Surrey Hills and Box Hill Bends · part 3

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Mitcham

   Mitcham once smelled of lavender. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the fields here supplied much of London's lavender and herbs for perfumes and medicines, and the name still turns up on local street signs. Today it is a dense, busy South London district, but it has kept two large open spaces: Mitcham Common, a wide area of grass, scrub and ponds, and the old cricket green, where the game has been played for centuries, and which the locals will tell you is one of the oldest cricket grounds in the world.

   Read the complete Mitcham write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Surrey Hills and Box Hill Bends checkpoint 8 is where the day begins. Next is High point near Kemsing.

2. 2. High point near Kemsing

   Planning note

   You top out here; the road stops climbing. Next is Scenic stretch in Grays.

3. 3. Scenic stretch in Grays

   Planning note

   about 90 km into the recorded legs you reach Scenic stretch in Grays. Next is Back to Surrey Hills.

4. 4. Back to Surrey Hills

   The forest is what is left of a huge royal hunting ground, and it covers about two thousand hectares of ancient woodland, heath and ponds, running from the edge of London to the Essex countryside. The trees are mostly hornbeam and beech, many of them pollarded, cut high in the past to give a crop of wood, and they have an odd, twisted shape.

   Read the complete Surrey Hills write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Back to Surrey Hills closes the day.