The steep south faces of the Downs look into the Holmesdale Valley of greensand and gault, across which, within a rifle-shot, rise a line of sandy hills whose more rugged and shaggy outlines often form the loveliest scenes in Surrey, to some tastes, certainly the wildest, though many corners have been tamed by grounds and gardens among stretches of bristling common and straggling pine wood. These heights stand usually lower than the Downs; but at more than one point, as Leith Hill, they are the most mountainous prominences of the south-eastern counties. Hants, Sussex, and Surrey meet about Hindhead and its neighbour Blackdown, next in height to Leith Hill, where an illustrious settler has famed the view over Green Sussex fading into blue With one grey glimpse of sea. But here a prosaic describer must note how it is only from some point of vantage, and at some rarely clear hour, that through a gap the sea comes in view of Surrey hills, since their prospect southwards is usually bounded by the line of the South Downs, crossing Sussex to end in the bluff of Beachy Head. Between stretches the Weald, a strip of which, except in that south-western corner filled by the broadened sand heights, belongs to Surrey and makes its southern zone of fresh features. This wide plain once lay shaded under the great Andredeswald, that was the Black Country of England before coal and steam came into play, and still earlier it raised a barrier parting the South Saxons from kindred invaders. Its _hursts_ and woods hint how the clay soil bore a primæval forest, notably of oaks, patches of it still preserved in the parks dappling an expanse of farm land long ago cleared to feed the furnaces that cast cannon and other iron work, specimens of which may be found in churches and homes about this district. Less picturesque, on the whole, than the zones to the north, the Surrey Weald is more remote from metropolitan sophistication, and keeps perhaps a larger proportion of the old weathered cottages and moated granges, which æsthetic citizens love to look on rather than to inhabit. It must be the Weald Fuller has in mind when he speaks of Surrey's skirts as "rich and fruitful," but its inward parts "hungry and barren," though these, even in his day, "by reason of the clear air and clean ways, full of many genteel habitations."