Norbury Park

Norbury Park is a swathe of mixed wooded and agricultural land associated with its Georgian manor house near Leatherhead and Dorking, Surrey, which appears in the Domesday Book of 1086. It occupies mostly prominent land reaching into a bend in the Mole and is divided between the parishes of Mickleham and Westhumble. Box Hill, to the south-east, was once part of the estate.

A small Bronze Age hoard consisting of two palstave axes and a scabbard chape dating from around 1150-1000 BC was discovered in 2003 in woodland on the western side of the park. The park also contains, at Druids Grove marked on Ordnance Survey maps, an important grove of yew trees apocryphally used by Druids for rituals and ceremony. They are some of the oldest trees of Great Britain. The manor was also known as Northbury for some time.

The Park was owned for two centuries by the Stydolf family and the diarist John Evelyn records a visit in August 1655 to both Box Hill, Surrey and Norbury Park, which was then owned by Sir Francis Stydolf. Sir Francis' son Richard, who was created a baronet by Charles II subsequently inherited the estate and on his death it passed to his daughter, who married Thomas Tryon of Leatherhead. The estate remained in the Tryon family until 1766 when Charles Tryon (father of William Tryon, then Governor of Province of North Carolina) sold the estate to William Locke, a London art critic. Locke was responsible for the abandonment of the original site of the manor house on the floodplain of the River Mole and the construction of the current house, designed in 1774 by the architect Thomas Sandby. Locke commissioned the Irish landscape artist George Barrett Sr. to decorate one of the main reception rooms.

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