A Home County
Surrey. By Eric Parker. (Hale. 15s.)
AN established author, buttonholed by the editor of a series of county books and charged with writing one on Surrey (Suth, south, plus rice, realm, as in bishopric), would have to consider carefully how to do it. Mr. Parker must at any rate have been quite clear how not to do it. Nearly forty years ago he wrote the classic Highways and Byways in Surrey and he must somehow or other avoid covering again the ground so well covered then. He has, in fact, avoided that completely. This is a completely different kind of book. Then he was giving the wayfarer in Surrey what the wayfarer in Surrey needed ; here he is free to follow his bent as he chooses. What his bent is most people know. One of the first authorities in England on birds and beasts and trees and plants, he writes of all of them as he has seen them in Surrey—though, often enough, it might as easily have been in Sussex or Hampshire. He is instruc- tive about the antiquities and the ancient industries of the country, but has little to say about its great houses and famous inhabitants or the derivations of the Friday Streets and Coldharbours. He tells of his own walks and drives, quotes (at rather undue length) from an old Surrey farm account-book of 185o, describes the Surrey soils, and the lakes and ponds of the county and devotes a chapter, on which rather more must be said, to The Pilgrims' Way, which, as everyone knows, or thinks he knows, runs from Winchester to Canterbury over the Hog's Back, over Merrow Down, over Ran- more Common and so on eastwards by Dorking and Reigate and beyond. Is not St. Martha's Chapel one of the landmarks that authenticates the tale? All this you will find set out as accepted fact in the Highways and Byways book. All of it Mr. Parker now rejects in the light of later study. The argument can be no more than hinted at here. Briefly, pilgrimages to Canterbury date from the tzth century, but the first mention of a Pilgrims' Way in Surrey is ir18o4. Camden's Britannia (1536) is completely silent about
any such thing. So is Aubrey's Antiquities of Surrey (late 17th century). So is Cobbett's Rural Rides, though it describes the very country through which the way was supposed to run. This iconoclasm will, no doubt, be challenged. Ancient legends die hard. Bin tribute at least must be paid to the sincerity of Mr. Parker's recantation.
As a whole he has given an individualistic picture of Surrey, telling of the county as he has seen it in peace and war, in rain and shine. His book is full of natural history, by no means all of it peculiar to this particular county. It is discursive, deliberately unsystematic and contains rather too much quotation of other writers—George Bourne, for example. It rather supplements the Highways and Byways Surrey—as it was clearly- meant to—than
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