Two miles up the road lies the Hut Pond, opposite an inn that serves many tables. There is no quiet on the pond in the business of the day, but I was once on it on an October evening, and as the sun went down the sky filled suddenly with teal. Bunches of teal wheeled and circled in the cold twilight, whizzed down among the rushes, darted up again and round over the pines, then shot down again and settled, splashing quietly in the sedge.
Priest's door and Norman Chancel Ripley Church.
Ockham village, with its church and park, is south-east of Ripley by a mile or so. The charm of Ockham church lies in its tower, its east window, and its deep and happy site among the oaks and elms of Ockham Park. The church lies some hundred yards from the road, under the windows of the manor-house, a building which cannot be said to owe anything to the taste or consistency of successive architects. The tower is thirteenth century, buttressed, mottled into cool greys and pinks, and heavy with ivy. But the chief decoration of Ockham Church is its thirteenth century, seven-lancet east window, and in the carving of the capitals of its slender columns of black Sussex marble. There is some quaint Flemish glass in one of the south windows; but the church is spoiled by an extraordinarily ugly little chapel built on the north side as a mausoleum for the family of the Kings. The first of the line of these Kings was one Peter, the son of an Exeter grocer. He came up to London, soon made his mark as a lawyer, and died Lord Chancellor. There are several of his descendants buried with him, and their coronets hang above the arch of the chapel. They add a peculiar tawdriness; but the chapel itself, with its dull blue paint, and the strange, bath-like sarcophagus below Rysbrach's statues of the first Lord King and his lady, is the main offence.
Ockham Church.
Ockham itself, even with that humming white highway not a mile distant, is untouched and unspoiled: nothing more than a half-dozen or so of half-timbered or brick cottages and farm-buildings, rain-bleached and creeper-veiled, and fronted with some of the prettiest and brightest gardens in Surrey. One of the sleepy little buildings bears the legend "County Police," forbidding in new blue enamel. What should anyone do with police in Ockham?
But Ockham, perhaps, lies a little too far from the old waterway to join the group of villages and churches which cluster along this winding stretch of Wey. Still it belongs to Ripley, if not to Ripley's group along the river. Rivers, here, would be the better word, for the Wey has hardly yet made up its mind as to its right channel north of Woking, and by Ripley runs actually in seven streams almost parallel with one another, some of them cut artificially, but others tiny remnants of the broad watercourse which once rolled through Surrey to the sea. No doubt it was this abundance of water which first attracted the founder of Newark Priory, whose ruins stand almost in the centre of the seven streams. The monks must have had plenty of choice of fishing.
Newark Priory is generally supposed to have been founded as a house of Black Canons by Ruald de Calva and his wife Beatrice de Sandes in the reign of Richard I. But Ruald de Calva as a fact only re-founded or endowed the house, which was founded long before, probably by a Bishop of Winchester. Its older name was Aldbury, and Newark—or Newsted, as it was once called—which for us is an aged ruin, was Aldbury rebuilt with a new church and a new name. It is in some ways a rather uninteresting ruin. Of the tracery of the windows, or any of the lighter and more delicate architectural work, not a stone remains. I believe much of the more easily used stone-work found its way into the building of neighbouring houses, perhaps into the paving of the roads. But it has a certain bluntness and gauntness of its own, standing solid and stark in the plain meadowland of the Wey. Perhaps if one were to "visit it by the pale moonlight" it would take on darker graces and dignities. As it is, there is somewhere about it an air of protest; it is like a ghost that cannot get back before daylight. Horses gallop about the rough field under its walls; boating parties wonder why it should be thought worth while to fence it off with wire. Once I caught an echo of the real Newark, late on a dark and stormy afternoon, when a sudden snipe rose at my feet out of one of the half-dry Priory stewponds. That wild cry must have been familiar enough to the old monks wandering by the stream in search of a likely run for perch or pike.
The "very old castle" which Frank Buckland, the naturalist, mentions in the following note, taken from his edition of White's Selborne, must surely be Newark Priory, which is now a happy (and I think unmolested) home of jackdaws:—