the song of blackbirds about the hill. Others, perhaps, would choose an August day, with the wind scented and the hill purpled with heather; perhaps, too, in August the rabbit-cropped turf is smoothest and greenest. Others may find the chief beauty of the hill in the bronze and yellow of the changing leaves of October; there are no hills where the beech glows with a deeper fire than over Albury and the Tillingbourne. Others even might ask for the vague, wet airs of midwinter, with the shouldering hilltops east and south and west faint and mysterious in the clinging mist, and never a house-roof to be seen. That is an effect of strange loneliness; but the abiding charm of St. Martha's is the peace of clear air, in the enchantment of low spring sunlight on the down turf and the quiet walls.
Once I saw a remarkable sight by St. Martha's. Incongruously enough, the wooded hillsides below the chapel are preserved as game-coverts; indeed, pheasants are shot quite close to the churchyard. There are rides cut through the wood in which broods of young pheasants are fed by their fostermothers' coops; and looking down one of these rides on a day early in August, I watched for some time a curious collection of birds feeding together in front of the coops. There were the young pheasants, of course, there was quite a crowd of small birds, finches chiefly, but a few thrushes and hedge-sparrows; there were seven or eight turtle-doves, five jays, and, queerest of all companions for doves and pheasants, a carrion crow. I thought at first he must be a rook, but there was no doubt about it. I looked up as I walked away, and over me sailed five herring gulls, high and slow.
St. Martha's Chapel.
St. Catherine's chapel, on the other side of Guildford, has not the same lonely charm as St. Martha's. It has never, like St. Martha's, been restored, and the hill on which it stands is sacred to nobody. Children climb about its walls and windows; cockneys scratch their names, and picnic parties bestrew the grass with paper. Yet St. Catherine's, in the days before pilgrimages ceased and shrines were left to moulder, perhaps heard as many Aves as her sister chapel on the hill beyond the Way. A country legend is common to both chapels. St. Catherine and St. Martha, in the wonderful days of the giants, were sisters who built chapels on neighbouring hills. They had but one hammer between them, and they hurled it high over the valley one to another, St. Martha catching it from St. Catherine, driving in a nail and hurling it back again.
North of Guildford to the west is Worplesdon Common, a stretch of heathery, rushy ground over which have gone many marches and manœuvres, and north of the common is the home of Mr. Frederick Selous, the African traveller and naturalist. Mr. Selous throws his collection of trophies open to the public for a small sum, and his garden is known to the readers of the Field as the home of rare and shy birds. The owner has described, with callous disregard of the feelings of less fortunate ornithologists, the nesting operations among his bird boxes of half a dozen nuthatches.
To the north-east, a mile from the main road from Guildford to Ripley, is Sutton Place, perhaps the finest piece of domestic architecture in the south of England. Mr. Frederic Harrison has described it at length in his Annals of an Old Manor House. It was built by Sir Richard Weston about 1525. The architect is unknown, but the house is peculiarly interesting, partly because it is the best example of the use of terra cotta in the moulding combined with brickwork, and partly because it is one of the earliest houses in England built as a country home rather than a castle. Sir Richard Weston, the founder, was one of the ablest servants and greatest friends of Henry VIII, the more astonishing a friendship in that it was never broken. Henry VIII sent his friend's son to the scaffold, accused as a lover of Anne Boleyn; he went to the block protesting his innocence, and there was nothing to prove him guilty; his last words were a defence of the queen. His son, a baby when his boyish father was executed, married the daughter of Sir Thomas Arundell. Sir Thomas had suffered for treason, so that husband and wife were the children of parents who had been sent to the block. They entertained Elizabeth at Sutton; she would have a child's memory of the founder of the house, and doubtless praised the rebus in the terra cotta moulding, the "R.W.," the grapes and the tun.
Later representatives of the Westons at Sutton were the Salvin family, and it was one of these Salvins, I imagine, to whom Frank Buckland refers in his edition of White's Selborne. Captain Salvin lived at Whitmoor House, near Guildford, and was the happy owner of a tame wild sow. Lady Susan was her name, and this is how her master describes her:—
"My sow originally came from Syria, and was given to me by H.H. the Maharajah Duleep Singh. She is a remarkably fine healthy animal, and her instinct and affection can only be equalled by the dog. She follows me almost daily in my walks like a dog, to the great astonishment of strangers. Of course I only take her out before the crops are up, and too low to injure, during the spring and summer months. I always have her belled, to hear when she is in the wood, etc.; and the bell, which is a good sheep's bell, is fastened round her neck with a strap and a buckle.
"Her leaping powers are extraordinary, either over water or timber; indeed, only a few weeks since she cleared some palings (between which she had been purposely placed to secure her for a time) three feet ten inches in height. Knowing my pig's excellent temper, even when she has young pigs, and when domestic sows are always most savage, I was once guilty of a practical joke. I got a blacksmith who was quite ignorant of even the existence of my pig, to 'come and ring a pig.' The stye being under a building, he had to enter it at a low door, which was some distance from the sow's yard, where she was feeding. He entered, shutting the door to keep the pig in, and thinking his subject was an ordinary one and that assistants were following him to hold the cord, etc. He had not been gone a minute, before I heard the greatest 'rum-ti-tum' at the door, and cries of 'For goodness' sake, sir, let me out! let me out! I never saw such a beast in all my life!' and out came the poor blacksmith pale with fright, but all the consolation he got was a jolly good laugh at his own expense."