The road leads south and up hill from the Crossways to Abinger Hatch,
bordering deep woods of oak and beech. In July and August the glades of
the Abinger woods, like the woods about Byfleet and Woking, gleam with
the pinks and purples of rosebay. Abinger Hatch is no more a village
than Wotton Hatch: both are wayside inns, and Abinger Hatch one of the
best country inns to be found in a walk. Saturdays and Sundays in the
summer fill it with guests from almost everywhere, who sit down to a
long table; my own first visit to the inn was on an ordinary weekday,
and the surprise was to discover that there was a hot lunch ready. Such
surprises are rare. But Abinger has everything worth keeping of the old
customs. The stocks stand at the churchyard gate, mouldering, but they
are there. The inn has the old name, and the little old bar, and the
old-fashioned custom of hanging the squire's portrait in the
dining-room. Only the church is a difficulty. It is kept locked, and it
takes ten minutes to walk to the rectory to get the key--too far for the
patience of those who would merely wish for rest and refreshment in the
cool and sacredness of a country church. I was fortunate in my day, for
I found the vestry door accidentally open, and a kindly countrywoman
cleaning the church; she let me in. The nave, with its hugely thick
walls and lancet windows, is unlike any other Surrey church; Mr. Philip
Johnston, who perhaps knows more about Surrey churches than anyone else,
dates it at 1080.
Nobody should go straight from Abinger Hatch to Leith Hill. You should
turn aside to the left and let the road take you eastwards into the
woods. Then you may come upon the tiny gathering of cottages called
Friday Street with a suddenness which is a delight. You turn a corner of
the road and you are in Switzerland. A little tarn, unruffled by any
wind, mirroring a hill of pine-trees, lies below you; beyond the water
is the blue reek of wood-fires; open grass runs to the edge of the lake,
a light green rim to the dark of the pines. So do the little emerald
tarns lie like saucers full of sky and trees in pockets of the Alps. The
illusion wants but the tinkle of cowbells: it would be pleasant to
present bells to straying goats.
From Friday Street to the tower on Leith Hill is a walk through the very
depths of the wood. Heather glows in the openings of the pines, bracken
brushes rain on your sleeve, bilberries ripen in the scented heat, and
almost any path--though not the road--runs higher and higher to the open
ground at the very top. At the top, nine hundred and sixty-five feet up,
you are on the highest hill in the south-east of England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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