Left and right of Leith Hill are two great camps, both of them firmly linked in local legend with Cæsar and the Danes, and both of them connected by history with neither. Like the camp on St. George's Hill, the camps on Anstiebury and Holmbury Hills were ancient British settlements; places of refuge where the men of the tribe left their women and children and cattle while they themselves went out with their stone-tipped arrows to find the men of other tribes. Anstiebury Camp is the larger, and covers eleven acres or so of what is now deep beechwood.
Anstiebury has an easy and certain derivation. Hean Stige Byrig is early English for the Bury of the High-way. Mr. H.E. Malden, in the Surrey Archæological Collections, points out that this may be the Roman Stone Street, which passes half a mile left of the hill, or it may be the ancient British road which runs from Coldharbour to Dorking; the latter he thinks most likely. Certainly a native with proper pride would hardly refer to the newly engineered road in the distance in preference to the wonderful highway close at hand. It runs from the hilltop north and south, cut deep in the yellow sandstone as the ancient Briton liked his pathways cut. A man twenty feet high could walk invisible between the banks of that sheltering trackway.
Anstiebury camp came near to harbouring a modern garrison early in the last century, when the Napoleon scare was at its wildest heights, and good citizens went to bed praying that the next day "Boney" might not be thundering at the town gates; it was actually proposed that the old British Camp should be used to shelter the women and children of Dorking. Another battle, an extra rumour or two, might have filled the breaches with the dauntless subjects of King George. Happily, that cloud vanished.
Round the camps and the battlefields of the heights of Leith Hill and Holmbury cluster the names of wilder enemies than man. Bearhurst, Boars' Hill and Wolf's Hill belong to the neighbourhood, and members of the Surrey Archæological Society have heard Mr. Malden discourse incisively on the scavengers' work after the battle of Ockley, when the West Saxons buried their dead, and there were no Danes left alive to bury theirs.
Leith Hill has another curious record of an animal. On July 27, 1876, a tourist walking over the hill trod upon a snake, which bit him; he managed to get to Ockley, but died in two days. The interest of the record is that Mr. J.S. Bright, the historian of Dorking, says that the snake was a black adder, Coronella laevis, while Mr. Boulenger, in his list of Surrey snakes does not admit that the Coronella laevis has ever occurred in the county.
From Anstiebury the old high road runs steep to Dorking—a road of later memories of sudden death than British battles. On a gallows at the foot of the hill three highwaymen once hung in chains. A house has been built upon the very spot.
Looking towards Dorking from Westcott.