The Crown Inn, Chiddingfold.
Chiddingfold's old inn is the Crown, which claims to have been standing for more than five centuries. According to a copy of a deed dated March 22, 1383, which hangs in the coffee-room, Peter Pokeford, of the parish of Chudyngfold, gave and granted to Richard Gofayre, "the said tenement, namely, the Hall and the Chamber with a solar, and also the kitchen with a small house with their appurtenances for the term of fifty years for four shillings of yearly rent payable to the said Peter." The inn is pleasant and solid, and dark with enormous wooden beams. Above a fine old open hearth hang three engaging pictures—or used to hang—of actresses of days gone by. Madame Vestris, in a feather hat and a red cloak, plays Don Giovanni; Miss Paton, spangled, trousered and red-slippered, would appeal to any Turk as Mandane; Belvidera, in a sober grey gown, is an actress who knew Surrey well, Fanny Kemble.
Rock Hill, Hambledon.
To the Fold Country belong two other villages, Hascombe, two miles north of Dunsfold, and Hambledon, a little more than two miles west of Hascombe. The Hascombe yews, which make an arched gateway to the churchyard, will some day be famous; the church lacks something of the quiet of plainer, whiter walls. Half-a-mile south of the church, Hascombe Hill once lit a beacon, and looks out over many miles of the Fold Country. At the White Horse in the village I was told of a great old beech-tree standing on the hill, and learned that if you went up the hill it was impossible to miss it; however, I followed all the directions and achieved the impossible. Once Hascombe was the home of a divine whom the biographers briefly describe as "controversialist." He was Doctor Conyers Middleton, the author of a famous Life of Cicero, for which he stole the materials from a Scottish professor's work, De Tribus Luminibus Romanorum, and for some time was not found out. His controversies were chiefly with Bentley, who perhaps was as arrogant as Middleton was greedy.
Hascombe Hill is the eastern of three hills which stand in a triangle round the north of the Fold Country. Highdown Ball is the centre of the three, fifty feet lower than Hascombe Hill, which is 644 feet; but Highdown Ball somehow seems the higher of the two. A strange little rhyme, or riddle, belongs to the hill:—
"On Hydon's top there is a cup,
And in that cup there is a drop:
Take up the cup and drink the drop,
And place the cup on Hydon's top."
The third hill is Hambledon's. The village is dotted over the hill and at its foot; the church is perched on the very top, and it is worth climbing the hill to look at the pair of yew trees in the churchyard. One of them cannot be much smaller than the Crowhurst yew itself. Like that monarch of trees, it is hollow; unlike it, it has not yet been damaged by man in order to protect it from the weather.
Hambledon is best approached from Chiddingfold through Hambledon Hurst, a stretch of cool woodland. A tiny path leaves the main road over a strip of grass and brambles, dives into an oakwood and emerges at the end of a long straight open ride of grass, edged and shaded by oak trees, green, smooth and silent. Into such open glades dark fallow deer should come, and roedeer dancing out from the shadows to listen and snuff. If bearded men with jewelled feathers and crimson cloaks rode across the patches of sunlight, it would be nothing strange in that deep wood. The illusion of virgin solitude is perfect. Yet the green ride was once the main road south from Godalming through Hambledon to Chichester.