Agatha’s greatest
In December 1926, Agatha Christie drove to the Surrey Hills, got out of her car… and disappeared for ten days. The story is extraordinary. A walk in her (possible) footsteps is even better.
EARLY ON THE morning of 4th December 1926, a Surrey police constable responded to a report of a possible car crash at Newlands Corner.
Sure enough, he discovered a Morris Cowley embedded in a bush, just above the chalk pit on the south flank of the famed hilltop beauty spot. Engine off but headlights on. A suitcase and a coat on the back seat. But no sign of the driver.
In short order, the identity of the owner of coat, case and car was established. They belonged to Agatha Christie, a promising author, 36 years old, and resident in Sunningdale, Berkshire, some 20 miles north of the scene. Last seen the previous evening, when, after an argument with her husband Archie, Mrs Christie had handed her seven-yearold daughter Rosalind to her maid, and left the house in the selfsame Morris Cowley.
The discovery triggered a national news story and one of the largest and strangest missing person cases in modern history. More than a thousand police offers, 15,000 volunteers and several aeroplanes searched the surrounding countryside. Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks pressured the police for a result. A newspaper offered a £100 reward for information – something like £6000 in today’s money.
And the press dredged the secrets of the Christies’ private life and speculated wildly. Could foul play be involved? Or had she drowned herself? After all, the gloomily named Silent Pool – home to a grisly legend of a drowned young woman – was not far from the scene. Agatha’s friend and fellow crime author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – a profound believer in spiritualism – handed one of Agatha’s gloves to a medium in the hope of tracking her down through the psychic plane. The story of Agatha’s eventual reappearance ten days later is just as extraordinary. But having set the scene, the important thing to do is to go for a walk, and see where this baffling story began.
The crowded corner
Locals will know this, but Newlands Corner is a bit of a conflicted place.
Yes, it is one of the most sensational viewpoints in the Surrey Hills. And almost any guide to the North Downs Way will include a photo taken from here. It’s a broad scarp in the North Downs with a gently sloping northern flank, and a dramatically steep south face that stares out over the vale of Albury and across to the mighty sweep of Blackheath Forest.
What you don’t see as many photos of is the road. ▶
“Flecked
with trees… topped by one of the
prettiest churches in the land, St Martha’s Hill is a joy to behold.
Squint and it could be Tuscany.”
Newlands Corner is called a corner because it’s essentially a bend in the busy A25 on its way between Dorking and Guildford. It’s a nice view, yes, but it’s a noisy one. Even more so when you see the visitor centre. And the car park. And the cafés.
For this reason, the best place to start a Newlands Corner walk is not at Newlands Corner, but half a mile west at the much quieter White Lane car park. Not only do you get a calmer location, but you also get to approach Newlands Corner from its best angle – across the great open, curving meadow that connects White Lane to the corner itself. This is the true beauty spot of Newlands Corner, and being a few minutes’ walk from the main A25 car park, it’s a place that a decent percentage of the visitors and picnickers never even find.
And it sets the scene perfectly. Woods, meadow, sandy scarp: this is the essence of the Surrey Hills, and it’s a pattern of scenery that we’ll see repeated right the way through this walk – which, I’ll venture here, is one of the greatest walks in south-east England. (I hid that bit this deep in the story so it acts like a surprise twist, such as Agatha might enjoy.)
At the far end of the meadow comes Newlands Corner itself, where our story began.
Let’s put some background on it. Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, born 15th September 1890, had already become a celebrated novelist by the time of her disappearance, although she had so far only published three novels (starting with
The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, which introduced the character of Hercule Poirot). She had married army officer Archibald Christie in 1914, taking the name by which she would become known for ever more: Agatha Christie.
They made a graceful society couple. In 1922 they joined a round-the-world promotional tour for the British Empire Expedition. She already loved travel, having visited Egypt with her mother Clara in 1907. But the tour opened her eyes to the world’s delights and fired her imagination. She immersed herself
in archaeology, anthropology and forensic science, all of which would feed into her writing. She was also adventurous and adored sport. In Hawaii, she and Archie learned how to surf standing up – and were probably among the first Britons to do so.
