Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe.
From this grotesquely dismal scene, happier souls struggle up the Ladder of Salvation to where on one side Christ is seen triumphing over the powers of Evil, and on the other St. Michael weighing souls in his balance. One of the figures below, holding a bottle, is interpreted as a temperance lesson, no doubt needed by some of the pilgrims, who must often have turned aside to profit by this pictorial sermon. The worst torment seems to be that of a millionaire of the period, who had perhaps not opened his money bags to relieve poor pilgrims.
For the Pilgrims' Way we have only to keep the brow of White Hill, looking over to the southern ridge on which Bletchingley stands. After crossing the road from Caterham to Bletchingley, it is continued by a lane turning off beside a tower and past the mansion called Arthur's Seat, to the War Coppice, once an ancient camp, but now, like the Cardinal's Cap on White Hill, offered as a too eligible building site. Except by peeps, the view to the south becomes obstructed; and we look over the Harestone Valley, down which a pleasant path runs northward to Caterham. At Gravelly Hill and its Water Tower, new road-making seems to transmogrify the Way, that on the slope beyond must have taken a scramble into the deep hollow through which runs the high-road to Godstone. Perhaps the original track is represented by a narrow lane descending on the south face of the Downs.
Across that quarried hollow, we again ascend the Downs for their last half-dozen miles in Surrey. A little below the milestone goes off a charmingly devious lane up Winder's Hill and along the south side of Marden Park, past its white shooting "Castle" so conspicuous on the brow, then the lodge gate, through which there is a bridle-way running to Caterham or on to the farther end of the park, two miles north. Evelyn tells us how this fine demesne was made from a "barren warren" and a poor farm in a hardly populated parish, by that "prodigious rich scrivener" of his own time, Sir Robert Clayton, a Lord Mayor of London, whose virtues, or at least his fortunes, are attested by the monstrous monument covering a whole chancel wall of Bletchingley Church on the ridge to the south. Here, admiringly says our authority on such matters, the wealthy citizen so changed the face of hill, valley, and "solitary mountain," that before long Marden looked like "some foreign country" which would "produce spontaneously pines, firs, cypress, yew, holly, and juniper," not to mention "an infinite store of the best fruit."