HAPTER XIII

THURSLEY AND THE MOORS

Painters among heather.--The Devil's Jumps.--The Devil
redivivus.--Cobbett at Thursley.--A superb belfry.--The Sailor's
Grave.--Pig-iron and hammers.--The natterjack at eve.--A plank for
bellringers.--Witley fifty years hence.--Mehetabel in the church.

Thursley lies nearly three miles north of Hindhead on the edge of the
heather, and brings artists all the summer to paint its timbered
cottages and glowing hills. Mrs. Allingham sketched as charmingly on
Thursley common as by Haslemere; Birket Foster found a background of
purple for his cottage gardens. Mrs. Allingham's sketch of Hindhead from
Witley common, which runs up to Thursley from the north-east, is all the
wild of this part of Surrey on a few inches of paper.

Thursley is Thor's ley or field, and has memories of the Danes. They
left other names near: Tuesley, or Tuesco's field, lies towards
Godalming, and Thunder Hill, near Elstead, is Thor's or Thunor's. Thor
lives in local legends. Three strange conical hills, lying close
together two miles or so west of Thursley, have been known since his day
as the Devil's Jumps. Tradition draws a frightful picture of the Devil,
horns and tail and all, jumping from hill to hill to amuse himself,
until one day Thor caught him at it and knocked him over with an
enormous stone. You can see the stone on the Devil's Jumps to-day.

[Illustration: _Interior of Thursley Church._]

The Devil jumped up again when I was last looking at the Jumps. I had
climbed to the top of Kettlebury Hill, a mile away, and was looking out
over those strange little lumps of rock and crimson heather, which
puzzled Cobbett to the end of his days, when suddenly at my feet there
started up a rabbit as black as a cinder, leapt wildly about the
heather, and disappeared. There could have been very little doubt what
that meant long after Thor's time.

[Illustration: _Thursley._]

Cobbett, riding in from Hampshire or Sussex, used to make Thursley his
first stopping-place. But one thing he would not do, and that was to
come into Thursley over Hindhead. He detested turnpike roads, and he
detested Hindhead. He liked to ride through woods, or along lanes with
trees meeting overhead. When he rides from Chiddingford to Thursley, he
writes that "the great thing was to see the centre of these woods, to
see the stems of the trees as well as the tops of them." Otherwise, the
pleasure in riding was to pass fi