Surrey’s literary landscapes

Karen Neville

Local author Alice Fowler reveals how the nature on our doorsteps has been a source of great inspiration to many writers

Every writer knows the best way to get words on the page is often to go out for a walk. In Surrey, we’re lucky to have an array of natural landscapes, from chalk grassland to rivers, heathlands and woods. Across the centuries, many celebrated writers including H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.M. Forster and Lewis Carroll – have used our stunning countryside to enrich their writing and help ideas flow.  

H.G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds, delighted in the countryside around Woking, where he came to live in 1895: “Close at hand was a pretty and rarely used canal amidst pine woods, a weedy canal, beset with loose-strife, spiræa, forget-me-nots and yellow water lilies… in all directions stretched open and undeveloped heath lands…” 

Wells lived at ‘a small resolute semi-detached villa’ called Lynton (now 141 Maybury Road), where he spent his mornings writing and revising proofs. In the afternoons, he walked or cycled in the surrounding countryside, “marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians”. In just 18 months in Woking, Wells planned and wrote three novels – making nearby Horsell Common famous, as the setting for his Martian invasion. 

Today, the towpaths along Woking’s canals remain delightful places to stroll, while Horsell Common’s 916 acres north of the town are owned and managed by the Horsell Common Preservation Society. Its heathland, woods and meadows support rare species including the Dartford warbler, woodlark and silver-studded blue butterfly. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, moved to rural Surrey around the same time as Wells, hoping to improve the health of his first wife Louisa, who suffered from TB. “If we could have ordered nature to construct a spot for us, we could not have hit upon anything more perfect”, Doyle wrote of the site at Hindhead, where his house Undershaw was completed in 1897. Finding peace and creative inspiration in the Surrey countryside, Doyle wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles while living there. Today, visitors can enjoy spectacular walks and views at Hindhead Commons and the Devil’s Punch Bowl, thanks to the preservation work of the National Trust. 

Another of our best-loved novelists, E.M. Forster – author of A Passage to India, among other enduring works – has a close connection to Surrey and the National Trust. Forster lived at a house called Harnham in Weybridge, from 1905 to 1924, and wrote all six of his novels in Surrey. He drew inspiration from the Surrey Hills, using the picturesque villages of Coldharbour and Holmbury St Mary as settings in A Room with a View. When Piney Copse, a four-acre wood on the western boundary of Abinger Roughs, close to his mother’s home at West Hackhurst, was under threat from development, Forster purchased it with funds from sales of A Passage to India. The wood was acquired by the National Trust following his death in 1970. Visitors to the small but charming Piney Copse can see the sign, pictured right, that commemorates Forster’s gift.  

Many writers, myself included, find the rhythm of our steps out walking can help generate ideas. Lewis Carroll (real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was walking in the North Downs close to Guildford when an unusual line came into his head: ‘For the Snark was a Boojum, you see’. From that snatch of inspiration, he created The Hunting of the Snark, the longest, most intricate nonsense poem in the English language. 

Today, walkers can enjoy Carroll’s route along the Hog’s Back between Guildford and Farnham as part of the North Downs Way long distance footpath, linking Surrey to the coast at Dover. 

Nature certainly influences my writing too. Two of the short stories in my collection, The Truth Has Arms and Legs, are inspired by local landscapes – Merrow Downs in Guildford – a delightful spot for walking, brimming with wild orchids as I write – and the Hurtwood, near Ewhurst, a much larger area of heath – and woodland, open to walkers, riders and cyclists. 

Yet, while our county is famously wooded, it is also nature depleted, with rivers polluted and insect numbers dramatically down. A recent book by writer Robert Macfarlane suggests we need a less human-centric way of looking at our world, with natural features such as rivers given legal rights, much like people. 

I’ll be exploring this idea, and many more, in two full-day Nature Writing Workshops this summer. The first, for Surrey Wildlife Trust in August, takes place at the Trust’s stunning learning centre at Nower Wood near Leatherhead. There we’ll immerse ourselves in nature, look at nature writing in both fiction and non-fiction, and produce writing ourselves. Then, in September, as part of the fabulous Guildford Book Festival, I’ll be running a Nature Writing Workshop at the National Trust’s Hatchlands Park, near Guildford. Please do join me for one (or both!) of these exciting days, exploring how writing, creativity and nature, go hand in hand.