Page:The Victoria History of the County of Surrey Volume 3.djvu/216

 A HISTORY OF SURREY

��WOTTON

��Odetone and Wodeton (xi cent.) ; Wodetone, Wo- dinton and Woditon (xiii cent.) ; Wodeton (xv cent.) ; Wodyngton, Wootton, and Wotton (xvi cent, and onwards).

Wotton parish is bounded on the north by Effing- ham and Little Bookham, on the east by Dorking, Capel, and Ockley, on the south and west by Abinger. It formerly had a detached portion on the Sussex border, now attached to Abinger (see Abinger parish). The parish is still over 6 miles long from north to south, and never more than a little over a mile broad, and in places less. It contains 3,782 acres of land and 14 of water. The church is 3 miles west-by-south of Dorking, and 9 miles east-by-south of Guildibrd. The Redhill and Reading branch of the South Eastern Railway and the road from Dorking to Guildford pass through the north of it. Two branches of the Tillingbourne rise in the northern slopes of Leith Hill, and run first from south to north and then east to west towards the Wey, uniting at Wotton House. The streams on the other slope of Leith Hill run to the Arun. The parish has the usual apportionment of soil in this part of Surrey. The northern boundary is on the summit of the chalk, here 5 77 ft. above the sea, the parish then crosses the Upper Green Sand and Gault ; the church, manor-house, and such compact village as exists are on the Lower Green Sand, and it reaches across this soil on to the Wealden Clay. It is now purely agricul- tural and residential, but iron mills, a wire mill, and perhaps gunpowder mills formerly existed in it. 1

The most striking feature of the parish now is un- doubtedly the natural beauty which makes it the favourite resort of all lovers of the picturesque near London. The traveller, on foot or horseback (the road is not one for wheels), passing from the chalk country sees in front of him an ascending mass of broken sand hills, thickly planted with conifers and other trees upon their northern side. Leaving Wotton House on the right a bridle road leads through a forest of beeches alongside a succession of trout- pools, up the valley where John Evelyn first began the ornamental planting of his brother's grounds. Friday Street Pond, an old millpond with a cluster of cottages by it, is a Swiss lake in miniature. Passing on by another hamlet, King George's Hill, so named from a now extinct public-house, the path leads out on to the heather-covered common of Leith Hill. A view opens gradually to the west, as the ground ascends, but it is not till the traveller reaches the southern brow of the hill that the panorama bursts suddenly upon him. The summit of Leith Hill is the highest spot in the south-east of England, 967 ft. above the sea. The tower, which is not on exactly the highest point, but somewhat south of it, was intended to bring the height up to 1 ,000 ft., and has more than done so. It was built by Mr. Richard Hull of Leith Hill Place, in or before 1765, who acquired from Sir John Evelyn of Wotton the top of the hill, part of the waste of the

��manor of Wotton. 1 Two rooms were fitted up in it by Mr. Hull, and a staircase led to the upper room. Mr. Hull, dying in 1 772, was buried under the lower room, by his own direction. A stone in the wall of the tower used to record the fact. After his death the tower was uncared for and became ruinous and a haunt for disorderly characters. In 1796 Mr. Philip Henry Perrin of Leith Hill Place repaired it and raised it a few feet, adding a coping, but built up the door, filled up the interior for half the height with earth and stones, and left the upper part a mere shell. In 1 864 Mr. W. Evelyn of Wotton again repaired it, built the upper room, added a battlement, and made the top accessible, first, by means of a turret and staircase, then, when that was closed for a time, by an outside wooden staircase, and then by the turret stair again. The view from the top of the tower is more comprehensive than that from the hill, looking over the trees to the north, which obstruct the latter. The ground falls very abruptly to the south, giving a peculiar impression of height above the Weald below. The greater part of the county of Sussex, much of Kent as far as Ashford, Essex, the Laindon Hills, Middlesex, St. Paul's Cathe- dral, Highgate, Hampstead, and Harrow, Hertfordshire, Dunstable Down in Bedfordshire, the Chilterns in Buckinghamshire, Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Inkpen in Wiltshire, and the sea through Shoreham Gap, are visible in clear weather.* But though the view from the tower is necessarily the most ex- tensive in Surrey, those from the western parts of Leith Hill are more picturesque, looking as they do over the more broken foreground afforded by Holmbury Hill. The small ditches round the tower, sometimes ignorantly mistaken for an ancient encampment, were made by the Royal Engineers, who were encamped here in 1844, correcting the Ordnance Survey. The cottages near the foot of the hill are collectively known in the neighbourhood as The Camp.

In addition to the ground near the top of the hill, there is a very large extent of open country, covered with heather and conifers, in Wotton parish. The part on the east side of the parish is called Broadmoor.

A fine polished neolithic flint found near the tower is preserved at Leith Hill Place. The present writer has found a very considerable number of flint flakes and a few implements not very far from the tower. In Deer Leap Wood, to the north of Wotton House, in what was part of the park attached to it, is a mound with traces of a double ditch round it. The mound is about 12 to 14 ft. high, and about 90 yds. in cir- cumference. It seems to have been dug into, but no record of exploration is to be found. It is marked as a barrow on the 6-in. Ordnance map.

At the southern foot of Leith Hill, a jar containing about thirty gold coins of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth was found in 1837. The coins are at Wotton House.

Tillingbourne, or Lonesome, as it used to be called, or earlier still Filbrook Lodge, is the property of the

��1 V.C.H. Surr, ii, 236, 312, &c., and tate, Leith Hill Place, q.v., under successive storation, and the Court Rolls of the manor

��Evelyn's Letter to Aubrey vol. Aubrey's Surr.

��of changes of ownership till Mr. Wedgwood sold it to Mr. Evelyn in the last century.

��speak of the tower as existing in 1765. 3 Copy of the bearings of various points

��Mr. Hull bought the land on which the The inscription on the Tower gives the taken by the Royal Engineers in 1844, in Tower stands. It remained part of his e- date 1766, but the 66 is an evident re- the possession of Mr. Maiden.

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