Farleigh – Great Park Wood

Page contents

About
Gallery
Parking
Poo bins?
Self-guided walk

About

Farleigh is a village in the civil parish of Chelsham and Farleigh in the Tandridge District of Surrey (although it became part of the London Borough of Croydon from 1965 until 1969.) It was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 as the manor of Ferlega. 

Farleigh’s Greatpark Wood is sited next to what used to be the Croydon Mental Hospital, which was built in 1903 and apparently the first psychiatric institution to have been called a mental hospital rather than an asylum. Renamed Warlingham Park Hospital in 1937, it was hailed as a leader in developing new treatments and revolutionising patient care before and after World War II. With an open door policy and no fences, the concepts of therapy and rehabilitation were greatly expanded here and it was the first hospital in the UK to provide a specialist unit for alcohol and drug dependency.

The hospital closed in 1999 and the site was acquired shortly after by Berkeley Homes. All the hospital buildings, apart from the Grade II listed clock tower, were demolished to make way for an upmarket gated housing estate. The hospital’s cemetery remains conserved as it was before the houses were built – access to it is granted a couple of times a year by way of open days.

Greatpark wood (and Littlepark too) hides an impressive display of bluebells in the spring, particularly the area tucked away behind the cemetery away from the main paths.

Gallery: What’s it like here?

GOOGLEMAPS LINK: https://goo.gl/maps/whPyVmeVYZz4RUoT9

WHAT3WORDS: https://w3w.co/social.discrepancy.bonus

NEAREST POSTCODE: CR6 9EL

Poo bins?

Next to the bus shelter opposite the pub.

---

Exit the Harrow Inn car park and cross Farleigh Road just before the roundabout to the pavement on the other side. Turn left, pass the bus shelter and cross the next road (Harrow Road), which leads off the roundabout opposite the pub. Go through the gap in the hedges next to the finger post on the corner.

Take the left-hand path that passes through another hedge onto Great Farleigh Green. Cross the first driveway with the four black posts and, immediately after the second driveway, take the diagonal path on the right, which heads away from the road and towards Littlepark Woods. At its end, it joins another path, bear left and walk towards the bench ahead. Turn right onto the path just before you reach the bench, passing between the line of large trees and into the woodland.

During late April and early May, there are bluebells here.

At the marker post, where on the left there is a makeshift hedge of stacked branches with a gap, continue straight – I mention this as it features later on the walk. Shortly after, you’ll pass another marker post (in the scrub on the left).

Go all the way to the end of the path, where you’ll meet a line of garden fences. Turn left.

Continue straight at the next marker post, which is in the middle of the path, crossing the bottom of Daniel’s Lane (on your right), and go between the wooden posts ahead. A little further on, the woods on your left give way to a big field.

At the five-pronged finger post just by a big tree, ignore the path to the right with the staggered barrier and the one on the far left, which runs up along the edge of the field. Instead, take the middle path, which also has a staggered barrier and a black circle with a yellow arrow. A low fence runs along its right-hand side.

Shortly, the fence changes to a 6ft tall one, which makes the path feel very enclosed (this isn’t the most interesting part of the walk, that’s for sure), before dropping back to the low fence as you arrive at a swanky residential estate – the exclusive (and extremely expensive) Greatpark development, which was built on the site of the old Croydon Mental Hospital in the early 2000s. The distinctive Grade II listed clock/water tower, painstakingly refurbished in 2012, looms high in the sky over to your right.

After a short distance, you’ll come to the black wrought iron gates of the hospital’s cemetery on the left. When Jett and I last came here, we saw a deer through the gate bars. Predictably, Jett kicked off, although thankfully she can’t fit through the gaps between the bars – sensibly, the deer scarpered.

Anyway, as you continue onwards, look out for the tree on the left where nothing happened in 1832 – this made me laugh the first time I saw it. The housing estate will come to an end and your path – still fenced on the right – will take you back into the woods, but now you are in Greatpark Wood.

Woodland times now – always fun to describe beyond “pass a tree, pass another tree, turn left at a tree, pass a tree”!

Just keep walking through the woods, looking out where the path snakes around the right-hand side of a tree that’s growing diagonally from right to left away from the path. Immediately after this tree, there is a holly bush opposite a horizontal tree trunk, which has large flat fungi growing on it. And immediately after that holly bush and opposite the fungi covered trunk, there is a tiny little path off to the left. Turn left down it and wind through coniferous trees.

It’s a super windy path and can be pretty churned up and muddy in some places during the winter. It’s also quite narrow/not very clear in the winter when there is a lot of leaf cover on the floor but much more visible at other times of year and very much the ‘main’ path. Just stay on it, you don’t want to take any side paths. I’ll now mention some things to look out for to help you be sure you haven’t gone off track as you follow it.

There will be a little dip next to a gnarly tree with a split trunk and you go straight over the little cross paths just after this tree.

The path will very slightly ascend and go over a small tree trunk and then round two sizeable ones. You’ll walk along the edge of fields/paddocks on the right,. The path goes right through a former fence line – the concrete posts remain standing like a line of soldiers across your path but the fence is no more.

There will be a couple more fallen trees to zig zag around and you will go over a few logs/branches. Yet more winding and zig zagging through the wood, with fields still visible through the trees on the right. You go over a couple of fallen branches that lay across the path and then over another two tall fallen trees. The church you can see beyond the field on the right is St Mary’s Church and regarded a ‘medieval jewel’ as it is largely as it was when first built back in 1080.

There will be a few more logs and branches across the path to navigate but keep as far to the left as you can (as near to the field boundary as the path allows) and you’ll exit the woods at a fence with a kissing gate in it. Go through the gate, which has a plaque dedicated to a former Croydon Rambler, John Kemble. Google yielded absolutely no information about this man in relation to the ramblers specifically, but I learnt that there was a John Kemble in the nearby south Croydon area, who was born in April 1937. I wonder if they were one and the same? Either way, I guess Mr Kemble loved walking here and it’s nice to take a moment to think about that.

Cross the middle of the field towards the woods ahead – these are Littlepark woods that you came through at the start.

Enter the woods and pass the two trees that are growing close together in the middle of the path (either side is fine), then follow the path ahead, up and away from the fence line. Go through the gap in the stacked branches behind which there is a marker post. You should recognise where you are from earlier – it is the stick hedge I mentioned near the beginning of the walk.

There will be a path running left to right across your way and two coming off diagonally ahead – one bearing to the left, one to the right. Take the one on the left diagonal.

Follow this down to the garden fences (marker post in the middle of the path at its end) and turn right. This fence-lined path brings you down to the corner by the Harrow, where you go out of the gap, cross the road and you’re back at the pub.