'These fields may be bought now, or they may be built over; which is it to be?' Octavia Hill asked this question in 1875 during a determined effort to save Swiss Cottage Fields as an open space in London. The campaign failed, but in January 1895 Octavia Hill was one of three conservationists who founded a private charity dedicated to acquiring and protecting beautiful and historic countryside, coastline and buildings. They called it the National Trust. At 193 metres (634 feet), it is prominent in the landscape, standing at the corner of one of the few big gaps in the otherwise unbroken line of the North Downs. Since Roman times all lines of communication have had to pass through the gap carved by the River Mole right beside Box Hill: the Roman Stane, or 'Stone', Street, linking the then seaport of Chichester with London, crossed the River Mole by a ford; and that was followed by the carriageways, the stagecoach routes, the railway and the present-day roads.
... it's a greate height and shows you a vast precipice down on the farther side and such a vast vale full of woods, enclosures and little towns: there is a very good river that runs by a little town called Darken [Dorking] just at the foote of this hill, very famous for good troutts and great store of fish, on this hill the top is cover'd with box, whence its name proceeds ... Celia Fiennes 1694 People have visited Box Hill for centuries.
The seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn, who lived nearby for a time, noted on 27 August 1655: 'I went... to Box Hill to see those rare natural bowers, cabinets and shady walkes in the box coppses ... there are such goodly walkes and hills shaded with yew and box as render the place extreamely agreeable, it seeming to be summer all the winter for many miles prospect.' But it is clear that other visitors were not just attracted by the natural beauty of the place. Daniel Defoe observed in A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-6) that 'here every Sunday, during the summer season, there used to be a rendezvous of coaches and horsemen, with abundance of gentlemen and ladies from Epsome to take the air, and walk in the boxwoods; and in a word, divert, or debauch, or perhaps both, as they thought fit, and the game i
ncreased so much, that it began almost on a sudden, to make a great noise in the county.'
To the Victorians it was literally a breath of fresh air, and the advent of the railway in 1849 made easy access possible for large numbers of people. They came to walk, cycle, picnic and admire the views and their surroundings. Box Hill is so close to London that it still draws around a million visitors a year. In 1971 it was declared an official Country Park, a measure that was intended to protect countryside near cities and give people a chance to enjoy the open air. Box Hill is one of the best-known summits of the North Downs, the chalk ridge which runs from the Hampshire border, eastwards through Surrey and Kent to the Straits of Dover. Hilaire Belloc, who loved the North Downs, described Box Hill as 'the strongest and most simple of our southern hills'; and there is certainly something elemental about it.
Box Hill was not always known as such The geographer William Camden referred to it in 1586 as 'White Hill' and it is easy to see why. The whole of south-east England was once covered by a huge dome of chalk which, over the last two million years, has been eroded to form two ridges: the North and South Downs.
At Box Hill the true chalk soils can be found on the escarpment and the sides of the valleys where characteristic downland plants flourish On the top of the hill is an 'icing' ofclay- with-flints, which supports a mixed woodland - predominantly oak and beech - and different plant c
ommunities.
The 120-metre-high (394 feet) sheer chalk escarpment has been cut away by the River Mole as it flows unceasingly at the base of Box Hill. Still known as 'The Whites',it is the finest natural river cliff in the county, if not in southern Britain. And on it grows truly ancient box woodland that has certainly survived since the end of the last ice age and may well have existed before then. The Whites is a sanctuary for these native box trees, offering them hot. dry growing conditions which few other British trees would tolerate. It has 40 per cent of all the naturally occurring box woods in ] the UK. Chalk has certain characteristics which ; add to the peculiar charm of Box Hill To '' the north of the scarp, the hill is deeply [trenched with a series of dry valleys or combes running down to the Headley Little Switzerland Valley, part of an old tributary system of the River Mole Over time the river's natural drainage has subsided to lower levels underground in the porous chalk, leaving no surface streams in the original narrow, steep-sided drainage valleys.
