ar, and commemorating Anne Forster, the
granddaughter of a patriarchal neighbour, Sir John Gainsford. It is odd
in more than one way; it is the only iron tombstone in the county,
though it is a tombstone that has often been copied. There are still
several reproductions of it scattered about the country in the form of
firebacks; evidently the founders considered the design convenient.
Perhaps they might have made a better job if they had been severer
scholars; for some of the lettering on it is quaint and topsy-turvy, the
S's being twisted the wrong way round and the F's lying unhappily feet
uppermost. Yet it fits well with the other old Gainsford and Angell
monuments, and is also a memorial of a dead and gone industry, the
iron-smelting of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent.

[Illustration: _The Farmhouse opposite Crowhurst Church._]

Leisured churchgoers should choose a service at Crowhurst at sunset:
September drives the sun at the right angle to light its dark oak and
the great beams of the belfry. Many churches have windows built high in
the west end, through which part of the splendour of the setting sun can
filter; but this window is set low, and the red sky floods the church.

From the church to Crowhurst Place a mile away runs an interesting
byway, the only one in Surrey, so far as I know, built by a private
gentleman of permanent material, extending for a mile from his house to
his place of worship. In the year 1631 the John Gainsford of the day, at
the fine old age of 76, determined he would walk wet to church no more.
He had a stone-flagged causeway laid from the manor-house to the
churchyard, "it being before," as the Parish Register informs you, "a
loathsom durtie way every stepp." He paid two workmen fifty pounds for
the job, and the causeway is still to be picked out across the meadows.

[Illustration: _Crowhurst Place._]

The Gainsfords were one of the best, though not the greatest of the old
Surrey families. They are first heard of in the reign of Edward III,
when John and Margery Gaynesford had the manor of Crowhurst from John de
Stangrave and Joan his wife--a delightful gathering of English names.
One of them, in Tudor days, was Sheriff of Surrey, and well in the Tudor
fashions: he had six wives. But he must have found them disappointing in
their family duties, for the first five of them brought him fifteen
daughters running, and it was only from the sixth and last that he got a
son and heir. He was one of