o 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 mediaeval 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, no