If there’s a certain place that you return to whilst out for a walk, then it usually means it holds something a bit special for you.
For me, that’s the Hogsmill Local Nature Reserve in Ewell, an absolutely lush stretch of green that I’ll never get tired of wandering through.
It sits quietly behind the village, tucked between houses and the A3, and if you didn’t already know it was there, you could pass it without thinking twice.
But once you step onto the path and let it pull you in a little, it becomes something entirely different.
When the weather’s warm, or at the very least it hasn’t rained, it’s where I end up during lunch or after work, headphones on, more often than not with House of Memories playing.
What I like about it is that it never really feels like one single space.
One minute you’re on a narrow path with the river right beside you, the next you’re crossing small wooden bridges that cut over side channels, and then you reach the stepping stones where the whole walk slows down without anyone really deciding to.
People pause there, not because they have to, but because it breaks the rhythm in a way that makes you look properly at the water for a second before carrying on.
Further along, the ground rises slightly into these green hills that open the reserve so you can look back along the river.
The river is usually where I end up walking alongside, and even without knowing anything about it, you can tell it’s not quite like other rivers around here.
The Hogsmill River is a chalk stream, which means the water is naturally filtered through chalk underground before it reaches the surface, so it comes out clean for most of the year.
At first, it just looks like a clearer river than you’d expect in a place like this, but once you know what it is, it changes the way the whole walk feels.
One of the most interesting parts of the walk is Chamber Mead.
Chamber Mead is a wetland area designed to slow the water down before it reaches the river, so instead of runoff flowing straight into the Hogsmill, it now moves through reeds and shallow pools first, getting filtered naturally along the way.
You don’t really notice it doing that unless you stop and think about it, because it still just looks like part of the landscape rather than something engineered.
And then there are the stepping stones again downstream, which feel almost like the opposite of Chamber Mead, because they interrupt the river rather than working with it, forcing you into the middle of it for a moment before you step back onto the path.
The stepping stones are flooded, so if you do cross, wear your boots or expect wet feet.
There are water voles here now too.
Water voles disappeared from this stretch of river around 20 years ago and bringing them back took years of work.
Conservationists spent years trapping invasive mink, reshaping the riverbanks and building wetlands like Chamber Mead to give them a fighting chance.
Now, if you’re patient and quiet enough, there’s a small but real possibility that Ratty from The Wind in the Willows is somewhere nearby, slipping between the reeds while you walk past with your headphones in.
Most people using the reserve will never think about any of that.
For them, it’s just the cut‑through they take with the dog, or the place they bring the kids to burn off energy, or the loop they run when they’ve only got half an hour of daylight left.
But that’s sort of the point, as all of this work is folded into something that feels completely ordinary on the surface.
To me, the Hogsmill Local Nature Reserve is one of the biggest reasons I call Epsom & Ewell “sweet Surrey”.
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