The most interesting interior in Haslemere is the museum. It was
presented to the town by Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson, and teaches history,
geology, botany and everything to do with Haslemere's (and other) birds,
beasts, and reptiles. You may study the development of the world from
the birth of life perhaps thirty-one million years ago--that is the age
Haslemere teaches--down to the present day. Skulls of elephants,
antelopes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, gorillas and giraffes instruct
the zoologist; local vipers and grass snakes curl in spirits of wine;
stuffed quadrupeds, including a large kangaroo, illustrate climates
foreign to Haslemere; local ornithologists contribute cases of the birds
of the neighbourhood. Witley sends a case of crossbills; twenty years
ago a pair of hen harriers--or are they Montagu's harriers?--were killed
on Hindhead; a blackcock guards his grey hen, and was shot not far away.
Are blackcock extinct in Surrey? The last Lord Midleton wrote to _The
Times_ some years ago to state his belief that they were. At Frensham I
was told that the last pair were shot in 1889. But Mr. E.D. Swanton, the
curator of the Haslemere Museum, learned in everything that a museum
should hold, from Celtic pottery to caterpillars, told me when I was at
Haslemere that he had seen a pair (I write in 1908) only two years ago.
He was not at all certain that there were no more blackcocks in the
county. But I fear the villas have been too much for them.
The church stands a little apart from the town, and holds two very
different memorials. One is the Burne-Jones window to the memory of
Tennyson, who lived at Aldworth on Black Down over the border; the other
is a strange, rough heap of peat and heather, piled inside the gate of
the churchyard. Under it lies John Tyndall. He was one of the
discoverers of Hindhead as a place to live in instead of merely a hill
to climb; the tragedy of his death is a recent memory. It was his wish
that his grave should be no more than a mound of heather, but such
wishes can end unhappily. If the grave is neglected, perhaps that is
what he hoped it would be; but neglect, can grow into something worse.
When I last saw the grave--perhaps on an unfortunate day--the heather
had somehow collected newspapers and empty jampots; it looked like soon
becoming a rubbish heap.
A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ visited Haslemere in 1801 and
described the painted glass in the windows. One of them he catalogued
thus:
"Offering of the Wise Men. Among the numerous presents, I
distinguished some fine hams, poultry, and mutton."
A recent inspection fails to distinguish among the numerous presents
either fine hams or mutton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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