I reached Norbury Park be taking the train from Brighton to Box Hill and Westhumble station (hourly service, 90 minute journey time). From the train station I walked up Crabtree lane to the Norbury Park car park. The footpaths around Druid's Grove are currently closed due to Ash felling because of ash dieback. However, I decided to accept the risk of an ash tree falling on me; none did.
All sections of text in italics are quotations, sources sited.
I am only an amateur naturalist; thus all identifications are provisional; if you note a mistake in identification please feel free to tell me. If you want to contact me about any aspect of this blog, email me at simeon[underscore]elliott[at]gmail[dot]com
In 1931, Norbury Park was auctioned and Surrey County Council bought the site to prevent it being developed. This was the first intervention of its kind to protect the countryside in England and the Trust continues to manage the site for nature conservation on their behalf.
The woodland areas are awash with bluebells and other wildflowers in spring, providing habitat for dormice, roe deer, badgers and foxes and all three British woodpeckers.
Veteran trees provide roosts for a variety of bat species, such as pipistrelle, noctule and common long-eared and the yew trees in Druid’s Grove may be up to 3,000 years old.
The 33ha of chalk grassland, which is managed by the Trust, can sustain up to 40 species of flowering plants in one square metre, including rare bee and fly orchids. These in turn attract a wide variety of butterflies and other insects. Norbury Park | Surrey Wildlife Trust
Screen shot from OS Maps app | Digital map app (ordnancesurvey.co.uk)
The blue areas of this map show the area of Ancient Woodland; all the photos in this post were taken in woodland of ancient and semi-natural grade.
Norbury Park: Druid's Grove
On the steep slopes [of Norbury Park] to your right is Druids Grove with its ancient yew trees. The yew woodland on this section of the North Downs, together with extensive Box woodland, is a rare habitat found in very few other places and nowhere is it as extensive as here. Druids Grove - Surrey Hills National Landscape
I can't describe the Yews better than Louis J. Jennings did in 1828:
The Druids' walk is long and narrow, with a declivity, in some places rather steep, to the left hand, and rising ground to the right, all densely covered with trees. The yew begins to make its appearance soon after the little gate is passed, like the advance guard of an
army. In certain spots it seems to have successfully driven out all other trees. As the path descends, the shadows deepen, and you arrive at a spot where a mass of yews of great size and vast age stretch up the hill, and beyond to the left as far as the eye can penetrate through the obscurity.
The trees in their long and slow growth have assumed many wild forms, and the visitor who stands there towards evening, and peers into that sombre grove, will sometimes yield to the spell which the scene is sure to exercise on imaginative natures — he will half fancy that these ghostly trees are conscious creatures, and that they have marked with mingled pity and scorn the long processions of mankind come and go like the insects of a day, through the centuries during which they have been stretching out their distorted limbs nearer
and nearer to each other.
Thick fibrous shoots spring out from their trunks, awakening in the memory long-forgotten stories of huge hairy giants, enemies of mankind; even as the "double-fatal yew" itself was supposed to be in other days. The bark stands in distinct layers, the outer ridges mouldering away, like the fragments of a wall of some ruined castle. The tops are fresh and green, but all below in that sunless recess seems dead. At the foot of the deepest part of the grove there is a seat beneath a stern old king of the wood, but the genius loci seems to warn the intruder to depart — ancient superstitions are rekindled, and the haggard trees themselves seem to threaten that from a sleep beneath the " baleful yew," the weary mortal will wake no more. FIELD PATHS AND GREEN LANES: Louis J. Jennings (1878) quoted DRUIDS GROVE NORBURY PARK - SURREY, A Survey of its yews. Peter Norton & Hugh Milner (July 2012)
All of the photos below are of Yews, Taxus baccata, except for those individual labelled
Box, Buxus sempervirens
Glistening Inkcaps Coprinellus micaceus
Mossy fallen Ash trunks
Box, Buxus sempervirens
The east-facing scarp slope of Norbury Park on which the Druid's Grove of ancient Yews is viewed from Box Hill. The huge number of dead Ash can be seen around the Yews, Box and Pedunculate Oaks. Very concerning how widespread Ash dieback is on the North Downs (and the South Downs, where I live).
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