Painters among heather.—The Devil's Jumps.—The Devil redivivus.—Cobbett at Thursley.—A superb belfry.—The Sailor's Grave.—Pig-iron and hammers.—The natterjack at eve.—A plank for bellringers.—Witley fifty years hence.—Mehetabel in the church.
Thursley lies nearly three miles north of Hindhead on the edge of the heather, and brings artists all the summer to paint its timbered cottages and glowing hills. Mrs. Allingham sketched as charmingly on Thursley common as by Haslemere; Birket Foster found a background of purple for his cottage gardens. Mrs. Allingham's sketch of Hindhead from Witley common, which runs up to Thursley from the north-east, is all the wild of this part of Surrey on a few inches of paper.
Thursley is Thor's ley or field, and has memories of the Danes. They left other names near: Tuesley, or Tuesco's field, lies towards Godalming, and Thunder Hill, near Elstead, is Thor's or Thunor's. Thor lives in local legends. Three strange conical hills, lying close together two miles or so west of Thursley, have been known since his day as the Devil's Jumps. Tradition draws a frightful picture of the Devil, horns and tail and all, jumping from hill to hill to amuse himself, until one day Thor caught him at it and knocked him over with an enormous stone. You can see the stone on the Devil's Jumps to-day.
Interior of Thursley Church.
The Devil jumped up again when I was last looking at the Jumps. I had climbed to the top of Kettlebury Hill, a mile away, and was looking out over those strange little lumps of rock and crimson heather, which puzzled Cobbett to the end of his days, when suddenly at my feet there started up a rabbit as black as a cinder, leapt wildly about the heather, and disappeared. There could have been very little doubt what that meant long after Thor's time.
Thursley.
Cobbett, riding in from Hampshire or Sussex, used to make Thursley his first stopping-place. But one thing he would not do, and that was to come into Thursley over Hindhead. He detested turnpike roads, and he detested Hindhead. He liked to ride through woods, or along lanes with trees meeting overhead. When he rides from Chiddingford to Thursley, he writes that "the great thing was to see the centre of these woods, to see the stems of the trees as well as the tops of them." Otherwise, the pleasure in riding was to pass fine turnip-fields, or bean-fields; anything rather than waste land. The heather on the hills might glow to crimson, and the bracken fade from emerald to bronze, without touching a chord in that sturdy farmer's heart. Hindhead, you read, "is certainly the most villainous spot that God ever made," and Cobbett will have nothing to do with it.
The last fifty years have altered and enlarged Thursley church, but it still retains the distinction, unique in Surrey, of its timber tower and steeple rising from the centre of the nave. Other churches in the county—Dunsfold and Alfold in the neighbourhood—carry their bell-turrets on ingenious constructions of timber, but there is no such collection in any other Surrey church of such superb beams as are to be seen at Thursley. The effect of these dark and majestic pillars of oak, some of them thirty inches square, with their great crossbeams, and their arches springing from the pillars across the nave, is one of astonishing splendour and power. Outside, the shingled turret tells the time with, instead of a clock, a fine old sundial.