Surrey

Walk Details:
Date: 22/10/2004
Total ascent: 142m/466ft
Total distance walked: 3.78mi
Walk difficulty: 4/10
Enjoyment rating: 4/10
Best bits: Tea & cake at top, the tower, "secret" trig point,
Worst bits: The worst "honeypot" ever!
Car Parking: There's loads of car parks all around. The southern ones are closer and have less ascent, the southern ones are slightly quieter

Top details:
Name: Leith Hill
County top number: 16 of 207
Grid reference: TQ 13935 43186 (our own reading) MAP
Height above sea level: 295m/968ft
How nice was it?: 5/10 for the top, 2/10 for the ascent
Description/Notes: Highest point in Surrey. Also a marilyn. Has a tower and a trig point at the summit. Generally heavily wooded, clearing at the top.

The Walk:

We'd originally planned to make this one of the very first county tops that we climbed, but it didn't quite pan out that way. It had meant to be a kind of celebratory top to start the challenge - if you include the height of the tower, it's the only hill in the "greater south-east" over the height of 1,000ft (without the tower Walbury Hill in Berkshire is actually a little taller). My Dad always claimed that this 1,000ft figure turned it into a mountain, & was a little annoyed when we disagreed.

We would be returning to the county of our birth, and several of our relatives still lived there. We'd have loved to have visited them, but we had five county tops to fit in today, and felt we'd be too muddy, sweaty and rushed to be able to fit into polite company. So if any of our relatives are reading this; we're sorry, we'll make it up to you some other time!

We'd heard that Leith Hill was a bit of a "honeypot" - completely over-run with people. On a Friday morning we fancied it would be quiet enough, and were thoroughly looking forward to it. I was also looking forward to trying out my new GPS device (a Garmin Geko 301) that my wife had given me for my birthday.

An amazingly quick run around the M25 (not one hold-up, even through the roadworks section near Heathrow), and some "gorge"-ous roads through the North Downs bought us to a car park to the north of Leith Hill. That was the plan, anyway. The pink OS map (helpfully loaned by Reading Library) showed the car park in question as being midway between two roads. Looking at the pattern of paths and roads, I guessed the access to the car park would be from the hamlet of Broadmoor, which would also be a handy point to start our walk. There seemed to be a lot of parking bays on the side of the road, and we guessed that this was the parking marked on the map.

Switching on my Geko we headed off up through woodland on the Greensand Way. It was a good quality path that gently sloped uphill through the woods, but suffered the same problem as all woodland paths; it gets quite dull. Although the map told us that we were walking up through a fairly steep sided valley, all we could see were trees. There were no nice views at all, and the woods soon became a bit monotonous. At least we had them to ourselves though.

Eventually we turned right on a much steeper path, joining one of the "official" circular walks marked by fluorescent green posts (these were much too bright for the time of morning!). Immediately we fell in behind another couple of walkers, proving that the marked trails were much busier than the route we had chosen.

We quickly reached the top of the hill - despite the steep final approach it seemed a fairly easy ascent (perhaps I'm finally getting fitter?) to find that there were already half a dozen people there, despite it only being only half ten in the morning. They were all sitting around the tower in various stages of repose. The tower itself was smaller then I expected, but featured a nicely crenellated top, a tea shop (hurrah!) at the bottom, and was surrounded by a pleasant open grassy area with views in two directions. The tea shop had signs up saying "the highest point in the south east, and we resisted the urge to tell them about Walbury Hill.

The tower isn't quite at the top of the hill. The top of the tower is obviously the highest point, but on the basis that man-made structures are non-permanent and therefore don't count, the actual county top is quite clearly a slight rise a little way to the north-west. We took our tea and (excellent) apple cake up to a bench that someone had thoughtfully placed at the county top, where we were delighted to discover a secret hidden trig point. Rather than the usual concrete pillar, this one was just a rock set in the ground with the distinctive triangle and pole-hole carved in it. It looked like the first trig point ever, possibly dating back to neolithic times! We took a GPS reading on the new Geko (shown above) and settled down to enjoy our tea and the somewhat hazy but still impressive view, briefly interrupted when a strong gust of wind initiated a frantic (and no doubt amusing to the spectators) bout of map-chasing across the hill top.

Our enjoyment didn't last long. Two separate parties of schoolchildren turned up, followed by several more groups of walkers. Shouts, screams and laughter started to echo around the hill. Whilst it was great to see kids being encouraged to get out and walk and enjoy the countryside, we wished they weren't enjoying it quite so close to us. We bolted our tea and headed for the tower before the stairs became impassable due to a mass of struggling children!

After paying a National Trust chap two shiny nuggets we entered and were immediately surprised - the tower was like the tardis, seemingly wider inside than out. There were a couple of rooms inside with an exhibition inside about the history, geology and botany of the hill and tower, with an excellent 3D interactive map of the area. We learnt that the tower had been built in three stages and had only surpassed the magic thousand foot barrier on the third rebuilding. We also learnt that on a clear day you could actually see the English Channel, and that we had actually parked in the wrong place!

Emerging at the top of the tower (although it was wider than expected, it seemed even shorter from inside than out) we could see good but very hazy views in all directions; other nearby hills looked quite dramatic through the thin cloud. Soon children started to arrive and we fought our way back down the stairs and headed off downhill in what we though would be the right direction to complete a nice circular walk. We saw some fly agaric,or rather the remnants of one which had sadly been kicked to pieces by the passing hordes - another sad indictment of Leith Hill's "Honeypot" status.

We came to a car park much more quickly than we expected, and the Geko enabled us to establish very quickly where we were, and to turn right to correct our course and take us back along a long, muddy and heavily wooded path to Broadmoor.

Overall the actual ascent of Leith Hill is pretty poor, but the stunning top (and tea and cake) more than makes up for it. It could be thoroughly enjoyable were it not for the huge number of visitors - given how busy it was on a Friday morning, it must be unbearable at the weekend! I'd note that the tower is only open certain days, so you might want to check out the National Trust website before setting out.