Surrey: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope MoncrieffMoncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
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Surrey: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope Moncrieff
Moncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
Surrey (England) -- Description and travel
Here indeed a conscientious guide must hesitate how to counsel the
pilgrim of the picturesque as to his progress among an embarrassment of
scenic riches. There is hardly such another walk in England as that
dozen miles or so along the top of the Downs between Guildford and
Dorking. From St. Martha's Hill, one ascends to the stretch named the
Roughs, a beautiful wilderness of beeches, yews, thorns, holly and other
chalk-loving copsewood tangled in bracken and bramble. On the further
side of this ridge there is a straight way up from Clandon station,
coming out at Newlands Corner (567 feet). Thence, keeping eastwards
along the wooded edge, one might in a mile or so drop down again into
the valley by a deep coombe leading to Shere. But all along one can hold
on by what is often a broad turf-way set in woods, with tracks going off
south to the Tillingbourne villages and the Dorking line, north to the
stations of the railway between Guildford and Leatherhead, each of them
base for rare rambles. One has only to keep the crest of the ridge,
taking the successive names of Netley Heath, Hackhurst Downs, and White
Downs, till the way opens out on the expanse of Ranmore Common,
stretching over the end of this block of the Downs above the gap made by
the Mole. Here, by Denbies Park, there is a charming descent to Dorking;
or northwards one finds a network of grassy and leafy lanes leading
across the ridge towards Leatherhead. But ridge has ceased to be the
fittest term for a table-land of chalk opening out beyond Guildford to a
belt several miles broad, dotted here and there by islands of other
formation, and often roughened by patches of the wildest ground within a
couple of hours' walk of London tramway lines. As to the rutted
sward-way along the Downs, usually a little back from the edge, its
merit is romantic loneliness, hardly a house coming to view between
Newlands Corner and Ranmore Common, where the crash of a woodman's axe
may recall American backwoods; but it has the defect of a want of
prospects, shut out by lush greenery that suggests a valley rather than
a height of several hundred feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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