CHAPTER XXVIII
LEATHERHEAD TO DORKING
The Roman road over the hill.—The Swallows of the Mole.—An imperial draught.—Mickleham.—Fanny Burney.—A Story of letters.—Juniper Hall and its cedars.—Norbury Park.—How to measure trout from the Mole.—Conversation Sharp.—Keats and Endymion.—Mr. George Meredith's poems.—The best known hill in the world.—A Soldier's Whim.
The best way from Leatherhead to Dorking is the longest, and hardly goes by the high road at all. It begins at Ashtead; you can get to Ashtead from Leatherhead or Epsom, but you must start from Ashtead out over Ermyn Street, the old Roman road. One might begin the walk from Epsom; but Epsom downs, with the great empty race-stand, can be depressing, and the best of the old road lies south, nearer Mickleham.
Ashtead is growing towards the railway, but east of the main street there is hardly a cottage. The church stands in Ashtead Park, and shows that it once had Roman walls for neighbours by the quantity of Roman brick and tiling mixed among its flints and stones. It has been elaborately roofed with cedar, but otherwise contains little; the prettiest part is the churchyard and the park beyond it, with its deer which walk by the gates and gaze gently over the paths at strangers.
Ermyn Street or Stane Street of the maps, which English tongues here have named Pebble Lane, skirts Ashtead Park by the south-east, at first a wide green lane, afterwards a narrow path sometimes half-choked by trees, sometimes, in wet weather, impassable with mud, but always driving straight as the Roman roadmaker drove his pick towards the cap of Mickleham Downs. The narrow lane to which the road has shrunk is less than the Roman made it, but Mickleham Downs can look very little different to-day from the downs which the legionary knew. He, too, like the modern traveller tramping by the yews and box trees, saw the sunlight on the dark, shining leaves, and watched the wind ruffle the whitebeams on the shoulder of the hill.
Mickleham Church.
Below the downs lies Mickleham, halfway between Leatherhead and Dorking, and famous in all the guide-books for the "swallows" of the Mole. The "swallows" are described as deep, blue pools, into which the Mole disappears underground, and, except from the most carefully written accounts, you would imagine that the whole river dives completely into the earth and jumps up again at Leatherhead. But if you ask at Mickleham to be directed to the "Swallows," the chances are that you will have to explain that you do not mean birds. The fact is that it is only in seasons of great drought that they would be noticed. In summers when there is very little rain the Mole is said to run dry between Burford Bridge and Thorncroft Bridge near Leatherhead, but I have never happened to see it do so, and had the greatest difficulty in discovering the Swallows, which, when I saw them, were brimming with very muddy water; the stream was as full as possible. The best comment on the legend of the diving Mole is Thomas Fuller's in the Worthies:—