After returning to Britain, they bought a house in Sunningdale and named it Styles, after the mansion in Agatha’s first detective novel.
But all was not well. Agatha’s mother, to whom she had been exceptionally close, died in April 1926. The press reported that Agatha had gone to a village near Biarritz in France to recuperate from a “breakdown” caused by “overwork”.
Worse was to come. Archie had entered into an affair with his secretary Nancy Neele, and in August he asked Agatha for a divorce. A series of intense quarrels followed in the subsequent months, and after one such, on December 3rd, Agatha vanished into the night.
Of chalk and gin
As the hunt began for the missing novelist, the first thought was Silent Pool, so that’s where we should head. Leaving Newlands Corner behind, the North Downs Way heads into blissful woodland which runs eastwards along the scarp. Then a sharp right takes us steeply down off the edge. Enclosed by trees, and chalky underfoot, it’s one of those typical downsy passageways; in the South Downs they’d call it a bostal. And it leads straight to Silent Pool.
The pool is a spring-fed lake, whose opalescent hue comes from the underlying chalk. The upper half of the pool is completely natural; the lower half is a dug-out extension, created by the Albury Estate in the 17th century, along with the entirely artificial Sherbourne Pond below it.
Silent Pool has a gloomy rap. As always, the legend varies, but it usually involves a ▶
woodcutter’s daughter who swims in the pool and is accosted by a nobleman (King John in some versions, his Archbishop of Canterbury in others) and drowns while trying to escape their advances. Legend has it the poor maiden’s ghost now haunts the pool. You can see why the over-fertile imaginations of locals and the media could have fermented the idea that Agatha might choose such a place to do something desperate.
Thankfully it wasn’t so (as we shall discover) and there’s a cheerier tone to the pool today. It is home to both the Albury Vineyard (producing award-winning Chardonnay and Pinot since 2009) and Silent Pool Distillers, producing an excellent gin in a cluster of formerly dilapidated farm buildings just above the pool, and drawing water from the pool itself.
In 1926 the police dredged Silent Pool, but found no trace of Agatha. So the hunt continued southwards towards Albury, and thus so does our walk.
The entire village of Albury sits within the Albury Park Estate, a grand ancestral seat dating back to the 17th century, and today owned by the Duke of Northumberland. Through it passes the River Tillingbourne (often known simply as the Tilling Bourne), which we’ll meet again later.
Above the village, the soil changes swiftly from chalk to sand, firstly over Albury Warren and then into the high, sandy-footed forest of Blackheath.
You’re best prepared for Blackheath by reading its entry on the Woodland Trust website. Although proud of their ownership of this broad, high common, the trust points out that “the soft sand underfoot can be quite tiring so the numerous bench seats become most welcome”. I can’t disagree, but don’t overlook the joys of the heath while trudging: its labyrinth of paths, its hidden hollows and sunken tracks, its sudden vast clearings. As we passed through, we encountered a panting adder, resting high in the sidewall of a sunken track, visibly squeezing the air out of his tubular insides to keep cool, and to tell us, politely, to stop staring at him.
After a long trek through the heathland, you can be glad of the firmer terrain on the descent back into the Albury valley – and also of the view ahead. Crowning the horizon is my favourite place in Surrey: St Martha’s Hill. Flecked with trees, rising to a perfect cone atop the Greensand Ridge, topped by one of the prettiest churches in the land, it’s a joy to behold. Squint and it could be Tuscany.
Found at last
But before then we have to cross the Tilling Bourne and enter the extraordinary world of the Chilworth Gunpowder Mills. Here, buried in the woods between the stately villages of Chilworth and Albury, are the relics of a noisy, black and dangerous industry which thrived here for almost 300 years (see panel below). Today it’s a little maze of woods, water and snaking footpaths. It’s completely unmarked on OS maps; only an information board (or foreknowledge via the excellent heritage guide which can be downloaded from Guildford Borough Council) will tell you it’s there. But once you find it, you’ll want to spend a lot of time roaming its dells and water-cuttings.
