Local art has depicted the scene; four original oil-paintings grace the walls of the Huts Hotel. Than the drawing of the stage-coach in full gallop up to the gibbet in the dead of night, nothing could be well more frightful.
Louis Jennings's description, in Field Paths and Green Lanes, of the Portsmouth road as he saw it in 1876, is worth reading at Hindhead on a summer day:—
It is with surprise that in this lonely waste one sees, between the Devil's Punch Bowl and the top of the hill, a fine, broad, and well-kept road; nor is that surprise diminished when you come upon it, and find that it is as hard and smooth as any road in a private park can possibly be. There are very few marks of wheels to be found upon it, but abundant traces of sheep. This is the main Portsmouth road, and to any one who knows what the roads are in country places, and even in large towns, throughout the United States, this splendid thoroughfare must seem one of the greatest curiosities in England; for the traffic of London Bridge might be driven along it, and even in this steep and wild country it is kept in the most perfect order. I declare that I stood looking at that road in amazement for pretty nearly quarter of an hour, and I am inclined to think that if I had stayed there till now I should not have seen anybody or anything coming along it in either direction. Will the tide of English summer travel ever again turn towards England itself?
The tide turns every Saturday and Sunday. But besides the tide, for which policemen set traps along the level road, Hindhead maintains a colony of its own. The western side of the hill and Grayshott on the Hampshire slope are almost a town. Grayshott lies actually in Hampshire, but geographically it belongs to Hindhead; so do Waggoner's Wells, a string of ponds rather like the Shottermill trout hatchery, but set much more prettily among trees.
Of Hindhead it is as true as of other places with magnificent views, that you must live on the spot to be sure of getting them. It is only the greatest good luck that allows a casual visitor full measure of the splendour of clear air all round him, north, south, east, and west. Even if it is clear to the south it may well be misty to the north, and, of course, the angle of the sunlight makes all the difference to the sharpness with which this or that detail of scenery stands out from its surroundings. In one respect the view from the highest point of Hindhead is never perfect. To the south-east, on a neighbouring slope, the pine trees that crest the ridge block out the downs over Brighton and Newhaven. It is a pity, for only from the tower on Leith Hill, not on Leith Hill itself, is there another view in the south-east of England with so wonderful an expanse of country seen clear away to the horizon. St. George's Hill is blocked with trees, so is St. Anne's; Leith Hill is almost clear, but from Hindhead, until those unlucky pines grew up, you could see pretty nearly thirty miles on any side. Not that the Devil's Dyke and the downs beyond cannot any longer be seen from Hindhead; you can get a fine view of them a mile away to the north, from the old Portsmouth road, on the other side of the new road, but from that point the view is not nearly so fine on the other sides. The hill is not so high. On Gibbet Hill you are 895 feet above sea level according to the ordnance map; if you have no map, you can consult a brass disc which has been erected on the plateau, which gives you also other interesting information. All the distances to the neighbouring towns are marked, for instance, with the direction in which they lie as the crow flies—an admirable idea, due to the generosity of Mr. T.W. Erle of Bramshott Grange, brother of the Sir William Erle who put up the granite cross which stands close by. It will be safer, in future, perhaps, to trust to the ordnance map rather than the disc for the exact figures, for some of them have already been nearly rubbed out, and Cockney names have been scratched on the brass. There they remain, the only gibbet on Gibbet Hill.
Prose-writers have had much to say about Hindhead, among them the late Grant Allen, who pleased a not very exacting public with the not always accurate natural history of "Moorland Idylls," and shocked it with Hill-top novels. But I think no poet has written of the hill, unless it is Charles Kingsley, who surely had climbed Hindhead and looked out on the view from its bracken and heather when he wrote Airly Beacon. It was one of the first poems he made after coming to Eversley, and it breathes the scent of June fern in the air and sun:—
Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
Oh, the pleasant sight to see
Shires and towns from Airly Beacon,
While my love climbed up to me!
Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
Oh, the happy hours we lay
Deep in fern on Airly Beacon,
Courting through the summer's day!
Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
Oh, the weary haunt for me,
All alone on Airly Beacon,
With his baby on my knee!
Of other writers, Mr. Baring-Gould has come nearest to catching the spirit of the moorlands and the breeze that sometimes drifts up over Hindhead from the great glen which local myth has named the Devil's Punch Bowl. The Broom Squire is strangely unsatisfactory as a novel, or I find it so, with its entire needlessness and inconsequence of plot. But it has something in it of the heather and the wind, of the sand of Thursley and the steam of the Punch Bowl on a wet day; and you may still meet broom squires if you like to wander down into the deep of the glen. The best broom squire is, I think, Kingsley's, in My Winter Garden:—
"The clod of these parts is the descendant of many generations of broom squires and deer stealers; the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though no more of the Queen's deer are to be shot in the winter turnip fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably once in his life 'hits the keeper into the river,' and reconsiders himself for a while over a crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults, and I have mine. But he is a thoroughly good fellow nevertheless. Civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; a far shrewder fellow too—owing to his dash of wild forest blood from gipsy, highwayman, and what not—than his bullet-headed and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South Saxon of the chalk downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone; swaggering in his youth: but when he grows old a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous as a prince...."
