Eric Parker

The Roman road over the hill.—The Swallows of the Mole.—An imperial draught.—Mickleham.—Fanny Burney.—A Story of letters.—Juniper Hall and its cedars.—Norbury Park.—How to measure trout from the Mole.—Conversation Sharp.—Keats and Endymion.—Mr. George Meredith's poems.—The best known hill in the world.—A Soldier's Whim.

The best way from Leatherhead to Dorking is the longest, and hardly goes by the high road at all. It begins at Ashtead; you can get to Ashtead from Leatherhead or Epsom, but you must start from Ashtead out over Ermyn Street, the old Roman road. One might begin the walk from Epsom; but Epsom downs, with the great empty race-stand, can be depressing, and the best of the old road lies south, nearer Mickleham.

Ashtead is growing towards the railway, but east of the main street there is hardly a cottage. The church stands in Ashtead Park, and shows that it once had Roman walls for neighbours by the quantity of Roman brick and tiling mixed among its flints and stones. It has been elaborately roofed with cedar, but otherwise contains little; the prettiest part is the churchyard and the park beyond it, with its deer which walk by the gates and gaze gently over the paths at strangers.

Ermyn Street or Stane Street of the maps, which English tongues here have named Pebble Lane, skirts Ashtead Park by the south-east, at first a wide green lane, afterwards a narrow path sometimes half-choked by trees, sometimes, in wet weather, impassable with mud, but always driving straight as the Roman roadmaker drove his pick towards the cap of Mickleham Downs. The narrow lane to which the road has shrunk is less than the Roman made it, but Mickleham Downs can look very little different to-day from the downs which the legionary knew. He, too, like the modern traveller tramping by the yews and box trees, saw the sunlight on the dark, shining leaves, and watched the wind ruffle the whitebeams on the shoulder of the hill.

Below the downs lies Mickleham, halfway between Leatherhead and Dorking, and famous in all the guide-books for the "swallows" of the Mole. The "swallows" are described as deep, blue pools, into which the Mole disappears underground, and, except from the most carefully written accounts, you would imagine that the whole river dives completely into the earth and jumps up again at Leatherhead. But if you ask at Mickleham to be directed to the "Swallows," the chances are that you will have to explain that you do not mean birds. The fact is that it is only in seasons of great drought that they would be noticed. In summers when there is very little rain the Mole is said to run dry between Burford Bridge and Thorncroft Bridge near Leatherhead, but I have never happened to see it do so, and had the greatest difficulty in discovering the Swallows, which, when I saw them, were brimming with very muddy water; the stream was as full as possible. The best comment on the legend of the diving Mole is Thomas Fuller's in the Worthies:—

The Swallows are really fissures in the chalk bed of the stream, which runs as it were over the top of a long chalk sponge. In rainless summers there is only enough water to fill the bottom of the sponge, and the top channel runs dry. Brayley has some amusing calculations as to the amount of water which the sponge drinks:—

Seventy-two gallons—a good-sized tankful—of water in a second is very pretty swallowing; an early instance of thinking imperially. To Camden, in the Britannia, the disappearing water suggests another image. The inhabitants can boast, like the Spaniards, of having a bridge that feeds several flocks of sheep.

Mickleham is almost the centre of the Fanny Burney country. At Mickleham church she was married to General d'Arblay; Juniper Hall is half-a-mile from the church; Norbury Park lies west of the Mole; Camilla Lacey south of Norbury Park at West Humble.

