Category: Surrey About It All

Surrey About It All 10 – the glimmering Thames

A lovely, hard day. I started in Egham Hythe, by Staines Bridge, and headed along the river – which was to be my guide and constant companion throughout the day. The Thames is Surrey’s northern border, and this is the penultimate stretch on my journey around what has become the Surrey Border Walk.

Please donate for the Stroke Association to keep me going.

Soon to come to a dead-end, and a cut through to the main road though: in this first stretch, the riverside is taken up with boat clubs, marinas and houses with gardens down to the river. By Thorpe I took a path back towards the Thames, through a mobile home village and a farm to the riverbank briefly before sending me to Chertsey. (The Thames Path is all on the north side of the river at this point, so this was a bespoke route intended to keep as close as I could to the river.)

By Chertsey’s elegant bridge is a statue commemorating a local heroine who clung to the clapper of the curfew bell to prevent it ringing, which would be the signal for the hangman to hang her lover – a famous story recounted as history but which is actually from a novel. It is a lovely bridge and the path resumes along the river here, briefly, before a diversion to the road and to the broad meadows of the Chertsey Meads. Beyond, I reached the River Wey – the same river that had defied me near Farnham on Day 7, with a broken bridge in the brambles, but now what change your waters show you in the meadowlands you fill! The houses running down to the river, with landing stages and waiting boats, complete a stunning picture in the sunshine.

(I should say that I was planning to do the walk on Saturday, but it was not just wet – there was a storm that would have soaked and frozen me in moments. Sunday was dry and bright all day.)

At the mouth of the Wey, the path crosses an island and becomes the Thames Path, which I could follow all the way down. Although actually I soon came off it to visit Desborough Island, left as an island when the Desborough Channel was cut, and walked around its edge to follow the county border more closely. Then back to the Thames Path.

Last year I walked the north bank, following the Middlesex border, and saw the river only fitfully then, as the riverbank is crowded with houses and the path is forced inland. Here though ther whole of the rest of the walk, apart from a gap between Hampton Court Bridge and the end of Thames Ditton, was on the riverside.

By Walton Bridge, I met the end of the Thames Half-Marathon. A busy spot – the organisation they put into these things is phenominal. And there was I worrying about getting the right, robust kit and solid boots for walking all day with kit for twenty miles, when these runners were doing 13½ miles at speed.

On I went, to Hampton Court Bridge and beyond. (The River Mole, by whose infant stream I had walked on Day 4, enters the Thames here in a concrete channel.) I had lunch at the Red Lion in Thames Ditton, much to be recommended, and tramped the road towards Kingston.

Past the boatyards, there is a lovely riverside walk, the Queen’s Promenade, all the way to Kingston Bridge. I popped into the town to pay my respects to the Coronation Stone (and found myself giving an impromptu talk to a group of Polish visitors on the history of King Athelstan) and back to the river. It was an hour and a quarter to Richmond, and had begun to get dark. In between the two is Ham, with a nature reserve and Ham House, but I could not see them. I miss a lot going round the edge of things.

By Richmond Bridge a quick snack and water stop, and I headed further north, to Kew. It began to get very dark – the clocks had changed last night. A few evening joggers passed, with lamps attached to their heads or arms. There was a full moon to illuminate when it could, and give me the strength in my limbs to press forward, but under the trees its light was dim. The dusk makes distances expand, as there is no visible destination. I passed Kew Gardens (hosting some sort of loud, illuminated function) and at last the Thames swept round to the east. Though the dark made it stretch out, soon Kew Bridge came in sight. A tall shrub had fallen completely over the path – climbing over its stems in the dark and tireness was “interesting” – but then it was a plain slog to the destination at the bridge.

There, under Kew Bridge, I called a stop and went to find a station.

One more day will do it. In the meantime, please donate for the Stroke Association.

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Surrey About It All 9.2

An enjoyable day walking – all along the county border, between Surrey and Berkshire, from Camberley to Egham, in unexpected places.

Please donate for the Stroke Association to keep me going.

This was an uncertain day (as I described in my earlier post) because I would not know until I got to each stage what is walkable.

