The town of Dorking lies in the county of Surrey, where the River Mole snakes through a gap in the North Downs. This pass is of some strategic importance; the pill-boxes found throughout the area are a reminder that during the two World Wars this range of hills and the passes that traverse it would have been the place for the last-ditch defense of London had the enemy armies landed.

Just to the north-east of Dorking is the best known hill in the North Downs, an imposing chalk scarp covered in woodland. This is Box Hill, and no hill in the south makes more use of its modest height, for it is less than 700 feet high. As its escarpment completely dominates Dorking and the Mole Valley, the views from the top are stunning - perhaps the best in the south-east of England.

Box Hill has been well known as a beauty-spot for a long time. Jane Austen set it as the location for a disastrous picnic in her novel, Emma (1815). John Keats wrote the last 500 lines of his poem Endymion (1818) after a moonlit stroll on top (having also walked its steep wooded slopes after dark I would contend that this is slightly risky), and it was at the inn just beneath the northern shoulder of the hill that Lord Nelson said farewell to Lady Hamilton before setting sail for what would be his last voyage, ending in the Battle of Trafalgar.

The scarp face of Box Hill is fun to walk up as it ascends through the woods (the tracks have been made easier in recent years with the addition of steps), and the stroller soon reaches a flat grassy sward from which Dorking looks like a toy-town spread out below. The views stretch for many miles taking in the North Downs, the Greensand Ridge to the south, and beyond them the weald and the South Downs. As Hilaire Belloc observed in his book The Path to Rome (1902), using Box Hill and Chanctonbury (on the South Downs) as his example, looking across from one to the other one seems to overlook and possess it all.

Perhaps even better for the casual walker is the aforementioned northern shoulder, the Burford Spur, a long grassy slope where families are often to be seen picnicking, looking towards the wooded ridges north and west of Box Hill, which include Ranmore Common and Norbury Park. There is also a fine secondary top to the rear (i.e. the north-east), Juniper Top, which is not easy to find without a map and thus has relatively few visitors; from there the view takes in Juniper Hall, a mansion where French exiles stayed in the years of the Revolution.

Juniper Top is grassy, as is the top of Box Hill; but its slopes and the valley below, Juniper Bottom, are covered in woodland, including some juniper bushes. The woods on Box Hill have, of course, plenty of pretty box trees growing at all angles (as they tend to), but there are also stately beeches and yew trees, the pale beech trunks making a pleasing contrast with the black-green yews. The scent of pine trees is always present throughout the area, and silver birches abound; there is an especially attractive birch grove at the northern edge of Juniper Top.

There are many popular hiking routes around Box Hill, lying as it does on the most popular section of the North Downs Way. In fine weather the routes amount to little more than a stroll, although some of the chalk slopes are steep, and in wet weather they can be very slippery.