RICHARD WILLIAMSON Country Walk...Stubb Hill and Hammer Wood

The distance is 4.5km (2.7 miles), and there is limited roadside parking top of Iping Lane at road junction SU852243.

Strong footwear required with some mud in places.

Walk north, into restricted byway (purple arrow) which is Sharvers Lane. HG Wells enjoyed this area and we could be back a century with his time machine, into tunnels of trees travelling to Tono Bungay.

An ancient stone wall, trees with gripping roots and the occasional stream-running wadi make the first 450m memorable.

But then turn left on ancient fingerpost through chestnut coppice to a sort of mock-Tudor Stubbsfield.

At the dip look to left for nine stems of black locust trees with deeply-fissured bark and peapod fruits.

Which Robinia is this? Brought to Europe by French botanist Jean Robin in 1601, grossly popularised by William Cobbett in 1820 and thought to be the tree that sustained John the Baptist in the wilderness by zealous missionaries, the false acacia has today lost a lot of its mystique.

Turn right on to road for 150m then left on yellow arrow up the bank into Chithurst Monastery woods. We follow the valley on a left-handed circle to great hammer pond built by Elizabethan engineers.

Ornamental plantings of bamboos, tsuga, rhododendron reminded me of the excesses of Edward James in this otherwise natural woodland of oaks, hazel, sweet chestnut and Scots pine.

Ignore permissive path to left by massive beech, but walk steep downhill to stream and pond.

Gargoylian beech roots on the banks in fantastic shapes like ranks of elders watching you. Mini cliffs of moss as we keep on leftwards.

Pass what I call the William Blake beech with its massed roots like his tumultuous portrait of God in Heaven.

Climbing uphill, we find a road for a dozen paces, quickly leaving it again to turn left into woods. Again go half left on fingerpost downhill past several specimen chestnuts, spruces and firs.

Hammer pond to left has wild waterbirds such as tufted and pochard ducks, kingfisher and heron.

Reaching Bridge Cottage sharp left along road over bridge, past female and male yew trees who have 
been together for 200 years, and uphill into another wonderful cavern of trees, a shadowed grotto of ochreous sandstone from a three-million-year-old seabed. Trees clinging to cliffs for dear life, a cold chasm of gloom.

At top of hill, sharp left on yellow arrow to follow the slight embankments of the old Roman road. Sandy fields show traces of Roman tile fragments.

This leads into woodland, where note a strange machine of wheels and screw, pulleys and frame thrown into brambles. Someone should rescue it. What can it have been?

To road, to turn right downhill back to curious old Morris machine with wheels, gears, chassis etc, a real old time machine if ever I saw one.