Starting in Camberley, at the gate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, I set off along a straight road north-east along the RMAS’s edge, onto the heathland. It is Crown Estate land, and in part subject to military rules, but with broad footpaths and public access. Sand underfoot and bracken under pine trees, the path took me to a tiny brook which marks the county border, and turning back a few yards, to a broad parallel path between wood and bracken over Old Dean Common, up to the covered reservoir on the border, on Surrey Hill. From there, down through the woods of Bagshot Heath to a broad track to the eponymous village.

However, could I push through the woods further east along the county border, and slip north of the extensive grounds of Bagshot Park to the road? Warning signs said no – in the polite manner of the Crown Estate, that some parts of the forest are closed for active forestry, without saying which, but step any further and I might be killed, which would be an inconvenience. Very well – down the broad track to Bagshot and the A30.

I tramped along the A30 for miles, close and parallel to the county border (which is at first along a grubbed-up Roman road, then a tiny stream), from Bagshot, through Sunningdale; from where the county border runs along the road, and on.

The original route I plotted stayed strictly within Surrey to the end of Virginia Water. However the long, straight road is not a cheerful walk, so when the county border left the road, so did I, cutting into Berkshire, for the Virginia Water car park and through the gorgeous parkland around the lake. This is all part of Windsor Great Park, and bisected by the county border. I crossed the Five Arch Bridge, and walked east, barely navigating, noting where I re-entered Surrey, and sat on a bench for lunch, in a dreamy open garden above the lake. I then carried east, on no particular route, on to the remarkable totem pole (which is where I met my originally plotted route).

I took a path north past the Obelisk Pond and its soaring war memorial, to the Cow Pond and out at a hamlet, Bishopsgate. A couple of roads, and wooded path ran north-east to Runnymede Meadow, past the memorial to John F Kennedy and downhill over the open meadow to the Thames. After nine days’ walking from the Thames, I had come all the way round to meet it again.

The fame of Runnymede is sung in poems and novels and our political culture, as where Magna Carta was made and all the myths around it. For me it has always been the place where we had happy summer picnics by the shimmering river. Then I enjoyed the freedom to run back and forth without care nor responsibility, and to come back to a pork pie – not a horribly aching left foot. It is a happy place, and I did go off to explore more of the meadow for old times’ sake, rather than stick rigidly to the Thames Path , but I still had to get on. Over the water I saw the white ruins of Ankerwycke Priory: a reminder that I went that way some years ago as I began my walk of the Buckinghamshire Way.

Carrying on down the Thames, I saw across the Thames the hidden brook mouth that marks the end of Buckinghamshire and the beginning of Middlesex on that bank, and immediately the M25. (I last saw the M25 at the end of my first walking day, as I crossed it on Clacket Lane.) I was intending to carry on down the path – but it is temporarily closed while a bridge is unsafe, and I was diverted up onto the road and through the backside of Egham, before I could get back to the river. Then I came at last to Staines Bridge, by The Swan. That, by the river by Egham, was the end of my day’s walk.

Although this should have been a more familiar strecth of the county, I did not know what to expect. It is more thickly peopled than the borderlands I had walked before – there where the farmland was endless and villages few and tiny, while here the towns grew where the railway passed and mansions lined the roads, deep into the landscape. However most of the day was in green, calming landscape, on the heath or the park or by the glittering waters of the Thames. I thought I would spend most of the day tramping thanklessly up a road, but that part was relatively brief – just a few miles, and ended with the landscaped parkland.

I have been walking two-day weekends, but this time I had family things that needed doing (and my foot was still not properly recovered) so just the one. I will though resume, now the last section, along Surrey’s border with Middlesex. In the meantime, please donate for the Stroke Association.

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Surrey About It All 9.1

The next leg, starting in the morning, is an odd one. It should be more familiar, but the route is uncertain. I plotted a route from Camberley to the Thames, then Egham – most of it was forced to run along the main road, which is not ideal. There are woods and wandery places though.

The Surrey-Berkshire border, the whole of which I will do during the day, is overspread with woods and commons, eventually running into Windsor Great Park. However much of this is intensely private land, and run through with a possibly impassable road and a railway. It is just a question of how much along the borderline can be walked until the inevitable long trudge down the A30, which cannot be avoided.

The A30, it should be said is close to the county border and parallel to it, so it is perfectly on-theme for me to walk most of the way on the road. I would just rather find soft paths where I can.

