I ought not to leave the Fold Country without mentioning the
Chiddingfold foxhounds, a pack which hunts the country south of
Guildford to the borders of Lord Leconfield's Hunt in Sussex. It is poor
riding, for there is too much woodland, and on the heather there is
hardly any jumping. "The prettier the country the poorer the hunting,"
Mr. Charles Richardson quotes in writing of the Chiddingfold foxhounds:
perhaps one might add that in a poor country there can be some pretty
hunting.
[Illustration: _Black Down, from Hambledon._]
CHAPTER XV
CRANLEIGH AND EWHURST
A coffee-pot yew--Vachery Pond--The osprey as a guest--Baynards and
its ghost--Ewhurst--A pet lamb--Children and a gipsy--Bilberries on
Pitch Hill--Lost in Hurst Wood--Farley Heath--Mr. Watson's
poem--Blackheath well named.
Cranleigh lies on the edge of the Fold country, neither in it nor of it.
In the Fold country the villages are set deep in woodlands and grass
fields, and the railway runs too far away to bring the slate for the
villas. But the railway runs through Cranleigh and stops there, and so
does the builder. The fields and woods are being "developed." But in the
heart of the village there is a touch of what is old and quiet. A
strange, towering figure of a clipped yew stands up in the middle of a
small garden, whether most like a peacock on a pillar, or a colossal
coffee-pot, I cannot determine. A wheelwright's yard is near by--one of
the best of all sights of any country village. Farm carts and their
wheels, and big spokes and shavings of white wood give as full a notion
of solid, strong outdoor work as the forge and the rickyard, and no
village is quite a country village without the three.
Two manors, Vachery and Knowle, have chapels in the church, which is
cruciform; but the Vachery chapel is seated for ordinary churchgoers.
The Knowle chapel is separated off by a fine fifteenth-century screen.
But the chief beauty of Cranleigh Church is the great sense of breadth
and light which you get from the size of the nave and the chancel arch.
The broad spaces and the massive Norman pillars set an air of strength
and quiet in the place that belongs alone to noble churches.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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