Surrey

o be part of a British trackway stretching from Kent to Cornwall, perhaps the road by which the metals of the west were forwarded towards distant lands, where an

al roads above the marshy and jungly bottoms. The road indeed may be older than Stonehenge, that might rise upon it, as churches and chapels came to be built along a section of it revived by Christian devotion. When its western end fell out of

sle of Thanet or in the Solent. Each of the two cities stands up a river, where the tide formerly flowed higher than it does now, and anyhow is within easy reach of the open sea, while not too open to piratical attack, a situation paralleled in the case of Exeter and No

M NEAR

y landed at or about Southampton. By their feet was beaten hard the track now broken to the eye, but well preserved in memory as the "Pilgrims' Way." There would also be a stream of pilgrimage in the other direction, to the watery halo of Winch

avoiding the worldliness of towns, it may be traced with more or less clearness, as has been lovingly done by Mr. Belloc and Mrs. Ady, and in less minute fashion by the reader's humble servant. Sometimes it is disguised as a modern road or absorbed in a park; sometimes its exact course is matter of conjecture or controversy; but short and long reaches of it are still plainly marked, thanks to the chalk, that has been easily trodden into half-natural terraces seldom inviting the plough on their steep contours. Often it is bordered by hedges of ancient yews, which, thriving on this ch

ell at the very end of December, when the gloom of our climate must have made a pious mortification to th

eke with his

h in every h

ender

nstrels, beggars, and knavish tramps. Pilgrimage was the tourist travel of the Middle Ages, undertaken with an eye to making the best of both worlds, to seeing life as well as preparing for death. One who set out for Rome got to be called a roamer, as a saunterer took his name from the sainte terre; then both these adventurers came to bear not the best of characters in the quiet countrysides through which they might spread plague and pox, as do the votaries of Juggernaut or Benares at this day. That very fleshly personage the Wife of Bath had been thrice so far as Jerusalem; and among her com

am, in which the "Bush" and the "Lion and Lamb" make halting-places for modern pilgrims to Winchester. At a humbler inn some way outside of the town I have found the Pilgrims' Way quite an unknown name, mention of it being received with blank stare

ne finds a byroad forking on the right below the house called Whiteway's End and the conspicuous red mansion of Downs End, on the butt of the bare ridge here dropping to the hop-fields beneath. This lower road, running level beside the fir-woods that swell up towards Crooksbury Hill, seems to have been the pilgrims' beaten track, indicated to our generation by a post-office box at the corner

d hollow beside the Hog's Back, about a mile on. The next mile or so is marked by the manor of Shoelands, its name interpreted as taken from the shoolers or beggars that beset pious wayfarers, to whom indiscriminate charity counted as a means of salvation. Then another mile brings us to Puttenham, with its much restored Norman church. At the lower edge of a wood above, by which a lane goes up to a white lodge in t

The situation is pretty, and the village worth a ramble among its bits of weather-worn antiquity. Such were the attractions that have always brought a sprinkling of visitors to Compton, now endowed with a new group of rare sights that on a fine summer day fill its byroads with cycles and vehicles. On the pilgrims' track, the late G. F. Watts, R.A., made for himself a home named Limnerslease, and beside it set up Artistic Pottery works, with a hostel for the youths trained here, in no mere commercial spirit. In the same block of buildings, shortly before his death, he opened a Gallery containing many of his most important works, and a rem

the ridge has the choice of co

Y, FROM ST. M

its incompleted state; and its hall, the carvings of the drawing-room, its collection of valuable manuscripts and royal portraits, its moated terrace, its mullioned windows, yew hedges, pigeon-houses, and other old-time features, have their due fame in guide-books and photographs. The house had a romance told in letters preserved here, relating the secret love and marriage of its daughte

heir route, was the scene of a great fair, gathering together the parasites of these idle and not always impecunious travellers. General James, in his Notes on the Pilgrims' Way, has suggested with some show of reason that Bunyan here got hints for his great work, such Vanity Fairs being kept up long after that earlier pilgrim's progress had become a memory. It is believed that the inspired tinker found a refuge both at Guildford and at Shalfor

pilgrims' track, that from this ferry runs on over a park sward, then across the high-road up to an avenue under whose shade path, lane, and overgrown roadway go side by side. It is necessary to insist on these details, as here for a space the track does not as usual cling to the side of the chalk range. Its line is continued by a lane along th

s restored in the middle of last century, and Sunday services are held here. The week-day pilgrim will halt to enjoy the prospect of the Tillingbourne valley before him, edged to his left by the Downs, which a little way farther on have their famous view-point at Newlands Corner, said to be named from Abraham Newland, the most popular author of England in his time, as signing the Bank of England notes, then made at Chilworth in the valley below St. Martha's, as Cobbett indignantly records. The Bank-note factory has gone; but still stand here the gunpowder mills whic

deep coombe leading to Shere. But all along one can hold on by what is often a broad turf-way set in woods, with tracks going off south to the Tillingbourne villages and the Dorking line, north to the stations of the railway between Guildford and Leatherhead, each of them base for rare rambles. One has only to keep the crest of the ridge, taking the successive names of Netley Heath, Hackhurst Downs, and White Downs, till the way opens out on the expanse of Ranmore Common, stretching over the end of this block of the Downs above the gap made by the Mole. Here, by Denbies Park, there is a charming descent to Dorking; or northwards one finds a network of grassy and leafy lanes leading across the ridge

e, and Tory M.P., a curious amalgam of business ability and fanatical fancies. At his Albury mansion he was in the way of gathering like-minded friends for study of the Scriptures, and among them, by much brooding over the prophecies, was hatched the new communion that claimed to be a return to gifts and hopes of the Primitive Church. The parson of Albury in those days was the Rev. Hugh McNeile, afterwards well known at Liverpool as a champion of sound Evangelical teaching, who sympathised with the early efforts of the movement, but withdrew from it when it began to take shape apart from the Church as by law established; and poor Irving was deposed by his own Presbyterian Church, while he fell into some suspicion even among his brother sectaries. Through the marriage of his daughter, Drummond came to b