St Martha’s Hill is the final obstacle of the ▶
walk. The climb is steep and unrelenting but it’s quick, and the reward is an even more flabbergasting view than the one from Newlands Corner – yet quieter, because cars can’t get up here. It’s a heck of a panorama. The residents of St Martha’s graveyard must have one of the finest views from any cemetery in the land.
The church itself is gorgeous too; not a brash and ornate thing but calm and restrained. It lets the landscape do all the loudness. It’s one of only three churches in England dedicated to St Martha of Bethany, although a common theory goes that the hill was actually called ‘Saints and Martyrs Hill’ rather than ‘St Martha’s Hill’. The martyr would most likely be Thomas à Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered in his own cathedral in 1170. Sure enough, the hilltop lies at the intersection of classic pilgrim routes to both Canterbury and Winchester. One of the routes is the Pilgrims’ Way, which predates, but was the inspiration for, the modern North Downs Way.
As we head down the hill and back towards White Lane Farm, it’s time to finish the story.
Ten days after the disappearance, the head waiter at the elegant Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate (yes, the Harrogate in North Yorkshire, 230 miles north of Newlands Corner) contacted police with his suspicion that a lively South African guest by the name of Theresa Neale might actually be the missing author, Agatha Christie.
The police informed Archie, who sped hotfoot to Harrogate. He took a seat in the corner of the hotel dining room, from where he watched his estranged wife walk in, take a seat at another table and begin reading a newspaper which displayed her own disappearance as front-page news.
When he approached and greeted her, ‘Theresa Neale’ (or ‘Tressa’ in some accounts) showed no apparent recognition of him. The exact nature of their conversation is unclear, but Agatha checked out with Archie and they returned to Sunningdale. Archie told the Daily Herald she had suffered “a complete loss of memory” and did not recognise him, adding that she did not even know how or why she came to be in Harrogate.
As far as official accounts go, that was the end of the matter. Agatha and Archie parted ways thereafter, Agatha resumed writing, and in time she married archaeologist Max Mallowan, with whom she lived happily for the rest of her life. In her autobiography, published posthumously in 1977, Agatha did not mention the event, only saying of that period: “So, after illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it.”
But speculation abounded at the time. Had she tried to fake her own death in order to incriminate Archie? (Some commentators pointed to the choice of ‘pseudonym’; Neale was the surname of Archie’s mistress.) Or could it have been a publicity stunt?
More recent analysts have offered all sorts of explanations, including severe depression, a nervous breakdown, an attempt to embarrass Archie, or even a ‘fugue state’, a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person suffers complete but temporary memory loss, yet has enough emotional
control to make short-term decisions. Even Doctor Who had a theory – seek out the David Tennant-era story The Unicorn and the Wasp to hear it.
But there’s a kind of awkwardness in our fascination for this story. As intriguing as the mystery is, it accounts for just a sliver of the incredible life and times of Agatha Christie. And in an era in which we are generally more sensitive to issues of mental health, it feels slightly uncharitable that so much interest is anchored to this one desperately sad episode in her life.
We can do two things to remedy that. One is to remember the impact of Agatha Christie in her ‘best self’: her creation of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple; her play The Mousetrap, the world’s longest-running play. Her fascination with everything from toxicology to Egyptology; her CBE and Damehood; her happiness with Max. And above all, her status in the Guinness Book of Records as the best-selling fiction writer of all time.
The other thing is to come to this part of the Surrey Hills and simply love it for what it is: a magnificently rich landscape, full of biological diversity and fascinating heritage; warm and welcoming on a summer’s day; crisp and dramatic on a winter’s one. And to see it as part of a tapestry of landscapes – the Devon coast, the parks of London, the banks of the Nile – that shimmer with the touch of Agatha’s genius.
And when you come to Newlands Corner, or Greenway in Devon, or even to Abu Simbel, think of her saying this: “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow. But through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”