Tag: Rambling

Sunday 2nd December 2018. 

A walk for nemophilists (with excellent glutes).

A surprising new, and very practical fashion trend has reached the capital – so we were far from alone in wearing hiking boots on the early tube to Vauxhall. We were, however, the only ones also wearing waterproof trousers and anoraks and clutching a compass and a hiking book. It seems every trend has its limits.

With 6 minutes to spare, we nipped to the station shop at Vauxhall for walking essentials (chocolate) and caught the 9.06 train to Boxhill and Westhumble.

I haven’t mentioned before, mainly because we’ve ignored it so far,  but the book* has a table setting out suggested walks for different weekends of the year. As daylight is getting increasingly limited, we decided to be guided by Nick to find a walk that wouldn’t require head-torches (trends have their limits, and so do I). So we chose the walk that his walking clubs took on 2nd December 2005. It’s quite nice knowing we’re spending the day almost exactly as a group of people did on this day 13 years ago. *As before, if you don’t know who Nick is or what the book is, read blog posts 1 and 2 and all of this will make more sense.

We arrived at Boxhill station before 10am, strode past a gathering of other-walking-club walkers in the car park, noted the station’s inconvenient lack of toilet facilities, and set off to explore a bit of Surrey.

I almost forgot to mention, the first point of interest in the book is actually this station. In an early sign that this walk will be markedly different to the last walk, Nick proffers the nugget that “an agreement with the landowner meant the station had to be ‘of an ornamental character'”. Despite Nick’s best attempts to conjure up a few sites of interest, it’s fair to say that for this walk we wouldn’t be too deprived if we did without the book and just followed the online guide.

The walk doesn’t take us into Boxhill and/or Westhumble, but immediately steers us past a flint gateway-wall with a blue plaque to Fanny Burney (diarist and novelist), past a bit of suburbia, and into a field. I would’ve suggested a quick detour to have a look at the village, but figured that after the last walk starting the day with a detour wouldn’t go down well!

We bypass a winery (it is still only 10.15), pass under an old bridge and cross a busy A-road. Well worth noting that if you reverse this walk you walk downhill all the way from Leatherhead to Boxhill, still getting all the views, and you end up at a winery…

We reach the National Trust-maintained Stepping Stones that cross the River Mole, or at least the signs for them. The signs say they’re there, and the book agrees, but sadly there’s absolutely no sign of any actual stones.

What we find is just the river, swollen by the recent rainfall. After watching a happy retriever swimming across the path we were meant to take, we follow the riverside until we find a bridge. And so get to have a bonus game of pooh sticks (I won).

Dad’s compass helped us get back on track on the other side (you’d think you wouldn’t need a compass to find your way back along the river…) and we have a spring in our steps as we splosh through the mud and puddles and enjoy the smell of the rain-soaked woodland on a surprisingly rain-free day.

It’s hard to maintain the bounce for long, however, after we reach the first of many, many flights of stairs.

The climb up Boxhill is basically a series of steep, slippy, muddy stairs, winding ever upwards, and interspersed and surrounded by beautiful old trees. Here’s a shortened snapshot –

We leap out of the way of the occasional sweaty downhill trail runner, eventually reach the top and collapse onto a bench to enjoy views across Surrey and a well earned packet of chocolate buttons.

You’ll be surprised to hear there aren’t any churches on the climb up Boxhill, so Nick makes up for it by getting carried away with a series of random facts about the hill instead:

“Boxhill, 172 metres above sea level, contains Bronze Age burial mounds. Daniel Defoe described scenes of drinking, dancing and debauchery on Boxhill; Jane Austen placed the picnic scene in Emma here; John Keats climbed Boxhill by moonlight whilst composing Endymion; John Logie Baird conducted his TV experiments from the summit…” etc, etc, until he ends with “box wood is heavy and does not float in water.”

Phew. Thoroughly educated, we skip off along the top of the hill naively thinking we’re done with the climbing part of the day.

A nice leisurely amble for miles along a muddy and leafy path appreciating the ancient trees.

In the middle here is a climb up onto a road, passing a saloon themed bar/restaurant, which leads back into woodland, but I thought I’d just show you the nice bits.

The sun came out! And we were treated to magnificent views across the other side of Boxhill and we headed down the aptly named Happy Valley.