Fanny Burney, retired from her post of Maid of Honour and receiving a pension of £100 a year, met M. d'Arblay in January, 1793, when she was staying with her friends the Locks at Norbury Park. He was living at Juniper Hall with other French ÉmigrÉs—a brilliant little colony; Madame de StaËl was there, and de Narbonne, and de Lally Tollendal, and Talleyrand. The General began as tutor, and the course of Fanny Burney's acquaintance with Juniperians, as her sister Mrs. Phillips used to call them, and particularly with her French master, perhaps may be given in a few extracts from her correspondence:—

It was at Bookham that Madame d'Arblay wrote Camilla, and out of the sale of the novel she built her cottage, Camilla Lacey, on a plot of ground at West Humble leased to her by her friend Mr. Lock. Camilla, which Horace Walpole thought deplorable, infinitely worse than Cecilia, which was not so good as Evelina, was an instant success. Within a month Madame d'Arblay had made £2,000, and Macaulay's estimate of her whole profits was over three thousand guineas. There was never a stranger climb down a ladder to fortune than Fanny Burney's. Evelina, her first and incomparably her best novel, brought her £30; Cecilia, her next, £250; then came Camilla; and her last novel, The Wanderer, which she wrote after ten years' absence with her husband in France, actually sold 3,600 copies in six months at two guineas a copy, and was an absolute and hopeless failure.

Camilla Lacey, invisible from the road, has been enlarged and altered to look like nothing the d'Arblays knew. Juniper Hall has also changed, but the splendid cedars which stand round its lawns must have been familiar to Talleyrand and Madame de StaËl. They have grown curiously slowly; they do not strike one as larger than many trees which are known to be not more than a hundred and twenty years old—those, for instance, at Farnham Castle; but John Timbs, in his Promenade Round Dorking, written in 1823, speaks of them as "immense," and as "said to be of the finest growth in England."

Norbury Park also has its famous trees. The Druids' Walk, a path running under enormous yews, is no longer open to the public. But Louis Jennings, thirty years ago, saw the trees and preserved a memory of them in Field Paths and Green Lanes:—

In another respect Norbury Park has changed—in the opportunities the Mole running through the park offers to anglers wishing to catch large trout. Mr. C.J. Swete, writing in his Handbook of Epsom, not longer ago than 1853, is pleased to take his reader with him by the banks of the Mole, in which he has obtained "permission from the proprietor to gather some of the finny treasures of its liquid mines." Quite unwarrantably, he assumes that his reader is no fisherman:—

He proceeds to do so. He knows because he has measured the fish and finds him nineteen inches long by ten in girth, and if you do the sum his way, it works out at three pounds. "This is in accordance, as you suppose, with the mathematical law that similar solids are to each other in the triplicate ratio of one of their dimensions." That is the way to measure trout in Norbury Park.

Two quaintly spelt epitaphs can be read on the black marble tombstones in Mickleham Church. Under one lies the body of Peter de la Hay, "Eldest Yeoman of his Majesties Confectionary Office, who Departed this Liee" in 1684, and under the other Thomas Tooth, "Yeaman of his Ma^ties Sculery, who deceased this Life" a year later.

Almost opposite Juniper Hall is Fredley Farm, once the home of "Conversation" Sharp, hat-maker, poet and member of Parliament. Fredley Farm, in the years between 1797 and 1835, when Sharp lived there, must have been visited by more distinguished poets, authors, politicians, wits, scholars and artists than any other house in Surrey. Wordsworth came there, and Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey and Moore; he talked painting with Lawrence, and sculpture with Chantrey; Macaulay talked with him "about everything and everybody," and so did Grote and Mill and Lockhart and Jeffrey; Porson was there, and perhaps had his favourite porter for breakfast; and the politicians were without number—Brougham, Sheridan, Grattan, Talleyrand, Huskisson, and almost a link with to-day, Lord John Russell. Macaulay has left a few sentences which greater men than Sharp might not deserve as an epitaph: "One thing I have observed in Sharp, which is quite peculiar to him among town-wits and diners-out. He never talks scandal. If he can say nothing good of a man, he holds his tongue." Yet with all his virtues and all his conversation, Sharp lacks his Boswell.

