PITCH PERFECT
BRITAIN AT ITS BEST: THE SURREY HILLS
From the top of the tower on Leith Hill, amid The rhododendron Wood owned by the National Trust, you can see The Shard.
London is that close, but the Surrey Hills — an Area of outstanding Beauty — are like a different world.
There are other views: from Gibbet Hill outside Hindhead, for example, over the huge natural amphitheatre of the Devil’s Punchbowl.
But this is also a land of lanes, enclosed by banks of knotty trees roots and overhung by pines and beeches; and of intimate villages that, despite the BmWs in the driveways, are still delightful, due to the variety of building materials — brick, timber, flint, weatherboard and marmalade-coloured Bargate stone.
Bargate stone can’t be shaped to provide a flat surface or straight corners; so the old masons used sometimes to press chips of flint into the wide mortar joints – a technique known as galletting.
Poor for building, it had another use: the orange colour indicates a high iron content. The village Abinger Hammer is named after an ancient forge. Water from the hammer pond at Friday Street, overlooked by the Stephan Langton pub, used to drive the waterwheel for a foundry.
But Surrey soil was poor and the heaths — now precious habitat for sand lizards and emperor dragonflies — difficult to farm.
Then the Victorians came, arriving by the new railway and they called this area, with some hyperbole, the English Switzerland. Pines and quick- draining, sandy soil were thought to be good for the health. So they built country houses amid the pines.
Surrey is the most wooded county in the UK, so that often all you see of these piles is a name board at the end of a driveway.
A number are by Sir Edwin Lutyens, who grew up in Thursley. His mentor, craftswoman and artist turned gardener Gertrude Jekyll, commissioned him to build her home, munstead Wood, whose garden can be visited by appointment ( munsteadwood.org.uk).
There’s a gallery about them both in Godalming museum.
Godalming also boasts a memorial Cloister to Jack Phillips, a local man who was the chief wireless operator on the Titanic.
Designed by the Arts-and-Crafts architect Hugh Thackeray Turner, with a garden created by Jekyll, the Cloister was opened in April 15, 1914, just two years after the disaster.
Just outside Godalming, at Eashing, is the Stag on the river. The bridge over the river Wey was built by the monks of Waverley Abbey in the 13th century.
The Stag is one of ten pubs owned by the red mist group, including a micro- brewery in pretty Tilford. J.m. Barrie had his country house here, and nearby Black Lake became the Blue Lagoon in Peter Pan.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, built a house at Hindhead — Undershaw, now a charitable foundation — for his wife to recover from tuberculosis (alas, she didn’t).
The poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson rejected Hindhead as being ‘very dear at the money’ and chose a site near Haslemere instead. His poem Flower In The Crannied Wall was written at Waggoners Wells, Grayshott.
Artist George Frederick Watts, a friend of Tennyson, built a house and studio at Compton, now a museum. After his death in 1904, his wife added a cemetery chapel in tribute in a Celtic revival style.
Go there. It’s unique — like so much of this prized patch of our country.