Largely due to the nature of the rock, which is easily eroded, this is a land-scape of soft and smooth curves, of dazzling whiteness (on almost every slope there are patches of bare chalk not covered by vegetation and exposed to the weathering action of rain and frost) and of lush greenness. Chalk rarely dries out, which is why the downland vegetation remains fresh and green when plants on other types of soil are parched with drought. It has even been suggested that there is some quality in chalk which lends a vividness of colour not seen in the flowers of other rocks, this being particularly noticeable in hawk weed rock rose, bird's-foot trefoil, milkwort, squmancywort and dwarf thistle. Near Box Hill the chalk can be observed at close quarters in a number of quarries, not least Surrey County Council's Brockham limeworks. Here, in the main heavy industry of the North Downs, chalk was quarried and burnt in kilns to produce lime and cement. The quarry, which can be seen from the Long Walk, is no longer used for lime extraction and is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest, but the scars that are left show the structure of the rock in dramatic fashion: as well as being minutely porous, it is cracked and separated all over into layers. It is this network of cracks and fissures which gives the chalk its great capacity for underground water storage.
... the current of the river being much obstructed by the interposition of those hills, called Box-Hill ... it forces the waters as it were to find their way through as well as they can; and in order to do this, beginning, I say, where the river comes close to the foot of the precipice of Box-Hill, called the Stomacher, the waters sink insensibly away, and in some places are to be seen (and I have seen them) little channels which go out on the sides of the river, where the water in a stream not so big as would fill a pipe of a quarter of an inch diameter, trills away out of the river, and sinks insensibly into the ground. In this manner it goes away, lessening the stream for above a mile, near two, and these they call the Swallows.
Today we know more about swallow holes, which occur only in limestone rocks, of which chalk is a form. As Defoe explains, they are holes or cracks in the river bed or river banks through which river water passes into underground channels, so diminishing the flow of the river. The average flow of the Mole above Burford Bridge is 63 million gallons a day, while at Leatherhead, down- stream, it is 55 million gallons: eight million gallons have therefore disappeared some- where along the way, the major part of which must go down the swallows. This leakage from the river goes on all year round, but in the summer the surface stream occasionally disappears completely. The bed of the Mole is then dry, except for a few residual pools, from Ham Bank near Norbury Park to a point near Leatherhead, where water emerges again into the river bed from a series of springs.
There are many subsidence holes, some old and some more recent, at the foot of Box Hill and elsewhere in the valley. In 1940 a medium-sized oak tree dropped without warning into a chasm behind a house in Mickleham. Apart from such odd happenings, the river valley holds other secrets. The elusive kingfisher may be seen at the foot of The Whites where the river is fordable by means of stepping stones. The same area harbours grey and pied wagtails, as well as moorhen, mallard and the gaudy semi-wild mandarin duck. Wild mink have been reported and, even more bizarrely, a small colony of the rose-winged parakeet has become established near the river. Box Hill from Denbies Hill. The River Mole winds between the trees at the base of the escarpment The River'Mole is something of an enigma. According to one school of thought, its name derives from its habit of burrowing underground, like its animal namesake. Others argue that in the Middle Ages the Mole was known as the Ernlyn Stream and its present name stems from Molesey where the river joins the Thames.Daniel Defoe, who lived in the neighbourhood for a time in the early eighteenth century, recorded his detailed observations of the River Mole in A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain.
... it's a greate height and shows you a vast precipice down on the farther side and such a vast vale full of woods, enclosures and little towns: there is a very good river that runs by a little town called Darken [Dorking] just at the foote of this hill, very famous for good troutts and great store of fish, on this hill the top is cover'd with box, whence its name proceeds ... Celia Fiennes 1694 People have visited Box Hill for centuries.
The seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn, who lived nearby for a time, noted on 27 August 1655: 'I went... to Box Hill to see those rare natural bowers, cabinets and shady walkes in the box coppses ... there are such goodly walkes and hills shaded with yew and box as render the place extreamely agreeable, it seeming to be summer all the winter for many miles prospect.' But it is clear that other visitors were not just attracted by the natural beauty of the place. Daniel Defoe observed in A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-6) that 'here every Sunday, during the summer season, there used to be a rendezvous of coaches and horsemen, with abundance of gentlemen and ladies from Epsome to take the air, and walk in the boxwoods; and in a word, divert, or debauch, or perhaps both, as they thought fit, and the game i
ncreased so much, that it began almost on a sudden, to make a great noise in the county.'To the Victorians it was literally a breath of fresh air, and the advent of the railway in 1849 made easy access possible for large numbers of people. They came to walk, cycle, picnic and admire the views and their surroundings. Box Hill is so close to London that it still draws around a million visitors a year. In 1971 it was declared an official Country Park, a measure that was intended to protect countryside near cities and give people a chance to enjoy the open air. Box Hill is one of the best-known summits of the North Downs, the chalk ridge which runs from the Hampshire border, eastwards through Surrey and Kent to the Straits of Dover. Hilaire Belloc, who loved the North Downs, described Box Hill as 'the strongest and most simple of our southern hills'; and there is certainly something elemental about it.
Box Hill was not always known as such The geographer William Camden referred to it in 1586 as 'White Hill' and it is easy to see why. The whole of south-east England was once covered by a huge dome of chalk which, over the last two million years, has been eroded to form two ridges: the North and South Downs.
At Box Hill the true chalk soils can be found on the escarpment and the sides of the valleys where characteristic downland plants flourish On the top of the hill is an 'icing' ofclay- with-flints, which supports a mixed woodland - predominantly oak and beech - and different plant c
ommunities.The 120-metre-high (394 feet) sheer chalk escarpment has been cut away by the River Mole as it flows unceasingly at the base of Box Hill. Still known as 'The Whites',it is the finest natural river cliff in the county, if not in southern Britain. And on it grows truly ancient box woodland that has certainly survived since the end of the last ice age and may well have existed before then. The Whites is a sanctuary for these native box trees, offering them hot. dry growing conditions which few other British trees would tolerate. It has 40 per cent of all the naturally occurring box woods in ] the UK. Chalk has certain characteristics which ; add to the peculiar charm of Box Hill To '' the north of the scarp, the hill is deeply [trenched with a series of dry valleys or combes running down to the Headley Little Switzerland Valley, part of an old tributary system of the River Mole Over time the river's natural drainage has subsided to lower levels underground in the porous chalk, leaving no surface streams in the original narrow, steep-sided drainage valleys.
Largely due to the nature of the rock, which is easily eroded, this is a land-scape of soft and smooth curves, of dazzling whiteness (on almost every slope there are patches of bare chalk not covered by vegetation and exposed to the weathering action of rain and frost) and of lush greenness. Chalk rarely dries out, which is why the downland vegetation remains fresh and green when plants on other types of soil are parched with drought. It has even been suggested that there is some quality in chalk which lends a vividness of colour not seen in the flowers of other rocks, this being particularly noticeable in hawk weed rock rose, bird's-foot trefoil, milkwort, squmancywort and dwarf thistle. Near Box Hill the chalk can be observed at close quarters in a number of quarries, not least Surrey County Council's Brockham limeworks. Here, in the main heavy industry of the North Downs, chalk was quarried and burnt in kilns to produce lime and cement. The quarry, which can be seen from the Long Walk, is no longer used for lime extraction and is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest, but the scars that are left show the structure of the rock in dramatic fashion: as well as being minutely porous, it is cracked and separated all over into layers. It is this network of cracks and fissures which gives the chalk its great capacity for underground water storage.
... the current of the river being much obstructed by the interposition of those hills, called Box-Hill ... it forces the waters as it were to find their way through as well as they can; and in order to do this, beginning, I say, where the river comes close to the foot of the precipice of Box-Hill, called the Stomacher, the waters sink insensibly away, and in some places are to be seen (and I have seen them) little channels which go out on the sides of the river, where the water in a stream not so big as would fill a pipe of a quarter of an inch diameter, trills away out of the river, and sinks insensibly into the ground. In this manner it goes away, lessening the stream for above a mile, near two, and these they call the Swallows.
