s meet, they stood to
pray at St. Thomas's shrine, now no more.
[Illustration: _By Slipshoe Lane to the Red Cross Inn, Reigate._]
They would please themselves where they climbed the ridge again. Or they
joined the old Way, perhaps, in what is now Gatton Park, where the yews
point to Merstham church. After Merstham the tracks divide again. East
of an interrupting chalk pit, a thick yew hedge lines the side of the
hill, under which I once ate fine blackberries in December, as perhaps
the Wife of Bath ate them. But half way along the ridge of yews another
path climbs up a plough, and on the crest it joins a narrow lane which
is as much the Pilgrims' Way as any road on the downs; it runs by
Tollsworth Farm over the summit of White Hill, and is actually marked
"The Pilgrims' Way" twice on the sign posts, so sure are the local
painters of what they have to point out. East from White Hill you may
follow a single track, sometimes grass, sometimes modern road. There is
a puzzle at Godstone Quarry, where the chalk pits have cut the hill to
pieces, and the tiny path which perhaps still keeps the line across the
pits is a perilous slippery place in the rain. On the far side of
to-day's road by the chalk pit you may pick up the green track again,
though you will lose it rounding the spur of the hill that lies half way
between Godstone and the railway. The old Way probably still kept to the
ridge, and Sir Gilbert Scott thought he had traced the Pilgrims' Way
through the Hanging Wood north of Tandridge Hill Lane. But I think I
found it in a green track which runs westward from a gap in that same
lane. It looked like a rough cart-track through a field, and would join
the road already traced beyond. In its centre, a foot from the ground,
was placed, and doubtless remains, a blue enamelled notice board, with
the brief but usual caution to trespassers.
East of Tandridge Hill Lane, on the far side of a grass field, a curious
path, half ditch, half avenue of yews and thorns, leads down through
woodland to green trackway again. The green track crosses the railway
cutting, and so journeys on into Titsey Park on the level lowland. Under
the new Titsey church it runs, as it once ran past the old church in the
Park, and from Titsey church eastward, by a country lane through broad
and glorious cornfields, it passes out of Surrey into Kent.
By those ways they went, fur-clad Briton, ravaging Dane, Roman eagle,
traders of tin and drivers of p
|