East of Chaldon is Caterham, west is Chipstead and south-west is
Merstham, each two miles or so away as the crow flies and something more
as the road runs, and each with a railway station. Caterham once was a
valley; Aubrey wrote of it: "In this parish are many pleasant little
vallies, stored with wild thyme, sweet marjoram, barnell, boscage, and
beeches." I do not know barnell, but the last twenty years have set
many houses among the boscage. They have built, too, two new churches,
one of them set very finely on a hill; the old church is disused, or
used, rather, only for a Sunday school. Upon Sunday scholars, from a
Norman wall, looks down a hideous stone corbel. A clown's face stretches
a devil's mouth wide open with hands like rat's paws; the sharp teeth
grin like rat's teeth; perhaps in the Sunday school they make their own
faces at it.
Chipstead, to the west, is on a hill the other side of the railway. It
has some pretty modern cottages by a pond and shading elm-trees; a
post-office also, with the smallest possible aperture for introducing
letters to the notice of the post-mistress within. The church has some
quaint features; there are a number of oddly shaped lancet windows, a
curiously carved boss in the groining of the tower, and a strange
arrangement by which the members of the choir sit facing the east with
their backs to the pulpit. In the churchyard lies Sir Edward Banks,
perhaps Chipstead's most illustrious native. He was born poor and he
died rich; and he built three great bridges, Waterloo, Southwark, and
London. Chipstead churchyard, too, has a fine yew; but good yews are
common in the churchyards south of Croydon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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