This is going to take active navigation on Bagshot Heath, and very possibly some long back-tracking.

Where I do finally escape from the road, I am also uncertain at the moment how open it is. The King is very generous in what is open on the estates of Windsor, but there are gates and walls for a reason, and until I get there I do not know. Map in hand and eyes open, I will explore.

When I have explored, I will report back.

In the meantime, please donate for the Stroke Association.

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Surrey About It All 8

This section was all, bar the last mile, on the Blackwater Valley Path. This is the path which made the whole Surrey Border Walk practical: until it was laid down and waymarked, there was a giant gap that would have taken some complex working out, so I am grateful for it.

Please donate for the Stroke Association to keep me going.

The River Blackwater rises in a muddy pool in Rowhill Copse, and I had followed the infant river from its source as the previous afternoon darkened to evening. Starting again in the morning, after a hearty breakfast, I found the river again marking the boundary of Badshot Lea in Surrey with with Aldershot in Hampshire. I assured a lady who enquired of my quest at that point that I was walking from Aldershot to Sandhurst; as I was.

The Blackwater Valley Path is marked here on the Hampshire side – but actually there is a path on the south side of the stream, the Surrey side, and the latter is the nicer walk, so I followed that. It does not go for ‘accessibility’ like the official path – it is the less used way and left to be a foot-friendly, narrow path through the heathland.

There is no hiding the fact that this is not Surrey’s, nor Hampshire’s, most picturesque tract. Hemming the valley in on either side are large towns, industry, and an unforgiving trunk road: the A331, a motorway in all but name, was to be my unwelcome companion all day. The path does its best to keep in a strip of woodland beside the ever-growing stream, and pretty it is, but every so often it burped me out onto a concrete forecourt or to a loud section beside the A-road. That is unavoidable, but the path does the best it can.

The path is well waymarked. It skips back and forth across the river, always following it downstream. The Aldershot / Farnborough suburbs pass in turn, roads and railway cross over – sometimes the path passes under without comment and in a few places it emerges and crosses a road. Between Ash, Surrey and the north edge of Aldershot the Basingstoke Canal crosses over, and the path climbs up, along its viaduct and down the other side. This is an area of lakes – gravel workings, I would assume – now filled with nature, gnats and anglers.

This has been a rather discontinuous narrative. There are few distinctive places – it was a question of bashing on with eyes open, with no open vistas under the trees, or those of no great note out of them, but I had been spoilt by the soft, green of the rural landscapes: for those who live in the towns, hard-working and industrious as they may be, this is a green lung that they need and that can provide good walking. I have nothing but admiration for the work of the Blackwater Valley Countryside Trust who created and who maintain this path.

At Frimley I went through a modern industrial estate that overspreads both counties; then the M3 crashed by overhead, and I was in open meadows, stretching all the way from here to York Town. A last woodland section, and I had reached the point where Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire meet; more prosaically, at the A30. I had finished the Surrey-Hampshire border.

From there, a walk up the road, past the grand gates of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (which immediately affected my walking – back straight, eyes front, the way they taught you), to Camberley, and an end to the day.

I will resume along Surrey’s border with Berkshire. In the meantime, please donate for the Stroke Association.

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Surrey About It All 7: the ragged edge

This weekend, I met Surrey’s border with Hampshire, and walked its whole length over two days. The first day was off any established long-distance path and so I had to devise a route which meant more active navigation – especially where paths just wandered uncertainly in the woods.

Please donate for the Stroke Association to keep me going.

It is unfair to call it the ‘ragged edge’, that bulge westward might look like it on the map, but it is a beauteous as any I have seen, as the wooded hills begin to soften where the rivers swim through meadowed valleys. It was ragged only in as far as the walk was more of a staccato passage on disjoined paths than before picked through by prior planning and on-the-spot exploration.

From Shottermill, I quickly spotted an intriguing footpath (that took me to a sewage farm and no way through in the right direction, so I turned back to the plotted route); though to the woods and a small diversion from the route down to the spot where Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire meet. From here then, a new border section was to follow. There is mud here – the first I have met after the scalding summer parched the paths. Up the path took me through the wood, then plunged down to a road, Sandy Lane whose name shows how the soil has changed from the baked clay of earlier sections, and the nature of the woods changed with the soil – vicious brambles among the birch and ash, like the woods I knew in my childhood.

