The highway leads along the east side of the valley, passing the hollow between Juniper Hill and Box Hill, for which latter goes off a winding road, but on foot it is more directly gained by the arduous path behind the Burford Bridge Hotel. Just outside of Mickleham a path turns to the right which would take one through the Fredley meadows, across the Mole, and on to West Humble, where is the Box Hill station of the Brighton line. On a slope near this station is conspicuous the long front of Camilla Lacey, a house that hangs by a tale, for it grew out of Camilla Cottage, built from the proceeds of Miss Burney’s Camilla, the most lucrative of her novels in its day, though not so well remembered as Evelina. By this time she had married M. D’Arblay, one of a colony of French émigrés belonging to the constitutional
party, who from the excesses of their Revolution found refuge at Juniper Hall, on the other side of the valley.
Juniper Hall, behind its grand cedars, stands back from the high-road a short mile beyond Mickleham. It lies in the hollow, so as to have been nicknamed Juniper Hole by the lively novelist, and must not be confused with the mansion of Juniper Hill above Mickleham. The Hall in 1792 was let to a party of refugee nobles, who had such distinguished guests as Talleyrand and Madame de Staël, the latter making here what she calls a “delicious sojourn.” The Locks of Norbury Park were kind to those exiles; and so, as she could, was Fanny Burney’s sister, Mrs. Phillips, then occupying a cottage at Mickleham. Fanny became intimate with her sister’s friends, especially with the handsome General D’Arblay, with whom she exchanged lessons in their respective languages; then soon it came to exchanging the speech of the eyes. Dr. Burney was against the engagement from prudential considerations; but he did not play the stern father after the young couple, without his presence, had got married in Mickleham Church. Their only fixed income was the pension of a hundred pounds given by Queen Charlotte to her ex-slave. She now set about writing Camilla, which was so well subscribed for, that after living in a small cottage at Bookham the ingenious husband could build one for himself in the Mole valley. But here they spent only a few years of happiness. After the peace of Amiens General D’Arblay went back to France, where his wife had her turn of exile when the war broke out again.
This nook of Surrey is rich in literary associations. Polesden Lacy, on the heights behind Camilla Lacey, was at one time occupied by Sheridan, as Dorking tradesmen had sore reason to know. Dr. Aikin and Mrs. Barbauld of Evenings at Home stayed at Dorking for a season. At his house in the Fredley meadows “Conversation Sharpe” was often visited by writers and thinkers like Francis Homer and Sir James Mackintosh, who from his Indian exile looked back fondly on what he called the “Happy Valley.” The two Mills, James and John, were also familiar with Mickleham as a summer retreat; during half the year they went down by coach for week ends; and it seems odd to find the zealous utilitarian writing in 1836 how the railway is not yet decided on, “but we are still in danger.” Sharpe’s house was afterwards occupied by the popular poet Charles Mackay, father by adoption of the successful novelist Miss Marie Corelli. Among many illustrious guests of the “Hare and Hounds” at Burford Bridge have been Nelson and Hazlitt; and here Keats finished his Endymion, perhaps getting a hint or two from “thorny-green entanglement of underwood” on Box Hill, when “the good-night blush of eve was waning slow.” I am much mistaken if William Black also had not at one time the chance of making copy from such fine scenery. Matthew Arnold spent more than one summer at West Humble, where he mentions the Miss Thackerays as rusticating near him, also Herman Merivale, who “says it is the most enchanting country in England, and I am not sure but he is right”; only this critical poet, though privileged to fish in Wotton Park, is found sighing for stonier streams than the quiet Mole, which here indeed seems the antipodes of lakeland ghylls and forces. Grant Allen tenanted “The Nook” near Dorking, when he helped to bring up out of long neglect by the reading public the name of his neighbour, Mr. George Meredith, who then lived at Burford Bridge, beneath the Downs he has described so lovingly,—“springy 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, mounds, promontories, away to broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills, and dimmer beyond, and farther the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil to the illimitable.”
That view was over the Holmesdale Valley, into which we are coming round a corner of the Downs. To this part of the Mole’s basin we shall return in tracking the Pilgrims’ Way and the Roman Road, that crossed each other between Mickleham and Dorking. The Mole does not touch Dorking, but turns towards Box Hill, its old name White Hill, which has been somewhat denuded of box trees since the days when it made a favourite excursion for Epsom Spa visitors and for picnic parties from so far off as Emma’s “Highbury.” But it is a grandly wooded face under which the river crosses the Holmesdale Valley, on the other side winding round the avenues of Betchworth Park, where stand the so-called castle ruins that represent rather a tumble-down mansion. Above the park it passes by the trim village green of Brockham, then opposite a huge chalk scar on the Downs crooks up the valley to Betchworth Church, at the east end of which is buried Captain Morris, that convivial lyrist of “the sweet shady side of Pall Mall,” who died near Brockham at the good old age of ninety-four, and the interior has a memorial to another unforgotten neighbour, Sir Benjamin Brodie, the surgeon.