It’s a shame I’ve had to reduce the quality / size of the photos so much for this blog, but I think you can click on any picture if you want to see it larger.

Just when we think we’re heading downhill in the sunshine all the way to lunch, we are suddenly faced with White Hill. If we thought Boxhill was steep…

More stairs, more trees, more mud. At the top Mark finds a Gandalf staff resting against a tree, presumably to aid weary travellers!

Now here’s a confession. I didn’t book the lunch spot Nick suggested, but went with the website’s (and Google’s) recommendation, The King William IV . We therefore go on a bit of a detour (the first of this walk!) through the woods, to take us to the other side of Mickleham.

At this point we’re expecting an uneventful, and hopefully quick, nip through some woodland, and our minds are very much on our stomachs. Little did we expect what we found.

First, while taking a photo of impossibly green lichen (none of the photos on this blog are edited or improved, for better or worse! so the colours you see are the colours we saw), I looked up and found a leg hanging in the tree.

I think it’s a deer leg? What would drag a deer up a tree? If you have any theories how this got here, do share!

Engrossed in a debate about the leg-in-the-tree, we picked our way down a dried up river bed, with dense woodland either side.

When, would you believe it after last blog’s comment about escaping the city and burnt out cars, we find…

Yep. A burnt out car. And as confusing as it is to find a leg in a tree, it’s more confusing to find a burnt out car on a river bed with absolutely no obvious way it could have got there. There are fully grown trees either side, and the riverbed path is too narrow for a car.

Just a few hundred metres on from here, we reach the pub, and decide we’ll ask them if they know how the car got there.

But then food arrived, and all thoughts of the woodland mysteries flew from our minds. So I guess we’ll never know.

Pretty good food, better than the walk 1 pub, not as good as the walk 2 pub. Friendly staff, though I got a bit fed up of being called “young lady”.

The next point of interest in the book is St Michael’s Church, Mickleham, so we walk into Mickleham to have a look and find a pleasingly rather pagan wooden doorway next to the churchyard. The church has a “chancel noticeably out of alignment with the nave – a ‘weeping chancel, to suggest the head of Christ leaning on the cross’.” I have my suspicions that there was actually just a slightly inept, but wily, builder-carpenter at some point in the church’s history! This time Nick’s facts are not enough to convince us to bother to enter the church.

We leave Mickleham and cross a busy A-road to follow a (very muddy!) path for a couple of miles past a farm to take us to the side of the River Mole.

Just as we were discussing how the post-lunch part of the walk is never as interesting (or scenic) as the pre-lunch part, our way is stopped by a man fishing in the path we’re meant to follow.

We figure if it’s deep enough to fish in – it’s too deep for hiking. If we can’t go under the bridge, we’ll go over – surely there’s a path down the other side?

No such luck – so we leap the motorway barrier and slide down the very steep and thorny embankment. It was higher than you’d think, and didn’t feel particularly safe or sensible, but short of hitching a ride into Leatherhead, or wading past the fisherman, we couldn’t see any other options.

Now we really were ready to be heading home, and the rest of this walk is pretty dull (though the pre-lunch part makes up for it). The route took us on to Leatherhead, which seems to be an average little town. The only interesting building we saw is the old bookshop.

I have no idea why, but the walk takes us through the town’s indoor shopping centre. So we hike past people doing their Christmas shopping. I decided we looked weird enough without me stopping to take photos like some strange hiking tourists, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

We emerge out the back of the shopping centre (it would’ve been quicker to go round it),  cross the road and reach Leatherhead station. It’s 3pm and we just missed a London train by 2 minutes. Fortunately the trains go every 15/20 mins, so we happily wait with a cup of station tea and practice our terrible selfie-taking.

My fitbit recorded 11.08 miles for the day, from home back to home, so I think the walk was about 7.5 miles. I agree with the 7 out of 10 toughness rating, 127 floors is an awful lot of climbing – and I might even up it to an 8 for motorway embankment-scrambling!

Best bits about this walk:

• Great exercise rewarded with views from the tops of the hills
• Lots of lovely woodland
• Short enough for a day of limited daylight

Bad bits about this walk:

• Pretty much all of the post-lunch bit
• Flooding blocked off 2 parts of the route