A turnpike through the Western Weald
Alfold stood within the heavy clay country of the Western Weald, where deeply rutted lanes and winter mud complicated journeys between farms, villages and markets. Parliament authorised the Guildford and Arundel turnpike in 1757. The managed road began near Dapdune Wharf at Guildford and ran south through Bramley, Alfold, Loxwood and Newbridge towards the Arun valley. Trustees raised money against toll income, repaired the carriageway, improved drainage and bridges, and placed gates across the route.
The road entered Alfold from Dunsfold and continued towards the junction now called Alfold Crossways. A toll-letting notice published in 1784 stated that the Guildford-to-Alfold section had produced income during the preceding fifteen years, placing regular toll collection there by at least 1769. The same road continued through Alfold Bars and Loxwood towards Newbridge, Pulborough and Bury.
Alfold Toll Gate House combined a collector’s office with a family dwelling. Its keeper watched approaching traffic, opened the barrier and collected the prescribed charges from riders, coaches, carts, wagons and livestock. Exemptions covered defined classes of traffic, while ordinary travellers paid towards the road’s maintenance. The gate occupied a strategic point where routes divided towards the old church centre, Horsham, Guildford and the Sussex road.
The Compasses and Alfold Gate
The Compasses stood a short distance north of the toll house on the same turnpike. A traveller coming from Guildford or Dunsfold reached the inn before continuing towards Alfold Gate. Traffic moving north passed the toll point and then approached the inn beyond it. The toll house collected money and controlled the barrier; the inn supplied food, drink, shelter, stabling and local information.
Loxwood repeated the arrangement farther south. The turnpike reached the River Lox beside Loxwood Gate, also known as Toll Gate Cottage. Bridge House, a sixteenth-century farmhouse beside the river crossing, became the Bridge Alehouse after the turnpike arrived. The house was trading as the Onslow Arms Inn by 1801. Inn, toll house and bridge occupied the same compact roadside setting.
A new road towards Horsham altered Alfold Gate in 1809. The carriageway was straightened through the toll-house garden and transferred to the opposite side of the building. The earlier frontage consequently faced the garden across which the first turnpike line had curved. The new alignment produced the familiar Crossways junction.
An established inn before the canal
The earliest firm newspaper reference appeared in the Sussex Advertiser on 26 July 1813. An auction notice directed buyers to the Compasses Inn at Alfold. A second advertisement followed on 2 August. The name of the Compasses was already familiar enough to guide prospective purchasers across a scattered rural parish.
The inn’s documented existence in 1813 followed several decades of turnpike operation and the 1809 road realignment at Crossways. Farms and roadside households around Lakers Green, Tickner’s Heath and the northern part of Alfold supplied a local trade alongside travellers using the turnpike.
The canal arrives at the summit
Parliament authorised the Wey and Arun Junction Canal in 1813. Its eighteen-mile course connected the River Wey at Stonebridge with the Arun system at Newbridge, completing an inland navigation between the Thames and the English Channel. Labourers cut the channel through difficult clay, formed towpaths and banks, and constructed locks, culverts and bridges.
The canal reached its summit around Alfold. A long level passed beside the Compasses and beneath the turnpike at Compasses Bridge. Carts, coaches, riders and livestock crossed above barges and towing horses. Contractors and labourers worked around the inn during construction, followed by boat crews, carriers and merchants after navigation began.
The ceremonial opening of the canal took place on 28 September 1816. Boats assembled near the Alfold summit and the Guildford-Horsham road before travelling towards Guildford. The procession included proprietors, invited guests and working boats loaded with goods intended to advertise the route’s commercial value. Two hundred and twenty canal labourers received beef and ale at Alfold.
A. L. Vine, the twentieth-century historian of the Wey and Arun navigation, placed the Three Compasses among the principal illustrations in London’s Lost Route to the Sea. His photographic sequence also included the summit level in winter and summer, the canal near Tickner’s Heath and the lock house in Sidney Wood.
Flood, sales and early publicans
Floodwater swept away Compasses Bridge in November 1821. The loss interrupted the turnpike crossing only five years after the canal opened. Property advertisements continued to use the Compasses as a landmark. The County Herald referred to it in a sale notice on 29 May 1819. In November 1827 the Sussex Advertiser described a farm beside the canal as about half a mile from the Compasses. The Morning Herald announced the sale of the manors of Markwick and Monks in August 1828 and stated that particulars could be obtained at the Compasses Inn.
Licensing records supply the earliest named publicans currently identified. The Blackheath Hundred register for 1822 lists Mary Charman at the Compasses in Alfold. Thomas Birch held the licence in 1824, supported by Benjamin Lucas and William Jennings, both Alfold farmers. The 1825 register again names Thomas Birch. Each licence depended upon annual approval and sureties for the orderly conduct of the house.
Jesse Holden and the first named census
The 1841 census recorded Jesse Holden at the Compasses and described him as a victualler. Sarah Holden and younger members of the family shared the household. A smith also lived there, placing a trade essential to horses, carts and road transport within the inn’s domestic economy.
