'Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,' John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge. The gouged-out lanes which thread through and over the thickly wooded Surrey hills around his birthplace, Wotton, are really just tarmac versions of the tracks on which generation after generation of Evelyns travelled around their land, from Wotton itself to Abinger, Friday Street and on. Beside them, the beech trees, whose massive root balls bind the banks together like nature's gabions, still wear identity tags around their trunks proclaiming 'Evelyn Estate'.

LRB 8 June 2006 | PDF Download