ver some of the wildest country in the county. A week
would not be long enough to explore the dozen square miles south of the
town.

Wrecclesham lies to the south-west, almost on the Hampshire border, and
still makes green pottery of patterns which were favourites in the
sixteenth century. Further south runs the tiny Bourne, the stream by
which Cobbett and his brothers had so good an education, as we have just
seen, in the sand. The Bourne, which runs dry in summer, has few
associations as a stream; one, perhaps, will remain with it. Readers of
_The Bettesworth Book_ and _Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_ will perhaps
not be very wrong if they fix on this sandy valley as the Surrey which
Bettesworth knew best. Than the _Memoirs_, I think, no more discerning
study of an old labourer's fight to keep on his own legs, out of the
workhouse, earning his own money with his spade and hoe, belongs to any
Surrey village.

[Illustration: _Pierrepont House and Bridge._]

Deep country begins south of the Bourne, with the first Surrey bridge
over the Wey, or rather one of the two Weys that are to join at Tilford.
Untouched as yet by any town, the little river runs here over gravel and
sand, clear and weedy. Trout lie under the bridge below Pierrepont
House, in George III's day a seat of Evelyn Duke of Kingston, who named
it after his family. He was the Duke who married the beautiful Countess
of Bristol when her lawful husband was still alive: perhaps she used to
stare into the Wey at Pierrepont and wonder whether it was worth doing.

[Illustration: _Beside Frensham Pond._]

Frensham stands a little distant from the river, just a cottage or two
and a church. But the church holds a famous relic--an enormous caldron
of beaten copper. Nobody knows its age; everybody has a story about it.
It was brought by the fairies, is one tradition; it was nothing of the
kind, is another. Mother Ludlam, the witch of Moor Park, four miles
away, used it for boilings and philtremakings, according to one story;
yet another connects it with a great stone which used to lie in the
neighbourhood. John Aubrey, the antiquary, who "perambulated" Surrey in
1673 and 1674, gives the legend in full:--

"In the vestry of the church, on the north side of the chancel, is
an extraordinary great kettle or caldron, which the inhabitants say,
by tradition, was brought hither by the fairies, time out of mind,
from Borough hill, about a mile from hence. To