await the man who has no superstitious reverence for legal rights.
There speaks the true vigorous Victorian. Although his near contemporary A. H. Sidgwick, who published his Walking Essays in 1912, had this to say on the subject:
There is a definite type of walker who loves trespassing for its own sake, and exults, as he climbs a fence or turns up a path marked ‘private’, in a vision of the landed aristocracy of England defied and impotent … There is much excuse for this attitude: as we review the history of English commons and rights of way, of the organised piracy of the body politic and the organised perjury which supported it, it is difficult to stifle an impulse to throw at least one pebble … at the head of Goliath.
He added with a semi-humorous shake of his head, ‘To indulge the love of trespassing involves ultimately making trespassing an end rather than a means, and this – like the twin passion for short-cuts as an end in themselves – is disastrous to walking.’4 Sidgwick’s view was that no matter how unjust the circumstances of its creation, the fact was that the enclosed English countryside was also, paradoxically, the thing of beauty that the walker admired so, and that fulminating against the landed aristocracy could only leach pleasure away from any walk. Added to this, it has always been rather easier for the patrician middle classes to trespass simply because, if confronted, they could sound eminently reasonable in perfectly modulated tones of Received Pronunciation.
Over 100 years on, the territory of these Sunday Tramps would now give Stephen little of that ‘delicious’ sense, though. Box Hill and Leith Hill are now firmly National Trust territory. What would either Leslie Stephen or indeed Emma Woodhouse make of it now? And so off I stride, out of Dorking station – and thanks to my airy dismissal of maps, I inevitably, immediately, take a wrong turning. As a result of my mistake, the next rather stressful thirty minutes involve following a busy road running along the base of Box Hill, heading towards Reigate. Walking along, I look yearningly up at those thick woods on the steep slopes – but without seeing any hint of public footpaths or indeed any particularly promising field I can simply trot across. In the meantime, my attempted Jane Austen-esque promenade has suddenly narrowed into a flinching, shrinking-back-from-vast-delivery-lorries ordeal. If I resemble any Austen figure at this moment, it is probably the oleaginous, cringing vicar Mr Elton.
What might have ended with a frustrated about turn – is there anything worse than having to go back the same way, over unlovely territory? – thankfully culminates in a side road, marked as a dead end. Following this a little way, past the eerie howling of a combined kennel-cattery, and just a quarter of a mile on, you are in business. I find a right hand turn, with a lane leading directly up the hill. When you are directly beneath it, the hill looks absurdly steep.
The lane soon gives way to some discreet National Trust signage. What previously looked steep, actually becomes steep. This lovely wooded path, slightly wet with the spring mist, moist flint-stone and mud, angles upwards through a tunnel of old trees. The cover is so dense that there is no possibility of looking out at the view – just a fairly solid climb. It doesn’t last long, you are at the top surprisingly quickly. Now you can see the prospect before you. Except, that is, on the day I have chosen to climb. I can’t see anything. There is a delicate yet impenetrable mist all around, and the Mole Valley beneath is a gauzy haze. It is not that disappointing; any views at all – from anywhere – offer at best a certain amount of limited novelty. This one, down to the river, over to the trees on the other side of the valley, would have been pretty enough, yet I know it would not have detained me for long. With hills and country such as this, there are other things. There are breathtakingly beautiful trees to be seen on this plateau. Oaks so nobbled that the trunks look as though they contain a multitude of faces. Box Hill, incidentally, is so called because of its profusion of box trees on its slopes and summit.
Thence to Emma Woodhouse’s picnic site. Back then, parties would have been taken up the hill by carriage via a zigzagging road. Much the same thing seems to be the case now. Indeed, these are the very roads used for the 2012 Olympic cycle races. On a day like this, when the mist drifts like the spray in a vast greenhouse, there is a magic to the glistening barks, and the squelchy dark mud underfoot. What is most impressive, though, is that this place – nestled between the M25, Gatwick Airport, and countless main roads – is so extraordinarily quiet. And in this, I see Leslie Stephen’s point about wriggling free from the octopus arms of London. Even in an ancient woodland like Epping in Essex, there is always, somewhere, the noise of traffic, or overhead aeroplanes. Here, you really do feel that you are somewhere slightly more remote than a London dormitory town.
The mist, however, prevents me from assessing the other thing I came here for; and that is how much the landscape below has changed over the years. The walker might, as an initial point of reference, turn to one of the earliest examples of British landscape painting, ‘A View To Box Hill’, by George Lambert, painted in 1733. This was one of the first works focusing on the land itself, and not some castle or tower or other similarly imposing man-made structure. In Lambert’s work, the focus is the hill, which is starkly delineated, but the air is thick with a honeyed light. In the foreground, there are labourers reaping corn. Today, that same field in the foreground is instead a vineyard. The other difference is that in the painting, there are very few trees on the hill. Either all these trees have grown since then; or Lambert simply left the trees out, for his own artistic reasons. Not that such paintings could ever be taken as accurate, but it does raise that perenially interesting question of how much tree cover we have lost over the centuries – and how much, quietly, we have gained.
For a more recent point of reference about the look and the feel of Home Counties countryside, we might turn to films and documentaries made in the 1930s and 1940s. There we see, in the countryside of Kent and Surrey, an agricultural landscape still composed of small fields and horse-drawn carts; working blacksmiths and dusty lanes – a world that simply isn’t there now. All it has taken is seventy years. There is the difficult-to-shake sense that the great ‘octopus arms’ of London now stretch all the way down to Brighton and the south coast. That apart from the odd Down or the occasional woodland trail, it is a region composed purely of uniform dormitory towns with joyless shopping precincts. One would never expect any hint of wilderness. One would scarcely even anticipate getting lost.
But wildness is not everything, and we return to the miniature artistry of Jane Austen. Just as she captured with funny and searing vividness the everyday vanities, anxieties and turbulence of small social groups, so the country that she moved in has a counterpointed sense of understated, though perfectly apparent beauty. On Box Hill and Leith Hill are to be found old beeches, oaks and yews. Rare species include silver-wash fritillary butterflies, bee orchids and orange butterflies. In the summer months, wild basil grows. Just several miles to the south, Leith Hill is one of the highest points in southern England; on clear days you might catch a glimpse of the south coast.
Leslie Stephen, who clearly had a great deal of affection for this part of the world, felt that through walking, he was maintaining a very grand literary tradition. In one essay, he cited the great walker-writers of history: Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Byron, among many others. He saw the act of walking as being, in its own way, as creative as ‘scribbling’. ‘The memories of walks,’ Stephen wrote,
Are all localised and dated; they are hitched on to particular times and places; they spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung … the labour of scribbling books happily leaves no distinct impression, and I would forget that it had ever been undergone; but the picture of some delightful ramble includes incidentally a reference to the nightmare of literary toil from which it relieved me. The author is but the accidental appendage of the tramp.
He went on to discuss how past walker-writers have somehow blocked out the sheer physicality, the corporeal realism of walking. They
have inclined to ignore the true source of their
