Newlands Corner

Newlands Corner is an area of Surrey countryside of which 255 acres have been designated a nature reserve. The place is found to the east of Guildford: the reserve is owned by the Albury Estate and managed by the Surrey Wildlife Trust under an access agreement with the estate.

Features

The site reaches 567 feet above sea level with hill-grazed grass slopes below interspersed with trees. There are areas of chalk grassland and woodlands. Visible are some of the greatest prominences of the Western Greensand Ridge and the North Downs Way runs through the site. There are 129 ancient yews with a girth over 11 feet (which makes them some 500 years old and more) with some on the northern wooded slope over 20 feet girth: these are probably at least 1,000 years old. Some trees are so old that the centre is hollow and the whole tree can be walked through.^[1]

Newlands Corner was a key location in the crime writer Agatha Christie's disappearance in December 1926. Her car was found in a bush overhanging a chalk pit at Newlands Corner, at the bottom of the south side of the hill. She was found some days later having checked in under an alias at a hotel in Harrogate. This brief fame inspired the writers of Doctor Who to film a scene around those events set at Newlands Corner (in the episode "The Unicorn and the Wasp").

Drove Road at Newlands Corner is reckoned to he a good site in the region for amateur astronomy as it is a dark sky site, close to London and its southern satellite towns. With a downhill slope facing south, the viewer faces many constellations in winter. Once or twice a year the Guildford Astronomical Society and other local societies hold public events at Newlands Corner with about 25 telescopes and 150 members of the public in attendance.