Surrey: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope MoncrieffMoncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
History
Surrey: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope Moncrieff
Moncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
Surrey (England) -- Description and travel
Between Farnham and Guildford rises this block of Downs, which Polonius
might well have judged "very like a whale," a bold eight-mile ridge of
sand crowned by chalk, along whose top, 400 to 500 feet high, goes an
airy high-road dear to cyclists and pedestrians once they have mounted
the long or steep ascents at either end. Taking the high-road from
Farnham, just beyond the second milestone one finds a byroad forking on
the right below the house called Whiteway's End and the conspicuous red
mansion of Downs End, on the butt of the bare ridge here dropping to the
hop-fields beneath. This lower road, running level beside the fir-woods
that swell up towards Crooksbury Hill, seems to have been the pilgrims'
beaten track, indicated to our generation by a post-office box at the
corner where it leaves the present highway. There is no need to quarrel
with the supposition that some troops may have chosen the higher road
along the top of the Hog's Back. I would have it understood as not my
purpose to enter upon byways of controversy, but merely to lead the
reader along the general line taken by the pilgrims, perhaps turning
aside here and there for the sake of a better view.
The Pilgrims' Way keeps down upon the sand, passing by the villages that
edge a sweep of woods, parks, and commons gently sloping to the
meandering Wey; and at several points one can mount steeply to the
high-road on the chine, where telegraph posts are more apparent than
houses. On the lower level this reach of the Way goes by or near three
parish churches. The first of these is Seale, prettily perched in a
wooded hollow beside the Hog's Back, about a mile on. The next mile or
so is marked by the manor of Shoelands, its name interpreted as taken
from the _shoolers_ or beggars that beset pious wayfarers, to whom
indiscriminate charity counted as a means of salvation. Then another
mile brings us to Puttenham, with its much restored Norman church. At
the lower edge of a wood above, by which a lane goes up to a white
lodge in the high-road, open some remarkable sand caves, believed to
extend as a labyrinth of secret passages under the chalk, now inhabited
by bats, as once by smugglers and outlaws like that Wild Man of
Puttenham that makes such a grim appearance in Sir A. Conan Doyle's
local romance; but at present the only peril here seems to be from golf
balls shot across the heath, where a flagstaff on a tumulus beacons our
way onwards.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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