Highways and Byways in Surrey

by Eric Parker

Of the two roads which run parallel to the downs east of Guildford, doubtless the road south of the ridge runs through the prettiest villages. Albury, Shere and Gomshall are a more charming trio than any three that lie on the northern road, if only because of the woods about them and the clear trout stream that runs under their walls and bridges. The villages north of the ridge hardly have a good-sized pond between them. But the walk from Guildford to Leatherhead, which can be shortened at any railway station you please from Clandon to Bookham, is for all that a walk through delightful country and villages of unchanging quiet.

Merrow is the first of the little hamlets that dot the Leatherhead road, and though the Guildford villas are stretching out their gardens further and further to the polite east, Merrow is still a mere group of downside cottages. The church might have been better restored; but the chief feature of the village is the old Horse and Groom Inn, with its gabled front and its noble stack of chimneys, three sister shafts of peculiar grace and mellow colour. The date, 1615, which records the age of the inn above one of its bay windows, reads a reproach to the aggressively modern porch and doors; and the white rough-cast with which the walls are covered apparently conceals admirable timber and herringbone brickwork. But the roof and the gables and windows still belong to an inn and not a public-house, and the Horse and Groom too, swings a good sign, vigorously drawn, of a prancing steed. Most of the signs of the many White Horse and Black Horse inns are more like rocking-horses than racers.

Merrow.

Above Merrow stretches some of the most perfect downland in England. If the Sussex downs by Rottingdean inspired Mr. Kipling to his finest poetry, the Surrey downs by Merrow taught him some of the most haunting lines of all. I quote from eleven stanzas that ought not to be separated:—

MERROW DOWN

There runs a road by Merrow Down—
A grassy track to-day it is
An hour out of Guildford town,
Above the river Wey it is.
Here, when they heard the horse-bells ring,
The ancient Britons dressed and rode
To watch the dark Phœnicians bring
Their goods along the Western Road.
But long and long before that time
(When bison used to roam on it)
Did Taffy and her Daddy climb
That down, and had their home on it.
The Wey, that Taffy called Wagai,
Was more than six times bigger then;
And all the Tribe of Tegumai
They cut a noble figure then!
Of all the Tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain—
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry—
The silence and the sun remain.
But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Comes Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.
In mocassins and deer-skin cloak
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.
For far—oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him.

Merrow to the east edges on Clandon Park, the seat of one of the great Surrey families, the Onslows. It is a notable space, perhaps a mile square of grass dotted with superb groups of elms. "Capability" Brown laid out the park, and he certainly saw what the capabilities of that sunny sward could be. The house, which stands on the south-east corner, is an imposing cube of red brick, patched here and there with ivy, and as square and formal as the ornamental water and the park below it is formal and serpentine. Leoni built it, and Rysbrach designed two of its chimney-pieces.

In the park you may chance to meet the mole-catcher of the place—an upholder of right traditions of an old English village. I met him searching disconsolately for a couple of his traps, which he had set too near the pathway and which had been carried off by thieving passers-by, on whom may malisons light. "I've got forty traps about here," he told me with some pride, adding with resignation to a persistent fate that "they" would not let him set a trap near the path. "They" always took it if he did.

West Clandon church stands in the corner of the park, and is chiefly remarkable for a very curious old sundial, belonging perhaps to the days of Henry II, and built upside down by "restorers" into a buttress of the south wall. Time has dealt hardly with the church, and time, perhaps, may still restore its own dial. Under the dial, when I was last in the carefully tended little churchyard, the level turf was studded with snowdrops.