Pilgrims Way – Day 2

• Start: The Princess Royal, Farnham, Surrey
• End: The Angel Posting House, Guildford, Surrey
• Distance: 20.42 km
• Time: 07 hours 12 minutes 48 seconds

After a comfortable night in the Princess Royal and a reasonable if unexciting breakfast,

we set off on our trek along the A31 to Guildford (or at least roughly parallel to it😀).

It has not been difficult to remember which route we are on, given the very large number of references to Pilgrims along the way.

The morning largely consisted of various beautiful woodlands interspersed with pretty ancient villages each with an attractive Norman church.

First up was Runfold woods, this was a commercial beech plantation which was destroyed in the Great Storm of 1987 and had now been transformed into a beautifully peaceful community wood.

This was followed by the pretty village of Seale, known in the medieval period as Zeyle. It’s 12th century Church of St Lawrence sported a case containing an ancient musical instrument, which supposedly dated from when the church had a minstrels gallery, before the Reformation!

Next up was Puttenham with it’s delightful woods running alongside the golf course.

In the village was the church of John the Baptist, with a porch dating from the 1170’s.

It contained a rather poignant memorial to Hugh Rose Pope, a young hiker who died in the Pyrenees in 1912.

On the outskirts of Puttenham there was a rather fine field of hops, which Craig was anxious to take a look at. Unfortunately, they were up a rather steep bank which was difficult to get up and dangerous to get back down!

Photo of the hop field duly taken, our hero was rather chagrined to find an opening in the hedge some 200m up the road, giving full access to the hops without the need for acrobatics! 😀😃🤣🤣

At lunch time we came across the Watts Gallery and Artists Village near Compton which had a very nice tea room.

Their homemade quiche was excellent, but their speciality was their Welsh Rarebit which was unusual and very tasty.

The Watts Gallery was set up by George Frederick Watts and his wife Mary Seton Fraser Tytler who were both power houses of the Symbolist movement in the late 19th Century and it is dedicated to Watts work.

We took a detour to visit the Watts Chapel which was designed in the 1890’s by Mary Seton Fraser Tytler in a fusion of Art nouveau, Romanesque and Mediterranean styles. It is really spectacular and unique and well worth a visit.

After lunch we continued to enjoy our sojourn in the woods, this time in the dramatic Loseley Nature Reserve,

before emerging onto a more mature River Wey just south of Guildford.

Walking into the centre of town we arrived at the Angel Posting Inn.

This ancient inn has been on this site since the middle ages and is the last man standing of Guildford’s 5 Coaching inns, renowned throughout the country in the 17th century. Famous visitors to the Angel included Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Lord Nelson.

These days the Angel seems to have a more complex persona, it’s inn sign looks significantly more Dante than Celestial,

and it is home to ‘The Fallen Angel’, Guildford’s secret cocktail and cabaret bar with a rather strongly worded list of rules.

However, our room has very generous proportions, so I can’t complain.

We ate tonight in a lovely little Tapas bar called La Casita.

Overall, I am surprisingly impressed with Guildford, which seems distinctly unpromising when viewed from the A3!

Tomorrow we are on our way to Dorking, another place which doesn’t at first glance incite a feeling of daring-do, still you never know! Tune in tomorrow for our…