from Garratt's Hall, whose grounds border Banstead
village, that Colonel F.A.H. Lambert dedicates his _Guide to Surrey_, a
valuable little pocket-book, to Admiral Charles Mathew Buckle, head of
another ancient Surrey family. One of the oldest things near Banstead
stands in ground once owned by the Buckle family. Nork House has a field
in which stands Tumble Beacon, a mound which saw the flares run from the
hills of Hampshire to London, when the Armada was breasting the Channel
and Hampshire had caught the signal from Dunkerry and the Lizard. Tumble
Beacon would not light an alarm now; or if it did, it would burn pine
trees and elders and nettles that grow about it, and would scare a
hundred rabbits. How did the trees come there? A beacon should not be
planted; it should stand open and high and free as when the Spaniards
came, and from the same spot where Elizabeth's sailors in the Thames saw
its flame, it should wait for jubilees and coronations to send its fires
roaring up into the night.

Nork, etymologists have guessed, may be corrupted from Noverca--perhaps
it once had a Roman owner. There were Romans who lived on the high
ground near. Walton Heath, south of Banstead on the chalk plateau, has
had the pavement of a Roman villa dug from it; I have been told that you
may still find Roman pavements there, if you know where to dig. But
Walton's chief possession--the village is Walton-on-the-hill, so named
that you may never mistake it for Walton-on-the-Naze or
Walton-on-Thames--is in the church. It is a leaden font, the only leaden
font which Surrey possesses, though England has thirty; and of the
thirty English fonts, Walton's is of as fine workmanship and design as
any. Throned apostles circle the bowl, and bless with the right hand, or
hold a book in the left. The church has some interesting old glass in a
southern window, and, by an oddly deliberate anachronism, a chained
Bible dated 1803. The chain is an old and genuine guard of the printed
word, taken from Salisbury; but why should it chain Georgian printing?
But Walton has long been anachronistic; there is a tomb outside the
chancel, in a recess of the north wall, on which some modern Latin
scholar has set the inscription, "Johannes de Waltune hujus ecclesiae
fundator 1268." The weather has removed part, but the rest is in black
paint.

A neighbouring village, Headley, has separated its new and old more
definitely. The church has been taken down, all but the porc