A day in Mole Valley

London has been experiencing great frosts of late. The temperature seldom falls far below zero, even in winter, but we've just come out of two or three weeks of regular freezes. One day it fell as far as minus six - the coldest I've experienced outside some Alpine ski-fields.


With the great frosts came a succession of perfect blue-sky days, and on Saturday the 3rd, the weekend before we were due to start back at work, Frances and I took a walk in the Mole Valley in the Surrey countryside south west of London.

I have an old book of walks which has inspired many days out and this time it promised a "forgotten and undisturbed corner of countryside and woodland." Packing a few breakfast bars for sustenance, we followed a course through field, farm and forest from Ockley to Wallis Wood, a place so weirdly remote it had no mobile phone signal (yet only thirty minutes or so from London by car).

As it happened, our trusty book contained a few errors, and we were lost in a meadow for half an hour, but, heading in what we guessed was a southerly direction, we eventually found our track again, marked by some letters carved into an old birch tree.

The camera ran out just as we arrived at the old church, hidden in the middle of the forest as if in a fairy tale. The sun turned into late-afternoon sepia. It was like we'd found some corner of Tuscany masquerading as darkest Surrey.

And then...back to work.