Today we know more about swallow holes, which occur only in limestone rocks, of which chalk is a form. As Defoe explains, they are holes or cracks in the river bed or river banks through which river water passes into underground channels, so diminishing the flow of the river. The average flow of the Mole above Burford Bridge is 63 million gallons a day, while at Leatherhead, down- stream, it is 55 million gallons: eight million gallons have therefore disappeared some- where along the way, the major part of which must go down the swallows. This leakage from the river goes on all year round, but in the summer the surface stream occasionally disappears completely. The bed of the Mole is then dry, except for a few residual pools, from Ham Bank near Norbury Park to a point near Leatherhead, where water emerges again into the river bed from a series of springs.
There are many subsidence holes, some old and some more recent, at the foot of Box Hill and elsewhere in the valley. In 1940 a medium-sized oak tree dropped without warning into a chasm behind a house in Mickleham. Apart from such odd happenings, the river valley holds other secrets. The elusive kingfisher may be seen at the foot of The Whites where the river is fordable by means of stepping stones. The same area harbours grey and pied wagtails, as well as moorhen, mallard and the gaudy semi-wild mandarin duck. Wild mink have been reported and, even more bizarrely, a small colony of the rose-winged parakeet has become established near the river. Box Hill from Denbies Hill. The River Mole winds between the trees at the base of the escarpment The River'Mole is something of an enigma. According to one school of thought, its name derives from its habit of burrowing underground, like its animal namesake. Others argue that in the Middle Ages the Mole was known as the Ernlyn Stream and its present name stems from Molesey where the river joins the Thames.Daniel Defoe, who lived in the neighbourhood for a time in the early eighteenth century, recorded his detailed observations of the River Mole in A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain.
Jane Austen
Excursions from Great Bookham to nearby Box Hill had a most definite impact on Jane Austen's fifth novel, Emma, which was published in 1816. At a critical point in the narrative, the wooded hill with the striking views is the setting for a picnic organised by Mrs Eiton.
'Emma had never been to Box Hill ... she wished to see what everybody found so much worth seeing.' But the outing is not a success, being marred from the start by 'a languor, a want of spirits, a want of union, which could not be got over.... even Emma grew tired at last of flattery and merriment, and wished herself rather walking quietly about with any of the others, or sitting almost alone, and quite unattended to, in tranquil observation of the beautiful views beneath her.'
She makes the journey home in tears. It is not known whether Jane Austen ever met Fanny Bumey, though it is just conceivable. Jane Austen, born in 1775, was several times a visitor to Great Bookham, where her cousin Cassandra was married to the rector Samuel Cooke. Whether or not they did meet, the younger woman seems to have been an admirer of the older, for Jane Austen's name appeared on the subscription list to Camilla. Possibly too the title of her best-known novel Pride and Prejudice was taken from the last paragraph of Camilla, where the words are repeated three times in capital letters.
Fanny Burney
'We are now removed to a very small house in the suburbs of a very small village called Bookham,' wrote Fanny Burney to a friend about four months after her marriage to Alexandre d'Arblay in 1793. 'Our views are not as beautiful as from Phenice Farm [on nearby Bagdon Hill, where the newlyweds had taken rooms for a time], but our situation is totally free from neighbours and intrusion. We are about a mile and a half from Norbury Park [home of her friend, William Lock], and two miles from Mickleham. I am become already so stout a walker, by use and with the help of a very able supporter, that I go to those places and return home on foot without fatigue, when the weather is kind.' Fanny Burney now returned to writing in earnest, starting work on her third novel, Camilla, in order to support herself and her husband, who had no income, being cut off from his property in France. Born in 1752, she had achieved fame at quite a young age with her first novel, Evelina, or a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, which in 1778 had taken London by storm.