EEDS, CH

ust self-applause, as amusingly appears in his literary memoirs, illustrated by rills of the torrents of prose and verse flowing from a truly fountain pen. Some of his verses, indeed, as John Bull's address to Jonathan, deserve not to be forgotten; and, while he had no patience with his neighbours the Irvingites, he is always warmly on the side of Protestantism, patriotism, and heart-of-oak sentiments. He claims, with reason, to have been a precursor of the volun

to the left of the road coming down from Newlands Corner and forking on the right for the Irvingite Church; just short of the fork a lane turns left to a cottage where the key of the enclosure may be had. It has been la

church on the bank of the Tillingbourne, which offers here the unusual village luxury of a small swimming-bath. This village is associated with memories of the county historian, Bray, and of Grote, the more famous historian of Greece. Its charming environs have been so attr

re harnessed to industry, also giving a subject to art in an often-painted mill, the Pilgrims' Way now mounted on to the Downs, looking across to the park of Wotton and the sloping woodlands of Leit

e left of the Hambledon Hills, and the irregular crest of Hindhead west of them. The whole is framed by the woods on either side of the field in which we stand. Entering the wood at top of this field, the path soon rejoins the cart-track from the lane that we left, and we reach the open meadows on the hill-top. Here the woods shut out any view. Proceeding westward along two meadows, at some farm buildings we take a path leading left into the woods over Shere, and in a few yards after entering these, obtain a view south and west that is even more beautiful than the one just described. F

etch of wild common known as Evershed Rough, at the edge of which a cross marks the spot where Bishop Wilberforce of Winchester, riding across the Downs, was killed by a fall from his horse. Farther on, past the Deerleap Wood and Wotton Church,

old promontory of Box Hill. How the Pilgrims' Way crossed this gap makes again matter of question. Mr. Belloc is positive that the old road must have gone straight over the mouth of the valley, perhaps by that very lane in which the narrator of the "Battle of Dorking" had his baptism

re of rich wood, open to any one taking refreshment at the Swiss Cottage just within its gate. Beyond this one is free to roam over turf slopes and among the groves, where indeed of late years part of the land has been acquired by the War Office for fortifications to figure in any future Battle of Dorking; so here and there the forbidding initials W. D. remind us not to trespass upon th

of Walton Heath beyond, he may get back on to the Downs, in front of their coronet of woods. The Way, beyond that coombe, is traced by Mr. Belloc on rough high ground; but a line of yews slanting up from the picturesque village of Buckland with its church and court, a mile on in the valley, has been taken to mark its ascent to Colley Hill and the lofty park of Margery Grove. A mile farther on, it comes behind a beech wood on the brow overlooking Reigate, the view from which was dubbed by Cobbett's dogged patriotism the finest in the world. This is now a public demesne of Reigate, a town lying just off the Way

ge of the park; but Mr. Belloc maintains that it must have presently run through this enclosure. One may enter at the lodge gate and walk among its lakelets and timbered knolls to the east side, where are t

EVE, MILF

r as the hall goes, which makes a rich show of coloured marbles, terra-cotta reliefs and frescoes, in imitation of a chapel at Rome; but it looks to be an artistic Tower of Babel, as if the builder's ambitious plans had been nipped by the Reform Bill when it took away the special value of what Cobbett styled a "very rascally spot of eart

railway lines have obliterated the crossing of the Pilgrims' Way on to the next face of the Downs, which now sweep back a little farther north. For a short mile, we may be content to take a road along the foot; then a pa

e overlaid by plaster and white washing, under which it was discovered on the Church being restored a generation ago. Since their exposure, the colours have somewhat faded, so the short-si

den tree, whos

nto the world a

chael weighing souls in his balance. One of the figures below, holding a bottle, is interpreted as a temperance lesson, no doubt needed by some of the pilgrims, who must often have

War Coppice, once an ancient camp, but now, like the Cardinal's Cap on White Hill, offered as a too eligible building site. Except by peeps, the view to the south becomes obstructed; and we look over the Harestone Valley, down which a pleasant path runs northward to Caterham. At Gravelly H

arther end of the park, two miles north. Evelyn tells us how this fine demesne was made from a "barren warren" and a poor farm in a hardly populated parish, by that "prodigious rich scrivener" of his own time, Sir Robert Clayton, a Lord Mayor of London, whose virtues, or at least his fortunes, are attested by the monstrous monument covering a whole chancel wall of Bletc

called Palmer's Wood and another wood on the face of the Downs, again hugely scarred by chalk cuttings. It next runs right through the middle of Titsey Park, where a Roman villa was discovered near its course. Titsey Place

ey Downs (882 feet) but has no markedly prominent point to command a view, looking north across a somewhat featureless table-land to the towers of the Crystal Palace, and south over a more pleasing expanse of hills, dales, woods, and villages. Presently this prospect is interrupted by woods, behind which five roads meet to make the perilous descent by Titsey, as other arduous lanes and paths have been seen dr

id they admire the arduous steeps and the patches of wilderness on which a generation free from the fear of robbers and bogeys best loves to linger. In this too short account of some forty miles as the bird flies, which might well be doubled by turning here and there among varied scenes and sites, I have been able only to outline one of the most alluring