Treed this weekend: annoying. So what I am doing, before resuming the walk next weekend, is catching up on the route planning and learning more about the heritage of the county which I am circling.
I was brought up in Surrey, and explored its hills and villages. Despite what has happened to the north-east corner of the county, the free, green hills are beautiful – but what of where it becomes, you know – edgy?
Far from the genteel idea of Surrey, the Surrey Docks were a hard, industrial area, backed by hard, coal-black, damp tenements bewailed by all who saw them, Dickens among them – what a change now though, with luxury Docklands development where once were tubercular hovels!
The suburbs have grown and changed: fresh new developments for the swelling middle-class, becoming ordinary an downmarket areas, but equally the reverse, as once poor areas have gentrified. It is a cyclical process, and all visible on the streets today. Still there are woods and commons preserved from the lusting concrete mixers, showing something of how the county once was.
Going south out of the town, I found not a single village on my path, as if the frontier with Kent were as hostile as in the days of the Heptarchy, but it is far from hostile – it is beautiful. In the very south-east corner (which I will see on Saturday) the spot was once famous for prize-fights. The fights brought all levels of society together, celebrated and patronised by the gentry as well as the common man, and thoroughly illegal. If officers of the Surrey magistrates were to descend, the ring would be shifted a hundred yards into Kent, outside their reach. If officers from Kent arrived, it would be moved again to Sussex.
Going west, the outer streets of East Grinstead trespass over the border. The oddities of East Grinstead are best left for a Sussex article, but I will say it has a pretty High Street, and is convenient for Surrey’s international airport – Gatwick. The whole airport is in Surrey (whatever bureaucracies have been set up) – there is still a County Oak roundabout south of the airport, close by the old oak tree that marked county border.
West of Gatwick the countryside empties into the Weald. There is much here hidden in the landscape. Here in the Wealden clay, they long quarried marble, which appears in local churches, not just the grandest.
A Roman road, Stane Street cuts arrow-straight across the landscape. When King Alfred was a boy, a Viking army marched down the road, and was defeated here in Ockley, beneath a far older reminder of battle – an Iron Age fort. How many Iron Age forts there were in the Weald i cannot say. The local Home Guard occupied the fort during the war – its strategic position was not over. The same road began a Victorian craze for ‘invasion literature’, when George Chesney portrayed a German army marching up it, to a victory at the ‘Battle of Dorking’.
Surrey’s county top, Leith Hill, is not close enough to the border for me to divert to climb it, but I have climbed it a number of times before, and it is a grand hill – the highest in the south-east.
Most people have seen another airport near the border – watching the Stig and his pupils piling cars around Dunsfold.
Closer to Haslemere, the ground is cruelly folded, with no straight way, in the woods of the High Weald. (Sussex’s county top is within the woods close to the border.)
North of the town is the Devil’s Punchbowl – a vast hole in the ground, and the tales told about it, both the idle legends and the true gruesome stories, would take more articles than these brief paragraphs.
At some point I will come to the Frensham Ponds (which overlap the border slightly, but basically are in Surrey). Cool and pretty in the woods, they are a natural part of the landscape to all appearance, but are said to have been dug in the 7th century to provide fish.
Farnham has a castle that belonged to the Bishops of Winchester – clearly the bishop took the concept of the ‘Church Militant’ a bit too far. It is a pretty place, with many stories of its own, and I may revisit them. Farnham is also the last place before the land becomes overspread again, with a new conurbation spreading over the river from Farnborough. From Aldershot in the south to Sandhurst in the north with Farnborough in the middle, the Army and the Royal Air Force are heavy on the Hampshire side, and Surrey feeds them too. For officers with families, Camberley was always the place to live.
I think I will have a break at this point, and resume the narrative after i have a few more stages under my belt. Thank you for bearing with me this weekend.
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