Dr Johnson said that some passages might do honour to Samuel Richardson. Sir Joshua Reynolds took the book to the dinner table and was so absorbed that he had to be fed while reading, after which both he and Edmund Burke sat up over it all night. Her second novel, Cecilia (1782), enjoyed the same success and even greater sales, though the publisher did rather better from the profits than the author. Married existence in the sleepy littlevillage of Great Bookham seems to have ; suited Fanny Burney. 'Here,' she wrote, 'we are tranquil, undisturbed, and undisturbing.
Men of lettersI am every morning at the top of Box Hill - as its flower, its bird, its prophet. I drop down the moon on one side, I draw up the sun on t'other. I breathe fine air. I shout ha ha to the gates of the world. Then I descend and know myself a donkey for doing it. George Meredith Of all the many literary figures associated with Box Hill, none had a better feel for the place than the novelist and poet George Meredith. From 1867 until his death at the age of 81 in 1909, he lived in a flint and brick house built off the Zig-Zag road at the bottom of the hill. Nine years after he moved into Flint Cottage Meredith added a small timber-boarded chalet high up in the steep garden behind the house where he did much of his writing and even sometimes slept. There was also a shed for Picnic, the donkey. 'Anything grander than the days and nights in my porch you will not find away from the Alps: for the dark line of my hill runs up to the stars, the valley below is a soundless gulf. There pace like a shipman before turning in.
In the day with the south west blowing I have a brilliant universe rolling up to me.' Meredith was a great lover of country things and an energetic walker who rambled many miles over the Surrey countryside. Even at the age of 61, he was fit enough to join the Order of Sunday Tramps, an early rambling club. He describes the downland vividly in one of his most popular novels, Diana of the Crossways (1885): Through an old gravel cutting a gateway led to the turf of the down, spring turf, bordered on a long line, clear as a racecourse, by golden gorse covers, and leftward over the gorse the dark ridge of the fir and heath country ran companionably to the south west, the valley between, with undulations of wood and meadow sunned or shaded, clumps and mounds, promontories, away to the broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills, and dimmer beyond and farther, the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil to the illimitable. Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of service-tree or the whitebeam, spotted the semicircle of swelling green down black and silver.
After Meredith's death, J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) wrote a fanciful essay in which he imagined the old man sitting on the crest of the hill which rises in front of Flint Cottage, chuckling at the sight of his own funeral cortege solemnly accompanying an empty coffin to the cemetery at Dorking. Barrie himself is commemorated by Barrie's Bank, just outside Flint Cottage, where the playwright is said to have sat before daring to approach the great writer. Others who made the pilgrimage to Flint Cottage included George Gissing and Henry James; and the critic and caricaturist Max Beerbohm lived there for a time during the Second World War. In 1878 and 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson stayed at the Burford Bridge Hotel, at the foot of Box Hill beside the River Mole. On the second visit Meredith read him parts of his masterpiece The Egoist, and, when Stevenson exclaimed that the character of Sir Willoughby Patteme must have been modelled on himself, made his famous reply: 'I've taken him from all of us, but principally from myself.'
'Emma had never been to Box Hill ... she wished to see what everybody found so much worth seeing.' But the outing is not a success, being marred from the start by 'a languor, a want of spirits, a want of union, which could not be got over.... even Emma grew tired at last of flattery and merriment, and wished herself rather walking quietly about with any of the others, or sitting almost alone, and quite unattended to, in tranquil observation of the beautiful views beneath her.'
She makes the journey home in tears. It is not known whether Jane Austen ever met Fanny Bumey, though it is just conceivable. Jane Austen, born in 1775, was several times a visitor to Great Bookham, where her cousin Cassandra was married to the rector Samuel Cooke. Whether or not they did meet, the younger woman seems to have been an admirer of the older, for Jane Austen's name appeared on the subscription list to Camilla. Possibly too the title of her best-known novel Pride and Prejudice was taken from the last paragraph of Camilla, where the words are repeated three times in capital letters.
