Читать книгу The North Downs Way. National Trail from Farnham to Dover онлайн

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Turn left at a T-junction, and in a few paces leave the road by the entrance to Watts Gallery. Refreshments are available at tearooms here. The North Downs Way now journeys along a sandy track whose banks are honeycombed with rabbit warrens. After passing between barns the way narrows and rises through woodland. At a crosstracks continue ahead with the Loseley Estate's nature reserve on the right. Leaving trees behind the way cuts through deep sand, and coming to a junction of paths you briefly veer left on a track, then right on another track rising between fields and woodland. Large aerial masts can be seen on the ridge to the left.

The Watts Gallery is dedicated to the work of George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), the highly successful 19th-century painter and sculptor who came to Compton with his second wife, Mary Fraser-Tytler, who was also an artist. (His first short-lived marriage was to the actress Ellen Terry.) The gallery, designed by his friend Christopher Turnor and begun when Watts was 83, contains more than 200 of his works. South of the gallery along Down Lane, on the way to Compton, stands an extraordinary red-brick mortuary chapel built in 1896 by Mrs Watts with a local builder and a team of villagers.