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
the steep old road past the cemetery, or by the more winding gradients
of the new turnpike to the left. He who has descended as far as Compton
Church may hold on by a pleasant path through Loseley Park and past the
gabled house lying about half a mile south of the pilgrims' course. This
Elizabethan seat of the More family is, Sutton Place excepted, the
noblest mansion in Surrey, even in its incompleted state; and its hall,
the carvings of the drawing-room, its collection of valuable manuscripts
and royal portraits, its moated terrace, its mullioned windows, yew
hedges, pigeon-houses, and other old-time features, have their due fame
in guide-books and photographs. The house had a romance told in letters
preserved here, relating the secret love and marriage of its daughter
and the poet Donne. Such a connoisseur in ghosts as the late Mr.
Augustus Hare assures us that Loseley keeps no less than three of
them,--"a green-coated hunter, a sallow lady, and a warrior in plate
armour," of whom the last ought surely to feel himself rather an
anachronism, yet he once appeared most inconsiderately to scare "the
kitchen-maid as she was drawing some beer in the cellar."
From the footpath through Loseley Park one must mount a little to
regain the Pilgrims' Way before it passes along a bold bluff overlooking
the valley of the river, that now runs north into Guildford through a
gap in the Downs. This height bears up the sturdy ruin of St.
Catherine's Chapel, which, built early in the fourteenth century, became
a main station of the pilgrimage. Here, as at Shalford on the opposite
bank, and at other points along their route, was the scene of a great
fair, gathering together the parasites of these idle and not always
impecunious travellers. General James, in his _Notes on the Pilgrims'
Way_, has suggested with some show of reason that Bunyan here got hints
for his great work, such Vanity Fairs being kept up long after that
earlier pilgrim's progress had become a memory. It is believed that the
inspired tinker found a refuge both at Guildford and at Shalford, where
low marshy ground might well have been a "Slough of Despond"; and the
actual name "Dowding (Doubting?) Castle" appears on the map of Surrey
about a mile south of Tadworth. As for Delectable Hills, there is no
want of them in the prospect from St. Catherine's, where we see the
course of our route leading by St. Martha's Chapel up the Tillingbourne
valley, between the bold chalk slopes and the broken crests of the sand
ridge to the south.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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