The Roman Road is on the other side of the town, beginning at the south-west corner of the racecourse, to be followed in a nearly straight line from an inn below the Grand Stand. On the Ordnance Maps it is marked Ermyn Street, but Stone Street is the traditional name, though it seems anything but stony in our macadamising days. An easy and pleasant way of striking into it from the town is to turn up left at the “Spread Eagle,” then presently right by a flagged path and a lane forking to the right, which brings one below Lord Rosebery’s seat, the Durdans, where a road goes straight up-hill to the inn above mentioned. One might, however, keep another in the same direction as the lane, presently bending up left round Woodcote Park, and past Ashstead Park on the right, till at the top of the ascent is struck the Roman Road.
There is no mistaking this deserted highway, here a broad stretch of turf, on which practical farmers must cast a covetous eye. At a height of about 400 feet, it makes a delightful walk, crossed by tempting pathways, on one side to the Dorking road through Ashstead and Leatherhead, on the other to Headley and Walton, by which one might cut across to the Reigate road. Pebble Lane is a local name, suggested by traces of the Roman construction that have been exposed to view; and there are hints of the old embankment, where to the careless eye nothing may appear but a swathe of waste land. The Church in Ashstead Park is believed to occupy the site of a Roman villa, such as often stood a little way off these roads, like a modern gentleman’s house behind its avenue.
Among the divagations suggested by guide-posts, one might choose the mile or so’s walk behind Ashstead to the church of Headley-on-the-Hill, whose spire is a far seen landmark and a focus of several such footways, another of which would lead back to the Roman Road farther on. If one keep straight along it, after half an hour’s soft walking it grows narrower, rougher, and shadier, crooking its way through a wood as it comes upon the yew-dotted and tumulus-swollen slopes of the Downs above Leatherhead. All this part of Surrey is particularly rich in yews, such as we saw in the Druid’s Grove of Norbury across the Mole, which our road now approaches. Beneath it, beside the valley high-road, the grounds of Cherkley Court contain a mass of yews packed together over some ninety acres, some of the trees very large and beautiful in form. Dr. John Lowe, in his monograph on the Yew-trees of Great Britain and Ireland, speaks of this as “perhaps the finest collection of yews in existence.”
Leatherhead Downs run into the neighbour name of Mickleham Downs, which in part are still much as they were described by Aubrey, but their clumps of ancient yews and thorn-trees are relieved by more artificial parks and woods, below which opens the lovely valley of the Mole, with Norbury Park on its opposite slope. The Roman Road seems to have dropped down into the hollow below Juniper Hill before crossing the Mole; but then its line becomes lost, though fragments of it are said to have been made out in living memory. Let us be content to take two or three miles of turnpike by Burford Bridge to Dorking, whose tall spire, reared in memory of Bishop Wilberforce, marks the traditional course of Stone Street by its churchyard.
As it left the chalk formation to mount upon the greensand, this old road must have crossed the central scene of that “Battle of Dorking” that has escaped mention by grave historians, who might indeed note the national characteristic which turns such a fable into the form of a wholesome warning, whereas the prophets of foreign fiction are more in the way of tickling their readers with glorious victories of imagination. The name thus used to point a moral and adorn a tale from Blackwood, was suggested by the position of Dorking at the foot of the steep Downs, making a natural line of defence for the south side of London. In Domesday the town figures as Dorkinges, a name authentically famed through a breed of fowls said to have been introduced by the Romans. There can be no doubt about its antiquity, and its importance in good old days is vouched for by the size and number of its inns, the “White Horse” and “Red Lion” still flourishing, and others turned into shops in our own time. The curious stranger searches in vain for the sign of the “Marquis of Granby,” for the tomb of Mrs. S. Weller, sen., or for the chapel at which Mr. Stiggins ministered; but an actual coachman named Weller is said to have lived at Dorking in Mr. Pickwick’s time, and his chronicler seems to have had in view the “Old King’s Head,” which became the Post Office.
A peculiar custom of Dorking must probably be spoken of in the past tense, now that staid citizens have been resolute in putting it down, as happened earlier at Kingston and other towns. Here lasted longest in Surrey what seems a survival of Carnival roistering, a triple game of football played through the main streets on Shrove Tuesday, between sides living east and west of the church. On this afternoon, all shops being closed, three balls,
