St Mary's Thorpe
Egham, Surrey
Prelude
"Thorpe has been little written about. It lacks its sacred bard. But neither
Shere, nor Gomshall, nor Thursley, nor Chiddingfold, which have been compared and criticised as the most beautiful of all
Surrey villages, can surpass Thorpe for richness of peace of ancient homes and quiet brooding over the past. True, its neighbourhood
has suffered. Once to the north lay bare fields: today a vast array of glasshouses and the workings of a gravel-pit, although
disfiguring, are I suppose evidence of local prosperity. But in Thorpe itself you can sit near the church on a stone stile,
and look round at walls and roofs which might surely have sheltered Sir John Denham himself, walking by Thorpe to Chertsey.
The stile stands across an ancient right of way, which crosses the fields; a straight line from the churchyard to Chertsey.
John de Rutherwyk, doubtless, often walked or rode that lonely byway; perhaps it was he who raised the level path dry and
well-drained out of the swampy, snipe-haunted meadows that lay between the little church and the great Abbey." Eric Parker, Highways and Byways in Surrey, with illustrations by Hugh Thomson (London: Macmillan
& Co. Limited, 2nd Edition, hb, 1935 452pp) 206f