The road and the path after it largely run on the Surrey-Hampshire border, and towards Grayshott. The original plot would take me straight through the village, cutting through a finger of Hampshire, but at the bottom of the valley is a broad cross-track, which I noticed lies on the county border so thematically I had to follow it, adding quite a bit of length to the walk. I will replot that diversion. Above Whitmore Vale there is no public footpath but a path through access land deep under forest, where I just had to trust where it would take me. (I will have plotted this by the end of the week – but where I actually walked defies any interpretation of the map.)

A road and soft paths woodland paths took me north beside the brook towards Churt, and from there through soft birch wood to emerge from the hills at Frensham Great Pond. It is a lovely, broad stretch of water, with a sailing club. Apparently it is manmade, from the Middle Ages, but nature has claimed the pond as its own.

The meadows are beautiful here, but I had to get on, on a path eastward north of Dockenfield and then a road north to Rowledge, where I stoppped for lunch (at the actual village pub – not the house on the route that keeps and old pub sign in its garden and gets marked on some maps).

North from the edge of Wreccesham the route was, erm, disrupted. I was advised to follow the main track, not the bramble-choked footpath over fields, and warned of a closed bridge. Alongside and under the railway, down a field – and the path barred and brambled with path closure notice and warnings. Back along the next path – that does not have a bridge but I could see I was facing the River Wey, not a jumpable stream. A mile or so upstream I did reach a bridge, rather fed up and having to work back along a busy road. This is where it stopped being fun.

Up a driveway to the Farnham House Hotel and I realised my plotted route past the hotel does not exist, but there is a path another way. I will replot that. My aim was for the St Swithun Way, marked on the paper map as a bridleway, close to Surrey’s westernmost point. I reached it, and found it is at this point a road (with my foot aching I could have done with a soft path). Nevertheless, the St Swithun Way, on road, driveway and soft path led in a direct sweep into the Hog Hatch at the northern edge of Farnham’s suburbs.

Upper Hale / Heath End is a military place, beside Aldershot. I walked at the edge of an estate on the other side of which is a live fire range, by houses designed with NCOs’ families in mind, and all the things you see in an army town. I passed through to Rowhill Copse and to a muddy pool marked as the source of the River Blackwater – the river I would be following all the way down for the next day. Somehow I managed to go astray on the common (the paths marked on two maps do not match) but I caught the Blackwater Valley Path across the common as the light began to fade, a picking the wrong path again somewhere, but I found my way back (not sure whether to replot that), and out to the edge of Aldershot and down beside the railway line.

Here at the heart of Badshot Lea village, close to the course of the infant Blackwater, I called a halt until the next day.

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

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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.

Please donate for the Stroke Association to keep me going.

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 5

Saturday moning at an isolated country station – Ockley being nowhere near the eponymous village. No choice but to hoof it the miles to the point where I left off before, but not an unpleasant walk – except where the road lost its pavement and verge and narrowed over a blind bridge which drivers like to take at Formula 1 pace. Soon though to the Sussex Border Path again; which I would follow almost all day, in my continuing quest to follow the Surrey border.

Please donate for the Stroke Association to keep me going.

Setting out westward on farm tracks, wiggling through a farmyard to a laid-back signpost (actually, it had probably just fallen over against the wall, but it looked relaxed), and though cattle meadows. Other farms hosted the path on the way until the A29.

After a woodland walk, I found a very ancient path – Stane Street, the Roman road that once led from Chichester to London, or from Noviomagus Reginorum to Londinium. There is no sign now of what the legions wrought – it has become a hollow-way, a deeply sunken track in a tunnel of trees, later levelling but still with no visible sight of the road apart from its straightness. Along this road once marched legions and merchants and messagers, before it was abandoned. In a later age the men of Wessex marched here to meet the Norsemen taking the road south – a dagger into the heart of Wessex. They met at Ockley. and the Heathen were routed.

All this way, from before the A29, is on the border itself. On it went, through woods and farms, gorgeous countryside (I diverted from the Sussex Border Path near Cox Green so as to continue upon the border) until my first village of the day – Rudgwick.

