136

DEER BY THE WATER

CHAP.

them on a blue August morning with sweet peas and dahlias; a villager and his wife gathered fruit in a garden banked above the road, and white-frocked, black-stockinged children sat demurely in the cottage doorways. But there is a patch of corrugated iron by the Eashing cottages and bridge which calls for a Society of Destroyers.

Godalming has two fine parks for neighbours, Peperharow and Loseley. Peperharow, which became the first Lord Midleton's in 1712, once belonged to Sir Bernard Brocas, who was Master of the Buckhounds to Richard II; afterwards it came to the great family of the Coverts. Peperharow Park has its own church, but the beauty of the place is in the parkland itself, with its noble trees and stretches of grass, and the Wey running through it down to Eashing. Deer wander in the sunshine there, dark and comely under the great cedars, or grazing slowly and sedately by the banks of the stream. One might walk out from Godalming only to watch the Peperharow deer; but a walk beyond the park brings another pleasure. Above Peperharow the Wey is bridged again, by stone as old, I think, as at Eashing: the buttress of the main part of the bridge is the same shape as Eashing's. Above the bridge is a fall built across the stream: only a few inches of masonry, but it changes the stream completely. The higher water is a broad, shadowy pool, cooled and darkened by alders meeting overhead and dipping in the water; below, the shallow water ripples over stones, as clear and black as a northern salmon stream. The difference between the Wey here and the Wey at Eashing or Tilford is, of course its bed. The Wey runs over as many beds as any little river in England; here it races over clean ironstone.

Loseley has a longer story than Peperharow, and Loseley House is a very fine old Tudor building, the best, perhaps, in Surrey, after Sutton. Sir William More built most of it, and took much of the stone from Waverley Abbey, for which it would be difficult to forgive him if he had made a less beautiful house. Sir William More was son of Sir Christopher, Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex under Henry VIII. Sir Christopher first had the estate in 1515; at the Domesday Survey the Earl of Arundel had it. The family history of the Mores is too long for a chapter; so would be a detailed list of the furniture and pictures of the house, some of which are catalogued in the

ΧΙ

LOSELEY AT A DISTANCE

137

guide-books, though the general public may see them but seldom. The house has had royal visitors; Queen Elizabeth came to see Sir William More there, and King James and his son were both guests of Sir George More, Sir William's son. It was Sir George More who was so furious with his daughter for marrying John Donne, though he lived to be good enough to forgive her.

I like to look at these great houses from a distance. When one enters a house that has been used by an historic family for generations, the first thing that demands attention is far more often than not something new, an alteration, an adaptation of

old means to new methods. The mark set on the house is of the living, and the fascination of it belongs to other years gone. But distance blots out all the innovations; the haze of half a mile sets it in the landscape as it has stood for centuries. I like to look at Loseley from the dusty, forgotten places of the old pilgrims' road passing at the boundary of the park; not that the pilgrims ever saw Loseley, but the old countrymen still using the road would have seen it first, perhaps, from that ancient trackway, and have wondered what manner of man its master might be, and how much he paid for the building of it, and whether the King or the Queen would

138

A FUTURE GLORY

CH. XI

be coming to Loseley again soon. That is the Loseley they would have seen; a noble dwelling of grey gables and spacious windows, looking over broad parkland and wide water with red cattle standing in it, flicking at the flies with their tails. So, perhaps, would Henry Wriothesley, second Earl of Southampton, have looked at Loseley from a distance, when Elizabeth sent him there, the Papist prisoner of Sir William More. He would have glanced doubtfully up and down the old road and wondered over the hopelessness of escape.

Godalming's nearest, and in point of size, its greatest neighbour is Charterhouse. Charterhouse is the name; the buildings are not yet forty years old. The school moved from Aldersgate to the hill above Godalming in 1872, and took the memories of Addison, Steele, and Thackeray with it in its museum and library. The Charterhouse buildings belong to the future. Centuries will add the grace of dulness to its new stone; trees will grow round its cricket ground, distance will set a haze round the names of its Surrey schoolboys; it will have venerable wood, there will be legends of the passages and the stairs; the doors will have been darkened by great men ; there will be a film and a glory of years about its chapel. To-day it is admirably arranged, hygienic beyond praise: then it will be an old building as well as an old school.

Six hundred feet up.-Haslemere's Museum.-A strange Tomb.-The Lion. The Cow.-Snipes in Conduit Street.-Shottermill Trout.Hindhead.--The Riddle of a Crime.-A deserted Road.-The View from Gibbet Hill.-Airly Beacon.-The Broom Squire.-Highcombe Bottom.-Pheasants, Tadpoles, and Swifts.

HINDHEAD Commands the south-west corner of the county, but Haslemere is the key to it. You cannot walk away from Hindhead and take a train back if you want to, which you ought always to be able to do from a centre. Besides, to

return to Hindhead is to end with a steep hill to climb; coming back to Haslemere, you can either drop down the hill from Hindhead, or the railway will carry you uphill to the little town from Milford or Witley down the line.

It is really uphill, for Haslemere lies higher than any town. in the south of England-or is said to do so; I have not measured them all. I think Tatsfield and Woldingham in the east of the county lie higher; but they are villages, not towns.

140

SIX HUNDRED FEET UP

CHAP.

Haslemere is between five and six hundred feet above sea level; as high as Newlands Corner and nearly three times the height of St. George's or St. Anne's Hill. If Hindhead were sliced away, Haslemere's view to the north would be superb.

Haslemere has strayed higher and higher on the slopes above the old town. The core lies round a broad street in which the White Horse faces the Swan, and the town hall stands between them, a rather dull little building, in the

middle of the road. The town has kept less of the past than Farnham; perhaps it had less to keep; but it has some good red seventeenth-century houses, weather-tiled gables, and tall brick chimneys. Toadflax and arabis climb over the old garden walls: one little house looks as if its walls were held together by coils of wistaria. In another, a square, comfortable building with an elaborate doorway, lived the water