The pilgrims would cross the Wey under St. Catherine's Hill by a ferry
or a rough plank bridge. The merchants travelling with their horses, and
the ponies driven from Weyhill Fair out towards Salisbury Plain, would
come through the water by a ford. But the ferry and the bridge were both
of almost immemorial antiquity. In 1736 there was a dispute about the
bridge. The lord of the manor of Braboeuf had built a bridge over the
Wey for a fair on St. Matthew's Day. The owner of the church lands at
Shalford ordered it to be destroyed; he claimed the right of conveying
passengers over the river. They went to law, and it was alleged that
there had been a bridge there time out of record. Judgment, however,
decided "that there had been no bridge except _per unum battellum_ (one
plank) at the mill belonging to the heirs of Henry de la Poyle (a mile
lower), laid for convenience of the pilgrims going to the chapel of St.
Katherine at the time of the fair." General James has unearthed the
decision of the Court, and incidentally added another bypath to the
Pilgrims' Way.
Opposite the ferry under St. Catherine's the line of the Way to St.
Martha's is clear enough, a green track in a green field; and once I saw
it as the pilgrims may have seen it on a spring morning. It was in May,
and there was a haze over the meadowland by the river which blurred
shapes and colours. St. Catherine's was no longer a ruin; the buildings
on the hill faded into the trees; the clothes of wanderers by the
riverside took on mediaeval brightnesses, lost modern forms; and into the
foreground ran three bare-headed, yellow-haired children, and in their
brown arms great bunches of cuckoo-flowers. So might one returning from
the Martyr's chapel have seen the path to the ferry in the days when the
Clerk told the tale of Griselda.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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