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still have a working rail stop. I make my way up Glazier's Lane past inoffensive new brick bungalows-one, inevitably, is called Wisteria-all built atop parish plots that once housed inoffensive old stone cottages. In between them, I can see ancient farmlands peeping through. Across these fields is an incongruously tall brick smokestack attached, as best I can tell, to absolutely nothing at all. But all else here is cozily domestic; the road crookedly leads onward past an intersection with the A323, past Normandy Common and a little pub, toward the old neighborhood known by the quaint name of Christmas Pie.
    No Pie for me, thanks: I tramp onward down the A323, letting Vauxhalls whiz past me as I walk on the verge. Odd little local businesses, washed up like flotsam from faraway towns, appear at irregular intervals along the road. A karaoke and PA shop, which surely must be doing its business by mail from this location. A glazier, inexplicably not based back on Glazier's Lane, advertises itself with the rather dispiriting motto "Probably the Best Window Installers in Your Area." Soon even these curiously misplaced shops disappear, and the once-hidden farmland stretches out on both sides. The side of the road becomes a ditch, filled with brackish water and hubcaps; growing in and around it are a wild profusion of winter-wilted daffodils and tulip stalks awaiting the return of spring, and wildly capillary trees; for the trees here are, for lack of a better word, very branchy. And then for long stretches come the hedges.
    Ah, the hedgerows: I am in England. It's hard to imagine a time when the rural landscape was not thus. Hedged-in country lanes are so utterly English, indeed so utterly this latitude of England. Up northward, in the rough tracts of Scotland and the Yorkshire dales, the fields are bounded with piled stone walls and stiles; but here in Surrey the road is hemmed in by dense greenery. I walk slowly along the verge, squinting my eyes at one stretch of the endless miles of twisting and gnarled foliage, peering in at the interlocking branches and trying to count. One . . . two? Two species here, I think. Hawthorn, of course-there is always hawthorn in these hedges-but there also looks to be some blackthorn growing in there.
    There's an old rule of thumb for dating hedges, commonly known as Hooper's Rule. It goes like this:
    Age of the hedge= [(No. of species per 30yards) x 110] +30
    For two species, then, that works out to about 250 years. So take away the cars, take away the glazier's shop and the karaoke, take away the cat's-eyes in the road—take away the road itself. And imagine a gentleman walking along this muddy lane those two centuries ago, back when these old hedges were still young. In his arms, he bears a box of bones.
    William Cobbett was born into the life of a farmer's son: a world that in the 1760s was small and circumscribed, with age-old tasks to keep the boy busy. "I do not remember the time when I did not earn my living," he later mused. "My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seed, and the rooks from the peas. When I trudged afield, with my wooden bottle and my satchel over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and, at the close of day, to reach home was a task of infinite labour."
    His childhood in Surrey was one of relentless work and simple pleasures: for amusement, he and his brothers would shove each other down a steep slope, "rolling down the hill like a barrel or a log of wood" and laughing uncontrollably as they got dirty and torn up. He had little formal schooling, and for the rest of his life considered that hiiside-where he and his brothers bled in and breathed in the dirt, where he covered himself in it and picked it out of his mouth and nose-as his schooling. "It is impossible to say how much I owe to that sandhill," he later claimed. Upon hearing that the king kept magnificent gardens in Kew, he eagerly ran away at the age of eleven