A little further towards Dorking the road crosses the Mole at Burford Bridge. The inn at Burford Bridge, a sort of Swindon of the Dorking Road, where everybody stops to have lunch or dinner, perhaps will again welcome a great admiral and finish a great poem. Nelson stayed there before leaving to command at Trafalgar; Keats came there to finish Endymion. His visit, he writes to his friend Benjamin Bailey, is "to change the scene—change the air, and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting about 500 lines." Night on the hill inspired him; in another letter he shows the way for other poets: "I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon—'you a' seen the moon'—came down and wrote some lines." And it is of the inn at Burford Bridge that the story is told, by Mortimer Collins, in his "Walk through Surrey," of Keats and the waiter. Keats was reciting Endymion:—

"For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath and yellow brooms,
And cold mushrooms;"

The waiter heard, and obeyed, bringing mushrooms uncooked on a plate and a decanter of sherry. But that story is a little too artificial.

Still, Endymion owes a good deal to the trees and the solitude of the hill above Burford Bridge. It was with the woods in his memory that Keats wrote something very like a description of Box Hill, with the Mole below it:—

"Where shall our dwelling be? Under the brow
Of some steep mossy hill, where ivy dun
Would hide us up, although spring leaves were none;
And where dark yew trees as we rustle through,
Will drop their scarlet berry cups of dew?
O thou wouldst joy to live in such a place;
Dusk for our loves, yet light enough to grace
Those gentle limbs on mossy bed reclin'd:
For by one step the blue sky should'st thou find,
And by another in deep dell below,
See, through the trees, a little river go
All in its midday gold and glimmering."

But the great poet and novelist of Box Hill came later. Mr. George Meredith lived his long life and died at last, on May 18, 1909, at his house, Flint Cottage, near Burford Bridge. It was by Box Hill that he imagined the gayest and wisest of novels and some of the most glorious of all English poetry. Here, in his chÂlet looking out over the Surrey hills, he wrote The Thrush in February:—

"I know him, February's thrush,
And loud at eve he valentines
On sprays that paw the naked bush
Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.
Now ere the foreign singer thrills
Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours
A herald of the million bills;
And heed him not, the loss is yours.
My study, flanked with ivied fir
And budded beech with dry leaves curled,
Perched over yew and juniper,
He neighbours, piping to the world:—
The wooded pathways dank on brown,
The branches on grey cloud a web,
The long green roller of the down,
An image of the deluge-ebb:"—

The lines ring with the bird's song; the light of all February evenings is on the hill. But if you are to take the heart of the poem, you must choose the last eight lines:—

"For love we Earth, then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.
Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire."

The noblest philosophy of poetry belongs to this Surrey hill, and so does the most wonderful love-song of its century, the long, enchanted cadences of Love in the Valley:—

"Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled."

Box Hill must be pretty nearly the best-known hill in the world. It has all the advantages. It is within easy reach of London for school treats, excursions, choir outings, week-ends, and all other journeys in open air; it has a railway station at its foot, and several inns, and a tea-garden at the top, and a hundred Bank holidays have left it unspoiled. The box-trees that name the hill are the finest in England. Box-trees love chalk, and here they drive their roots into the crown and scar of a cliff of chalk, so steep on one side down to the Mole that a stone could almost be thrown from the path round the ridge into the water. On the grass outside the box-grove the distance to the level valley below deceives even more strangely. It looks as if you could drive a golf ball straight from the hill on to the green; you may speculate as to the beauty of the arc curved in the sunlight, and the deadness with which the ball would lie after an absolutely perpendicular drop—to the extreme danger of those disinterested in the experiment. But the hill is not really steep enough. The contours crowd on the map, but they show that you would have to drive nearly a quarter of a mile.

At a distance, in spring and summer, the trees which mark Box Hill are not box or juniper, but the whitebeams that patch the deeper green of the oaks and beeches with glaucous grey. The box-trees, though their thick, snaky stems look as if they might be any age, are not all of them old. The trees have more than once been cut and sold. Sir Henry Mildmay put them up for auction for £12,000 in 1795 and apparently sold them for £10,000 two years later, with twelve years to cut the wood in. In later days, the wisdom of a War Office cleared a wide space of trees and built a fort there; the wisdom of another War Office abandoned the fort as useless. There it remains, behind spiked railings, the idlest monument of a whim.