Normandy, or by the Harrow Way from Salisbury Plain, from Wales, from Ireland, and all the West of England. But they would not all necessarily leave by the road that runs straight from Farnham to the foot of the Hog's Back. Some would have letters to the Abbot of Waverley, would spend a night at the Abbey two miles to the south-east, and join the others perhaps at Puttenham, six miles further along the Way. Then, among those who chose to travel straight to the western slope of the Hog's Back, there would be different minds at the foot of the hill. Some would climb the hill at Whitewaysend—the white way of the chalk would begin for them there—and would stride along in the sunlight the seven straight miles to Guildford. Others would prefer to keep to a path under the hill, stopping at the churches and gossiping at the inns. You can trace the old road clearly through Seale to Puttenham, where it must have travelled south of the church door, instead of taking the awkward and unnecessary turn to the north which is taken by the modern road. Then at Puttenham the pilgrims would divide again. Some would journey straight on across Puttenham Heath, heading towards St. Catherine's Hill—you can see the rough track; others would turn aside to the south-east, to visit Compton church; perhaps they would come down into Compton as you may come down into it from the east to-day, by what is evidently an old track cut deep in the woods. They would go up north again from Compton; perhaps they would be tired of the valley, and would climb the Hog's Back to walk the last mile or so into Guildford in the wind; perhaps they would join the other stream of pilgrims travelling by the sandy lane by which you may walk to-day as slowly as they did towards St. Catherine's Hill. Most of them, I think, would collect on St. Catherine's Hill; St. Catherine's was more popular than the Guildford churches. So General James has discovered, examining ancient records of litigation. The parson of St. Nicholas, Guildford, fearing to lose his profit from the pilgrims who visited the town, purchased from the lord of the manor the freehold of the site of the chapel, and rebuilt it in 1317. Perhaps the attraction of St. Catherine's was that it was on the way to Shalford Fair. Guildford had two special fairs, on May 4 and November 22, to catch the summer and the winter pilgrims. But Shalford Fair was the great fair, and actually covered 140 acres of ground.
The pilgrims would cross the Wey under St. Catherine's Hill by a ferry or a rough plank bridge. The merchants travelling with their horses, and the ponies driven from Weyhill Fair out towards Salisbury Plain, would come through the water by a ford. But the ferry and the bridge were both of almost immemorial antiquity. In 1736 there was a dispute about the bridge. The lord of the manor of Brabœuf had built a bridge over the Wey for a fair on St. Matthew's Day. The owner of the church lands at Shalford ordered it to be destroyed; he claimed the right of conveying passengers over the river. They went to law, and it was alleged that there had been a bridge there time out of record. Judgment, however, decided "that there had been no bridge except per unum battellum (one plank) at the mill belonging to the heirs of Henry de la Poyle (a mile lower), laid for convenience of the pilgrims going to the chapel of St. Katherine at the time of the fair." General James has unearthed the decision of the Court, and incidentally added another bypath to the Pilgrims' Way.
Opposite the ferry under St. Catherine's the line of the Way to St. Martha's is clear enough, a green track in a green field; and once I saw it as the pilgrims may have seen it on a spring morning. It was in May, and there was a haze over the meadowland by the river which blurred shapes and colours. St. Catherine's was no longer a ruin; the buildings on the hill faded into the trees; the clothes of wanderers by the riverside took on mediæval brightnesses, lost modern forms; and into the foreground ran three bare-headed, yellow-haired children, and in their brown arms great bunches of cuckoo-flowers. So might one returning from the Martyr's chapel have seen the path to the ferry in the days when the Clerk told the tale of Griselda.
The track crosses the road near the ferry, and by a wood named the Chantries comes up to St. Martha's, at the foot of the hill a close-cropped aisle of down grass, and nearer the top a loose, sandy path among pines. At the base of the hill the pilgrims who had come by the ferry would be joined by those who had left Guildford by Pewley Hill, to come out through the valley past Tytings, now a private residence, but once the dwelling of St. Martha's priest. And on the other side of the hill a difficulty waits. Mr. Belloc traces the road from the foot across a ploughed field, to connect with a narrow lane on the other side of the road dropping from Newlands Corner to Albury. Well, it is possible that some of the pilgrims strayed out in that direction, though it means that they would have to descend a bank like the wall of a house by the Newlands Corner road, which is a sunken track; also, Mr. Belloc owns that a little further on this road he chooses has a doubtful section of a mile and a half. May he not be on the wrong road? Why should not the pilgrims drop down the road which leads from the foot of St. Martha's Hill into Albury? The inns would have tempted them; they would be heading straight for the church; and the road leading to inns and church is clearly a road that led from St. Martha's Hill into the valley of the Tillingbourne long before the hill bore a Christian chapel. It is evidently an old British trackway. It runs along a ridge, and yet it is sunk deep between two very high banks. If it was there when the pilgrims came down from the Martyr's chapel, why should they make a fresh track for themselves, especially one which, as Mr. Belloc admits, "raises a difficulty unique in the whole course of the way"? The track he follows goes by the wet, northward side of a hill—"an exception to an otherwise universal rule."
I have no space to follow the way in detail through the country, but this particular section seemed to me to illustrate clearly the need for imagining what the pilgrims would be likely to do, rather than to try to fit in their doings with a particular path or lane through Albury. I do not see why the pilgrims should not have followed the same route as we travel by to-day. Doubtless by what is now Albury Park the road has become confused. May it not have led through Albury Park past the south porch of the ruined church, and so come in a natural way to Shere church by the old inn? All five would then lie in a line—the old track from the Martyr's chapel, Albury Church, the White Horse Inn, the short road to Shere Church, and the track that leads up from Gomshall to the flank of the downs again. But that is only guessing; the line on the maps tempts it.
East of Gomshall to Oxted almost on the county border the track of the old Way and of the Pilgrims' Ways, sometimes coinciding, sometimes running parallel to each other, runs along the crest and the southern slopes of the chalk ridge. Yews and wind-bent thorn mark the ways, sometimes, as east of Gomshall, by a clear cut ridge in the hill, lined with ancient trees; sometimes, as under Denbies by Dorking, you can only pick out the path by solitary yews studding grass fields and corn-land. At the gap of the Mole by Dorking the old Way, perhaps, forded the Mole; the pilgrims would cross by Burford Bridge, which joins the Roman Ermyn Street to Stane Street beyond Dorking. Both the Way and the pilgrims' track would join on the line of yews on Box Hill, and from Box Hill to Reigate there is a succession of yew road-marks and hedges, with here and there the whole face of the downs bitten out by a chalk pit; gradually the road climbs, until the track above Reigate lies almost on the highest point of the ridge. At Reigate the old Way carries on, crossing the hill-road which was from the town north to London. The slope of the modern road has been eased by cutting into the hill, and the ancient Way now is joined, on Reigate Hill, by a suspension bridge.
But the pilgrims would drop down into the town to sleep and to eat and drink. You may see their tracks on the chalk, streaming down from the ridge like a bunch of white ribands in the wind. They came into Reigate by Slipshoe Lane, and there, where the cross roads meet, they stood to pray at St. Thomas's shrine, now no more.
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