Fanny Burney
'We are now removed to a very small house in the suburbs of a very small village called Bookham,' wrote Fanny Burney to a friend about four months after her marriage to Alexandre d'Arblay in 1793. 'Our views are not as beautiful as from Phenice Farm [on nearby Bagdon Hill, where the newlyweds had taken rooms for a time], but our situation is totally free from neighbours and intrusion. We are about a mile and a half from Norbury Park [home of her friend, William Lock], and two miles from Mickleham. I am become already so stout a walker, by use and with the help of a very able supporter, that I go to those places and return home on foot without fatigue, when the weather is kind.' Fanny Burney now returned to writing in earnest, starting work on her third novel, Camilla, in order to support herself and her husband, who had no income, being cut off from his property in France. Born in 1752, she had achieved fame at quite a young age with her first novel, Evelina, or a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, which in 1778 had taken London by storm.
Dr Johnson said that some passages might do honour to Samuel Richardson. Sir Joshua Reynolds took the book to the dinner table and was so absorbed that he had to be fed while reading, after which both he and Edmund Burke sat up over it all night. Her second novel, Cecilia (1782), enjoyed the same success and even greater sales, though the publisher did rather better from the profits than the author. Married existence in the sleepy littlevillage of Great Bookham seems to have ; suited Fanny Burney. 'Here,' she wrote, 'we are tranquil, undisturbed, and undisturbing.
Men of lettersI am every morning at the top of Box Hill - as its flower, its bird, its prophet. I drop down the moon on one side, I draw up the sun on t'other. I breathe fine air. I shout ha ha to the gates of the world. Then I descend and know myself a donkey for doing it. George Meredith Of all the many literary figures associated with Box Hill, none had a better feel for the place than the novelist and poet George Meredith. From 1867 until his death at the age of 81 in 1909, he lived in a flint and brick house built off the Zig-Zag road at the bottom of the hill. Nine years after he moved into Flint Cottage Meredith added a small timber-boarded chalet high up in the steep garden behind the house where he did much of his writing and even sometimes slept. There was also a shed for Picnic, the donkey. 'Anything grander than the days and nights in my porch you will not find away from the Alps: for the dark line of my hill runs up to the stars, the valley below is a soundless gulf. There pace like a shipman before turning in.
In the day with the south west blowing I have a brilliant universe rolling up to me.' Meredith was a great lover of country things and an energetic walker who rambled many miles over the Surrey countryside. Even at the age of 61, he was fit enough to join the Order of Sunday Tramps, an early rambling club. He describes the downland vividly in one of his most popular novels, Diana of the Crossways (1885): Through an old gravel cutting a gateway led to the turf of the down, spring turf, bordered on a long line, clear as a racecourse, by golden gorse covers, and leftward over the gorse the dark ridge of the fir and heath country ran companionably to the south west, the valley between, with undulations of wood and meadow sunned or shaded, clumps and mounds, promontories, away to the broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills, and dimmer beyond and farther, the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil to the illimitable. Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of service-tree or the whitebeam, spotted the semicircle of swelling green down black and silver.
After Meredith's death, J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) wrote a fanciful essay in which he imagined the old man sitting on the crest of the hill which rises in front of Flint Cottage, chuckling at the sight of his own funeral cortege solemnly accompanying an empty coffin to the cemetery at Dorking. Barrie himself is commemorated by Barrie's Bank, just outside Flint Cottage, where the playwright is said to have sat before daring to approach the great writer. Others who made the pilgrimage to Flint Cottage included George Gissing and Henry James; and the critic and caricaturist Max Beerbohm lived there for a time during the Second World War. In 1878 and 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson stayed at the Burford Bridge Hotel, at the foot of Box Hill beside the River Mole. On the second visit Meredith read him parts of his masterpiece The Egoist, and, when Stevenson exclaimed that the character of Sir Willoughby Patteme must have been modelled on himself, made his famous reply: 'I've taken him from all of us, but principally from myself.'
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