There is a fine church in Rudgwick, with a Norman tower (and a guide-leaflet was thrust into my hands). This is possibly the edgiest church I have come across: the edge of the county runs by it: the border path along its south wall, and the county border itself at the north edge of the churchyard (placing the church a few yards into Sussex.) I was hoping for lunch in the pub in Rudgwick, but it is closed for refurbishment – maybe open in a couple of months. The locals know of an alternative on a local farm, to which I was heartily recommended, but it was far off the route, and instead I snacked on sandwiches in a gentle wood.

North through the village, running into Cox Green, and west again. A short, steep climb through a wood and I met several cyclists, coming down the Downs Link – an old railway line coming down from Guildford, heading for Shoreham-by-Sea.

From here, westward again, back on the route and upon the border. There was heathland and meadow and woods, all showing the wonders of the two counties at their best – and suddenly mid-afternoon into Alfold Bars.

I had organised overnight accommodation at Care Ashore (a fine organisation looking after retired seafarers, which also has guest rooms, and does a smashing breakfast). Supper though was down the road, back at Alfold Bars and the Sir Roger Tichborne. A pub in the middle of nowhere but busy, in a good way, which tells you something, and heartily to be recommended.

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 3 – round the corner

From Haxted (on Saturday), I walked south. The Tandridge Border Path was still my guide, just about all day. Here is farmland, without villages.

Please donate for the Stroke Association to keep me going.

I passed by some sites completely hidden – the remains of Starborough Castle are on one farm here, and a hill fort earthworks are indistinguishable from the path, but I was enjoying the walk to much to play antiquarian.

I then came to the end of Kent, and Surrey – the corner of the three counties, from where my path would be west along the long border of Sussex. It is a quiet spot, with a few houses just enjoying the view, and no dramatic anything, but three counties meet here and are content to do so.

I set off then westward, on a tree-shaded lane, now with the Sussex border. Soon the track comes off the road, where I was pleased to see I was being joined by the waymarks of the Sussex Border Path, and through Gotwick Manor Farm – whose name echoed the theme of the latter part of the day. On this path, I went across a footbridge into Sussex for a while. (Along here I met two dog-walkers who told a tale I had heard in the the county corner many years before and which had I recorded in my Part 2½ post: the prize fights which used to happen in Three Counties Field, that could hop across the border if the constables arrived.)

At a lane, I walked due north: by the brook (the Kent Water) which would bring me back into Surrey, a herd of fallow deer ran across the road; two holding back when they spotted me, only for the herd instinct to beat their fear. Across the brook is Old Surrey Hall, which I need to look up. It looks a grand, old house, and has a moat (a think I would love to have but for the midges they bring). The dog-walkers of earlier told me that it was where the pioneer of plastic surgery during the War cared for his patients. I did not want to disturb the householders though, and carried on westwards into the woods.

I emerged from the woods (after a slight diversion after taking the wrong path – there are several – and skirting fields, onto a road to greeted by signs welcoming me to East Grinstead. To that point, I had not met a single town or village on my route.I did not enter the town though, and hopped over a stile, cut off a loop and came back to the same road for a few hundred yards before the Sussex Border Path and Tandridge Border Way (working in tandem) led me down a broad track under the railway. The Tandridge route headed north on a path also waymarked “GMT” – the Greenwich Meridian Trail – past the edge of Dormans Park to Dormans Station, but I kept going west until the path leading south to the northernmost streets of East Grinstead – streets which are in Surrey.

The route dips in and out of the abodes of humanity along the county border; through Felbridge (a pleasant village), looping north around Hedgecourt Lake, to Copthorne, through which the border passes, and north to Burstow, with its pretty church and little else.

In this part of the walk, the presence of Gatwick Airport had become more and more pronounced. I was walking under the flightpath at times. After Burstow I entered those parts where all the ugly businesses are put that you get near airports, which are absolutely necessary and putting them here out of the way at least keeps them away from the eyes of all but those who seek them (and those of us happening to walk by). In a moment I was over the M23 and deep into the churned up landscape. A final run west, beside the motorway spur road, and I reached the railway line, where I called a halt to the day, and waked to find the B&B I had booked in Horley.

I will resume the next day in the next article. 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.

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