Norbury Park also has its famous trees. The Druids' Walk, a path running under enormous yews, is no longer open to the public. But Louis Jennings, thirty years ago, saw the trees and preserved a memory of them in Field Paths and Green Lanes:—

"As the path descends the shadows deepen, and you arrive at a spot where a mass of yews of great size and vast age stretch up the hill, and beyond to the left as far as the eye can penetrate through the obscurity. The trees in their long and slow growth have assumed many wild forms, and the visitor who stands there towards evening, and peers into that sombre grove, will sometimes yield to the spell which the scene is sure to exercise on imaginative natures; he will half fancy that these ghostly trees are conscious creatures, and that they have marked with mingled pity and scorn the long processions of mankind come and go like the insects of a day, through the centuries during which they have been stretching out their distorted limbs nearer and nearer to each other. Thick fibrous shoots spring out from their trunks, awakening in the memory long-forgotten stories of huge hairy giants, enemies of mankind even as the "double-fatal" yew itself was supposed to be in other days. The bark stands in distinct layers, the outer ridges mouldering away, like the fragments of a wall of some ruined castle. The tops are fresh and green, but all below in that sunless recess seems dead."

In another respect Norbury Park has changed—in the opportunities the Mole running through the park offers to anglers wishing to catch large trout. Mr. C.J. Swete, writing in his Handbook of Epsom, not longer ago than 1853, is pleased to take his reader with him by the banks of the Mole, in which he has obtained "permission from the proprietor to gather some of the finny treasures of its liquid mines." Quite unwarrantably, he assumes that his reader is no fisherman:—

"Well, now, cast out your line, you have a respectable cast, for here the river is broad, you can scarce cast your line across it. Well, you must be a little patient,—You cannot expect to catch a fish the moment you throw in.... I see you are not a great proficient at the piscatory science. Cast out very little line at first, perhaps about the length of your rod, and then increasing by degrees, you will soon be able to throw full across and with precision. Ah! now you have a fine fish; let him down the stream a little. Now bring him close to the shore. Stay! It is safer to land him with the net. For this stream it is a very excellent fish, exactly three pounds weight, I find. How do I know it is just three pounds? I will tell you."

He proceeds to do so. He knows because he has measured the fish and finds him nineteen inches long by ten in girth, and if you do the sum his way, it works out at three pounds. "This is in accordance, as you suppose, with the mathematical law that similar solids are to each other in the triplicate ratio of one of their dimensions." That is the way to measure trout in Norbury Park.

Two quaintly spelt epitaphs can be read on the black marble tombstones in Mickleham Church. Under one lies the body of Peter de la Hay, "Eldest Yeoman of his Majesties Confectionary Office, who Departed this Liee" in 1684, and under the other Thomas Tooth, "Yeaman of his Maties Sculery, who deceased this Life" a year later.

Almost opposite Juniper Hall is Fredley Farm, once the home of "Conversation" Sharp, hat-maker, poet and member of Parliament. Fredley Farm, in the years between 1797 and 1835, when Sharp lived there, must have been visited by more distinguished poets, authors, politicians, wits, scholars and artists than any other house in Surrey. Wordsworth came there, and Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey and Moore; he talked painting with Lawrence, and sculpture with Chantrey; Macaulay talked with him "about everything and everybody," and so did Grote and Mill and Lockhart and Jeffrey; Porson was there, and perhaps had his favourite porter for breakfast; and the politicians were without number—Brougham, Sheridan, Grattan, Talleyrand, Huskisson, and almost a link with to-day, Lord John Russell. Macaulay has left a few sentences which greater men than Sharp might not deserve as an epitaph: "One thing I have observed in Sharp, which is quite peculiar to him among town-wits and diners-out. He never talks scandal. If he can say nothing good of a man, he holds his tongue." Yet with all his virtues and all his conversation, Sharp lacks his Boswell.

A little further towards Dorking the road crosses the Mole at Burford Bridge. The inn at Burford Bridge, a sort of Swindon of the Dorking Road, where everybody stops to have lunch or dinner, perhaps will again welcome a great admiral and finish a great poem. Nelson stayed there before leaving to command at Trafalgar; Keats came there to finish Endymion. His visit, he writes to his friend Benjamin Bailey, is "to change the scene—change the air, and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting about 500 lines." Night on the hill inspired him; in another letter he shows the way for other poets: "I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon—'you a' seen the moon'—came down and wrote some lines." And it is of the inn at Burford Bridge that the story is told, by Mortimer Collins, in his "Walk through Surrey," of Keats and the waiter. Keats was reciting Endymion:—

"For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath and yellow brooms,
And cold mushrooms;"

The waiter heard, and obeyed, bringing mushrooms uncooked on a plate and a decanter of sherry. But that story is a little too artificial.