Highways and Byways in Surrey

by Eric Parker

Newark Priory.

"At Whistley, near Weybridge, the people go in May, when the birds are about a fortnight old, to the ruins of a very old castle. Men carry long ladders, and with blunt iron hooks take out the young jackdaws, and if there are no buyers they throw them to the ground. Bird dealers take hampers down to Whistley and bring up all the birds caught, as many as ten dozen of young jackdaws. They cost on the spot 2s. per dozen. The reason why they are taken is to stop the increase of jackdaws in the neighbourhood. If the young jackdaws are taken when about a fortnight old, the old ones will not 'go to nest' again that season. If the eggs only were taken, the birds would lay again immediately."

The Canal and the Wey by Newark lie in some of the quietest and wildest country in Surrey. It is not the wildness of Thursley Common, or the quiet of the pinewoods; but it is the sunny peace of a waterway almost deserted, of unploughed, rushy meadows, of waterside paths and thickets that fill in April and May with a tide of bird life which stays here, and elsewhere passes or is hardly seen. A May morning on the Wey Canal rings with singing. You can count scores of cuckoos gliding in the sun and calling from the budding branches; woodpeckers laugh from oak to oak; plovers tumble in the wind; herons flap up lazily at a bend in the stream, and flap lazily down again; snipe cut high arcs in the blue and drum down from the sailing clouds; perhaps from the very heart of the thicket the nightingale bursts into a pulsing riot of song. Surrey varies extraordinarily widely as a shelter and a nesting ground for birds, but most of its birds, I think, know the Wey Canal.

Of the seven streams which surround Newark Abbey the northernmost runs under the little hill on which stands Pyrford Church. Pyrford itself, on its outskirts, unhappily, is beginning to hear Woking. The Woking builder's hammer is already ringing under its trees. But the heart of Pyrford hitherto remains untouched. A cluster of red-brick farm-buildings, a footpath over meadows of buttercups, a score of arching elms, and a little shingle-spired Norman church on a knoll above the stream—Pyrford is one of the smallest and sweetest of Weyside villages. Few churches have so strong an impression of an untouched past. In plan it is scarcely altered from its Norman design of the twelfth century; and it stands on its knoll overlooking the meadows away to the great Priory of which it was a chapel, the Priory in ruins, and itself with hardly a stone loosened for nearly eight centuries. The roof is later than the walls, but there is a fascination in staring up at the old oak timber. It was the same vista of retreating beams of mighty wood on which the eye of the Newark priest droning from the altar must have rested; perhaps for his sleepy congregation there was the same glimpse of ivy tendrils creeping in under the eaves, and on drowsy afternoons in May the same chatter and hiss of nesting starlings. From the scanty scraps of the paintings on the wall you can only guess vaguely at the texts of the old Sunday sermons: manna falls in the wilderness; Moses brings water out of the rock; probably the congregation listened with most eagerness to the third, the death of Jezebel.

Mill on the Wey, between Pyrford and Ripley.

Donne, the poet, perhaps knew the paintings well. In the days when he was still unforgiven by Sir George More of Loseley for having run away with his daughter Anne, he and his bride lived for some years as the guests of Sir John Wolley, Queen Elizabeth's secretary, at Pyrford Park. May it not have been the seven-streamed Wey by Pyrford which gave him his stanzas for The Bait, his parody of Marlowe?

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.
Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset
With strangling snare, or windowy net.
Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest;
Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies,
Bewitch poor fishes' wandering eyes.
For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,
For thou thyself art thine own bait;
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas! is wiser far than I.