n. It was a famous house in the
seventeenth century, and cooked the Mole trout as well as the Dorking
inns cooked their water-souchy of carp and tench. The Reverend S.N.
Sedgwick, in his ingenious little collection of Leatherhead legends,
adds a strange record to the inn property. He founds one of his stories
on a local tradition that the carrying of a dead body can establish a
right of way, and he says that in quite recent times the sum of one
penny has been charged for permission to bring a corpse through the Swan
Brewery Yard, to prevent a right of way being established.

Whether or not the right of way was established originally by carrying a
dead body over it, there is another Leatherhead tradition of a right of
way which is connected with the church. The church, with the curious
double dedication of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, stands apart from the
southern road out of Leatherhead, above the banks of the Mole. The tower
is strangely out of the axis of the nave--as much as three or four
feet--and the tradition is that it was so built to avoid encroaching on
an established right of way. Probably the explanation is something more
symbolical or superstitious. One of the most learned of all Surrey
archaeologists, Mr. Philip Mainwaring Johnston, holds to the theory that
these deflections of the church axis are connected with legends of the
Crucifixion. The deflected chancel, he thinks, suggests the head bowed
upon the cross. But the deflected tower seems more difficult. The church
is interesting in other ways. It contains a leather-bound Book of
Homilies, chained in its original position to one of the northern
pillars of the nave; and in the porch is an upright gravestone erected
to the memory of Lady Diana Turner, the story being that she chose to be
buried under the very spot where her sedan-chair stood for the Sunday
service. She was paralysed, and listened to the Homilies from the porch.

Leatherhead has two faces. She shows one, which is slate and new, to the
traveller entering the town from Ashtead and Epsom to the north-east;
and another, which is the old bridge and the church road and the best of
her, to those who approach her from Feltham or Mickleham. St. John's
School, founded for the sons of poor clergy, lies on the Ashtead road, a
large modern building of red and grey patterned brick. But the best of
Leatherhead's houses stand about the Mole. One is Thorncroft, which
represents the domain of Tornecrosta in D