I live in the oldest village in England. How come? Well, in a field below the big house, there is a Mesolithic pit dwelling dating back some 10,000 years. This is the oldest known man-made dwelling in England — at least according to Dr Louis Leakey, who excavated it and wrote about it in The Spectator in December 1950. Prehistoric man instinctively knew that the Surrey Hills are a wonderful place in which to live.
Today, I suspect most people see them as a slightly blurry backdrop to the annual RideLondon-Surrey cycle infestation. I see them as a hidden gem.
Surrey is England’s most wooded county and if you drive east from Guildford, birthplace of P.G. Wodehouse and possessed of ‘the most beautiful high street in England’, according to Charles Dickens, you enter a magical land of hills and trees, carpeted blue in spring, dappled green in summer, blazing red and gold in autumn.
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