The River Mole meanders in an all but full-circle loop towards the Maserati- and Bentley-lined streets of Cobham before picking up pace over brown-blue riffles, where the early-morning sun elicits a kaleidoscopic dazzle of olive, emerald, violet and purple. A perishing wind, which has persisted for weeks, rattles a cyclist’s bones.
On the meadow in the nook of the bend, two Egyptian geese strut and graze. The male’s guttural, insistent and chuntering complaint becomes a cantankerous colloquy as it tears into flight, trailed by its quieter mate. The sun is more in than out, and barely peers over blackthorn for more than a second at a time. Within a patch of lesser celandines, most of the petals are still folded inward, and those that aren’t appear bleary and out-of-sorts, like the occasional passers-by at this time of day.
Clumps of white and red dead-nettle and yellow archangel blend into a Venn diagram of mint-family siblings. Pairs of great tits tumble together like lapwings along and around the hedgerows.
The Mole is a pretty river for most of its 50-mile length from just inside West Sussex to its confluence with the Thames at East Molesey, opposite Hampton Court, and deserves to be better known and celebrated. What renown it has derives from being the river traversable by stepping stones at the base of Box Hill, and from its habit, often purported as a reason for its name, of periodically ducking underground into swallow holes.
Defoe, in his Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Britain, described “its remarkable sinking into the earth … working its way under ground like a mole”, and was at pains to correct some erroneous observations made by another illustrious literary circumnavigator, William Camden, in Britannia, a century before. Pleasingly, Defoe noted that the water “trills away out of the river, and sinks insensibly into the ground”.
Further downstream, a bend before Surrey’s last fully-working watermill, Cobham Mill, the burgeoning sunshine catches the tangerine, pink-nibbed bills of greylags working sideways against the current, their elegant posture beautifully apposite on a Sunday of taking the air and going with the flow.