The canal carried coal, timber, lime, stone, grain and general merchandise during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Carts completed journeys between wharves, farms and villages, while local road traffic crossed Compasses Bridge and passed through Alfold Gate.
John Brown, the toll collector and the end of the old transport system
The censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1881 identify John Brown as keeper of the Compasses. His tenancy covered the final decades of commercial navigation and the last years of the turnpike trust. Railway competition drew long-distance freight from the canal, whose commercial traffic ceased in 1871. Carriers and local travellers however continued to use the road between Cranleigh, Dunsfold, Alfold and Loxwood and the Horsham connections.
The 1861 census names John Sparkes as the toll-gate collector at Crossways. Sparkes and his household occupied Alfold Toll Gate House while Brown and his family kept the inn along the same road. Their two census entries preserve the working relationship between licensed house and toll point during the final years of turnpike administration.
The gates at Shalford, Bramley, Smithwood Common and Alfold were removed on 31 October 1877. Alfold Toll Gate House and its gardens were advertised for sale within weeks. The barrier disappeared from the road, while the toll house, Crossways junction and Compasses remained.
Cricket at the Three Compasses
John Brown’s later years brought organised cricket to the inn. A newspaper notice in April 1883 named the Three Compasses Cricket Club at Alfold. The club defeated Rushett Common by ten runs in July. The return match on 15 September was played on the Three Compasses ground, where Alfold won again and Host Brown provided supper.
Newspaper reports also place meetings and dinners at the Compasses during the 1880s. A Surrey Mirror report from June 1884 and notices from December 1885 and January 1886 record organised gatherings at the house. Club officers could be elected, subscriptions collected, accounts discussed and meals served in the same premises.
George and Sarah Luff
The 1891 census recorded George Luff at the Three Compasses. By February 1893 the cricket club had elected officers and arranged fixtures with Hascombe, Cranleigh School, Loxwood and Dunsfold. These opponents defined the inn’s sporting district across the Surrey-Sussex border.
George Luff died before the 1901 census. Sarah Luff was then recorded as head of the Compasses household and continued the business. Licensed houses frequently remained within a family after a publican’s death, with widows maintaining the licence, household and customer trade.
Chiddingfold visited the Compasses ground on August Bank Holiday in 1904. Alfold won by ten wickets and the fixture carried the cricket tradition established under John Brown into the opening years of the twentieth century.
James Lapworth and the Edwardian inn
The 1911 census named James Lapworth as licensee of the Compasses. A report in the Woking News and Mail from November 1910 recorded Lapworth ejecting a disorderly customer and calling the police after the man returned with his companions. The magistrates imposed a fine.
Licensing law made the landlord responsible for order within the premises and around its entrance. Lapworth’s household served a road increasingly used by cyclists and motor vehicles, alongside farm carts, tradesmen and travellers moving between Cranleigh, Dunsfold and Loxwood. Alfold Gate had become a private house and the abandoned canal remained overgrown beside the turnpike line.
The motor age, aerodrome and final closure
The Compasses remained a stopping point during the motor age. A 1931 auction notice for Robbins and Tickner’s Heath Farms placed the properties about three miles from Cranleigh Station and about ten minutes’ walk from the Guildford–Loxwood bus, which stopped at the Compasses Inn. The former turnpike landmark had become part of the public transport network.
Construction of Dunsfold Aerodrome began on 11 May 1942, when Canadian military engineers started clearing woodland and farmland for an emergency airfield. The completed aerodrome was handed over to the Royal Canadian Air Force on 16 October 1942. Its runways, hangars, accommodation and service areas brought construction workers, military vehicles, aircrews and supply traffic onto the roads north of Alfold.
Wartime operations were followed by civilian aviation, the Berlin Airlift, aircraft manufacture and the long occupation of the site by Hawker Siddeley and British Aerospace. Employees, contractors, visitors and delivery vehicles provided the Compasses with a new source of trade 70 years after commercial traffic had disappeared from the canal and the turnpike tolls had ended.
Later changes to the road network diverted the Guildford–Horsham traffic away from the inn. The Compasses increasingly depended upon vehicles using the aerodrome entrance, together with local customers and passengers using the nearby bus stop.
The Wey and Arun Canal Trust rebuilt Compasses Bridge during restoration of the summit level. The bridge was officially opened on 2 October 2016 as part of the bicentenary celebrations marking the canal’s opening.
When access to the aerodrome was closed in 2024, the inn lost the final stream of passing traffic that had sustained it. The Three Compasses announced that its last day of trading would be 28 September 2025, exactly 209 years after boats assembled near the Alfold summit for the ceremonial opening of the Wey and Arun Junction Canal.
The date gave the closure an unintended historical symmetry. The canal still held water beneath the restored bridge, but the traffic that had sustained the inn for more than two centuries had been steadily drained away: first the canal boats, then the turnpike traffic, later the buses and through motorists, and finally the vehicles using the aerodrome entrance. On 28 September 2025, the Three Compasses closed beside the surviving summit level after the last of its passing trade had disappeared.
