s it runs here may not take the exact line of the Pilgrims' Way,
but no one could call it difficult to follow. Here and there it passes
through cornfields, and it is by leaving the road to take a footpath
through a cornfield that the best view is to be had of Puttenham, whose
red roofs and grey church tower are set delightfully among rich elms,
with a splash of ploughed chalk blazing white through the trees beyond.
Puttenham has added only a few new cottages to its outskirts; under the
church it is still red and mossy and lichened. The cottages are oddly
built to suit the sloping ground, for the road to the church rises on a
hill, and necessitates different levels for foundations and stone
pathways. One of the cottages has an outside staircase to its front
door, for what reason there is no guessing.

The next village under the Hog's Back on the way to Guildford is
Compton, perhaps the third stage of thirsty pilgrims journeying from
Whitewaysend. The main road enters Compton from the north, but the
prettiest way to find the village is to drop down on it by a woodland
footpath from the west. Icehouse Wood is the name of the few acres of
trees through which the path runs; an old brick-lined pocket in the side
of the hill suggests the name, but there are remains of another brick
building higher up the slope which look nothing like an icehouse. Was
the name ever Oasthouse wood, perhaps, and did they grow hops here as at
Farnham? If any pilgrims left the beaten track from Puttenham which runs
north of Compton they may have come to the church and the inn by this
footpath. It is centuries old; it is lined, before it enters the wood,
by ordered holly which may once have marked a road, and as it drops down
the hill it cuts as deep into the sand as the old trackways north of
Anstiebury Camp or west of Albury. Great beeches coil their roots about
its edge--younger than the road if ever oasthouses stood by it.

Compton looks like a village presided over by a single mind. The
cottages which add themselves to whatever is old in neighbouring
buildings are designed to fit with a scheme; the cottage gardens are
challenges of roses and phloxes, which shall be brightest. The black
beams and jutting stories of an ancient timbered house stand above the
road, an example and a guardian; the whole aspect of the village is of
the quietest country. When I was walking through Compton I was told of a
village festival which had been held in the spri