England -- Antiquities; England -- Description and travel; Roads -- Great Britain
Remembering all this we rested at the chapel on the hill-top, and
considered it wearily. We regretted its restoration to new worship,
and recollected (falsely, as it turned out) famous graves within it.
The air was too hazy to distinguish the further view to the south. The
Weald westward was quite hidden, and even the height of Hirst Wood
above and beyond us eastward was hardly to be seen.
When we had spent half an hour at this place we prepared to go down
the further side, but first we looked to see whether the Old Road
passed clearly to one side or the other of the summit, for we thought
that matter would be of importance to us as a guide for its direction
in similar places later on. But we could decide nothing. Certainly the
track makes northward of the church until it is near the top of the
hill, but, as it gets near, it points right at it (as we might
expect), is lost, and is only recovered some twenty or fifty yards
beyond the platform of the summit, coming apparently neither from the
south nor from the north of the church; the direction is a little
obscured, moreover, by a modern plantation which confuses the
beginning of the descent. Soon it grew clear enough, and we followed
it at a race, down the hill perhaps half a mile. It was plainer and
plainer as we went onward, till it struck the road which leads from
Guildford to Albury.
Here there rises a difficulty unique in the whole course of the way.
It is a difficulty we cannot pretend to have solved. The trail for
once goes to the damp and northward side of a hill: the hill on which
stands Weston Wood. It is an exception to an otherwise universal rule,
and an exception for which no modern conditions can account.
There is apparently no reason why it should not have followed its
otherwise invariable rule of taking the southerly slope, and it could
have chosen the dry clean air of the heath and kept all the way near
the fresh water of the Tillingbourne. On the other hand, there is no
doubt whatever of its direction. Tradition, the existence of modern
tracks, and more important still, the direction of the road after it
leaves St. 'Martha's' chapel, all point to the same conclusion. The
Pilgrim's Way crosses diagonally the field beyond the main road, goes
just behind the little cottage at its corner,[23] and then makes for
Albury Park by way of a wretched and difficult sunken lane to the
north of Weston Wood. We entered this neglected and marshy way. It was
a place of close, dark, and various trees, full of a damp air, and
gloomy with standing water in the ruts: the whole an accident
differing in tone from all that we knew of the road, before and after.
It was not long in passing. We left the undergrowth for the open of a
field, and found the trace of the road pointing to the wall of Albury
Park. It entered just north of the new church, and then followed a
clearly marked ridge upon which, here and there, stood the yews.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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