Category: Surrey About It All

Surrey About It All 6: into the hills

This next day would take me out of the gentler hills, to where the downland takes its job seriously. First though a series of footpaths out from Alfold on village paths by farms and woods. The county border wiggles about here, and the route I chose follows it. It is not on a waymarked route, which is liberating – more the random country walking I enjoy of a weekend.

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Bright sunshine. A young hind leapt past in the meadow, and ponds and brooks and bridges and stiles led the way. The Wey-Arun Canal is a dry ditch here (with volunteers wishing to restore it one day). Through one last farm and brook, I emerged at the broad track of the Sussex Border Path, just as it rejoined the counties’ mutual border and the woodland.

The path climbs and dips more steeply as it goes on. The paths become more heather-clad, and the vista opens to the south over rough grass meadows, dipping to an unseen vale, with hills beyond, and all upon the county border.

There are no villages on this part of the route – not until the main town at the end. About lunchtime I reached the only pub near the route, up Cripplecrutch Lane; but the lane is now a fast, pavementless A-road, and after the hearty supper the night before, and stoking breakfast, I was not hungry, so on I went, departing at last from the Sussex Border Path to follow a quieter, pavementless road through the woods, still on the border, as the hills rose.

And then I turned off, and to another, minor path through wood and meadow, down and up a dry valley, still on the county border, until at the edge of a wood I was heading a short way back into Sussex on the Serpent Trail (no adders seen, nor other arithmeticians), which took me south to the Sussex Border Path again, for a final stretch. The path here is on a road – a deep, sunken way in the woods, leading up and round to the car park on Black Down, from which you can walk to Sussex’s highest point, as I did years ago – however my theme this time is Surrey, and I turned away.

There was too much road walking that afternoon. I headed up Tennyson’s Lane then down Chase Lane – on these roads you see some of the most gorgeous houses one could only dream of owning. At the bottom is a stream, marking the border of Sussex for the next couple of miles, and a path and later a lane follow it. The countless brooks which I passed streaming down to the valley would once have driven many mills; reflected in names along the route.

On I went into the edge of ‘Greater Haslemere’ and one final hurrah through a miniature park along the brook to emerge at Shottermill, and an end for the day.

I will resume. In the meantime, please donate for the Stroke Association.

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Surrey About It All 4

I started the day plunging into concrete wilderness of Gatwick Airport – functional, ugly. It does cater for walkers though, remarkably. I picked my way around the South and North Terminals on the paths provided and then in the midst of the soullessness came upon a rustic wooden signpost saying “Public footpath”. Intrigued, I followed.

Please donate for the Stroke Association to keep me going.

It took me into a wooded glade – almost another world. I followed it, beside a little stream that should have been familiar: it was the infant River Mole, a river whose lower stretches ran by my childhood home (and whose mouth I will reach in the last days of this walk). Maybe it is a manmade diversion of the river, but the trees and thickets have taken to it. I thought that I would be trudging though the industrial landscape, but this was a delight.

Now, keen readers may have noticed that I walked the north edge, when surely the whole airport is within the historic borders of Surrey and I should have gone south of the airport to follow the border. That is true, and Gatwick was my biggest diversion off the border, but the paths to the south around Tinsley Green and Lowfield Heath are unhelpful and stop in the middle of nowhere, so the diversion around the north is the practical solution.

This is all part of the Sussex Border Path, which was to be my companion for the whole day. Departing from the young Mole, the route led west to Charlwood. In the 1970s, this was envisaged as part of the ‘Gatwick-land’ doomed to engulf the area but it remains a pretty Surrey village, if loud under the flightpath. It has a charming church, whose bells were insistently rebuking me for not being in the pews.

The soil hereabouts is Wealden clay, and those paths which should have been softer than the roads on my punished feet had been baked in the summer’s relentless heat, and the kiln-fired clay was rock-hard.

South-west of Russ Hill, the path runs upon the county border for a while. I could indeed have stayed on the line for longer, where the path and a lane follow the border. the Sussex Border Path is well laid out though, so I took it, dipping into Sussex, and after a quiet lunch sitting on a stump in the woods I emerged in Rusper – a lovely-looking place.

Had I known that the path in the woods beyond here was the closed due to collapses, I might have reassessed my decision to follow the waymarked route rather than tramp the lane along the border-line, but they don’t flag these in advance. Anyway, a spur north, back into Surrey, and a last westward one-click charge over level fields (practically running, as I had called a cab to pick me up to get me to the station, and he was faster getting there than expected). At the pick-up point on the road I had to climb an iron gate, and that was the only actually barred piece of the path I had come across, excusing natural brambles. There I called it a day at the A24, ready to resume the next weekend.

I will resume. In the meantime, please donate for the Stroke Association.

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Surrey About It All 2½

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.

Please donate for the Stroke Association.

Route map

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