Highways and Byways in Surrey

by Eric Parker

It seemed worth while, at the risk of spattering the page with dates and facts of gunpowder dryness, to attempt this short sketch of the Surrey gunpowder industry, if only to escape from the confusion of current legends. Chief among the traditions of the Chilworth mills is that which makes them the property of John Evelyn of Wotton. No Evelyn owned a powdermill at Chilworth, and John Evelyn of Wotton, though he may have owned a casual mill or so elsewhere, is not the John Evelyn who owned and worked the Godstone mills. Those mills belonged to the diarist's grandfather, George Evelyn, and to George Evelyn's son and grandson, both named John. The latter was the diarist's cousin. I ought to add that I am indebted, for most of this history of gunpowder, to the admirable article on the subject by Mr. Montague Giuseppi, published in the Victoria History of the County.

Albury is nearly two miles from Chilworth station, and the Tillingbourne runs through and under it. Albury has a number of beautiful chimneys; chimneys that are tall and graceful, of red brick, shaped and moulded in ingenious spirals, with patterned sides and columns, and crowsteps and other ornaments and uses. You would not guess all that a chimney can be, until you have seen Albury. A year or two ago there was another charm in the village. You looked in from the main street at what seemed like half a road, half an entrance to a square of houses, and found yourself in the remains of an old farmyard, of which one side was a row of cottages. The rest was old red brick—I think I remember a great dovecote—and a quiet look of age and disuse. But now new buildings are rising in its place.

Chimneys, Albury.

Just outside Albury is one of the Duke of Northumberland's houses, in Albury Park. The garden holds a historic yew hedge, but it is not shown to the public and I have not seen it. John Evelyn laid out the gardens; Cobbett has described the yew hedge. In his day it belonged to Mr. Drummond, a banker, and Cobbett, who had heard much of the park and gardens, rode up to the house and asked permission to see them. So he saw the yew hedge, and wrote about it.

"Between the house and the gardens there is a very beautiful run of water, with a sort of little, wild, narrow sedgy meadow. The gardens are separated from this by a hedge, running along from east to west. From this hedge there go up the hill, at right angles, several other hedges, which divide the land here into distinct gardens, or orchards. Along at the top of these there goes a yew hedge, or, rather, a row of small yew trees, the trunks of which are bare for about eight or ten feet high, and the tops of which form one solid head of about ten feet high, while the bottom branches come out on each side of the row about eight feet horizontally. This hedge, or row, is a quarter of a mile long. There is a nice hard sand road under this species of umbrella; and summer and winter, here is a most delightful walk! Between this row of yews, there is a space, or garden (a quarter of a mile long you will observe) about thirty or forty feet wide, as nearly as I can recollect. At the back of this garden, and facing the yew tree row, is a wall probably ten feet high, which forms the breastwork of a terrace; and it is this terrace which is the most beautiful thing that I ever saw in the gardening way. It is a quarter of a mile long, and, I believe, between thirty and forty feet wide; of the finest green sward and as level as a die."

In Albury Park is a ruined church. Its history is not very edifying. Mr. Drummond, the banker, who built the Catholic Apostolic cathedral near by, obtained permission to shut up the old church if he built a new one elsewhere. He built the new church, and the old, with its graves and memories, was abandoned. The footpath leading to it remains open to the public, and runs under the shade of some superb Spanish chestnuts.

Perhaps half a mile from the park, in the depth of a wood of box, are the two Sherborne Farm ponds, one of which has come by the name of the Silent Pool. The Sherborne ponds lie somewhere near the track of the pilgrims, and I like to think that the journeying men knew them and drank their clear water. Legend has grown round the deeper, upper pool. Martin Tupper, in his strange medley Stephan Langton, has shaped it into his story. A lovely peasant girl used to bathe in the pool; King John, riding by, saw her and drove his horse at her, and she, trying to escape, fell into deep water and was drowned. That was not enough for Martin Tupper; he decided that her brother should try to rescue her and be drowned also. There they lay, the two of them; "the brother and sister are locked in each other's arms in the tranquil crystal depth of Shirebourne Pond; and the rippled surface is all smooth once more; and you may see the trout shoaling among the still green weeds around that naked raven-haired Sabrina, and her poor drowned brother in his cowskin tunic." So wrote Tupper; a most moving finish of a chapter.

To gain the Silent Pool, if you are in Albury, walk eastwards right through the village and turn to the left over the Tillingbourne. Then to the left again, and you will spy a cottage, the gate of which bears the legend "Key of the Pool kept here." How should a pool have a key? It turns out to be two keys, one of a padlock shutting an iron gate leading to a grove of box trees; you shut the padlock and find that you have left all who come after you—and on Saturdays at least they are many—to climb the fence. The Silent Pool, when I saw it first, a little disappointed me. I ought to have known that it would, because everybody could tell me where it was, even quite unintelligent people walking about the road two miles away. I think I hoped the pool would be, not only solitary and sequestered, but entirely deserted by human beings; a pool on which you came suddenly, lying hidden in the heart of chalky dells dark green with box trees; it was to be as deep as a well, and cold with the coldness of a spring; smelling, too, of bitter wet box and sun-warmed chalk. It was to be a pool at the side of which the stranger should seat himself, and discover the air of the place so quiet and enchanted that he could hear no sound of birds or beasts or men; only, perhaps, the melodious drip of the rain-heavy boughs into the clear peacock-green depths of water. And, in fact, the disappointment is that this is precisely what the Silent Pool might be. It is what it used to be, I think; but so many people have heard of it and have come on bicycles and in carriages and motor-cars to see it, that the leaf-strewn paths are trampled into mud round it; and it cannot be called silent, for you will not escape hearing other people, who have quite as much right as you to be there, talk about it and tramp round its margin. Then, too, for the convenience of visitors, there has been built on the edge of the pool a thatched arbour of wood, into which you admit yourself with a very large key, only to be deafened on the spot by ten thousand cockney names scrawled on the white walls round you. Those who have gibbeted themselves on the walls have also thrown the newspapers that held their lunch into the water, and bottles with the paper—a most unhappy spectacle. Had I the right to touch the place, the arbour would be packed up offhand for Rosherville. Only in one particular has the arbour any claim on the wayfarer's gratitude. It enables him to watch the large trout which swim in the clear deep water under him as closely as if they were behind the glass of an aquarium. Trout which leap out of the water every two minutes in a spring afternoon, and yet which are tame enough to come and be fed under the rail of a wooden arbour by trooping visitors, are a sight for idle fishermen to see. I have fed them with worms, but I suspect them to be better used to sandwiches.