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History
Bronze sword dating from late Bronze Age found close to the River Mole north of Amberley Farm near Charlwood.

Flint axe dating from Mesolithic period found on spit of land close to River Mole in Cobham in 1965.

Mesolithic sites at Wonham, Flanchford and Sidlow. Finds at Wonham include arrowheads and a plano-convex knife. Wonham site probably late mesolithic possibly as late as 4th century BC.

Name of river first recorded in the Red Book of Thorney in 983 AD as Emen and in the 1005 AD Cartulary of the Abbey of Eynsham as both Emen and Æmen.

Geology 2
Between Dorking and Leatherhead the Mole cuts a steep-sided valley through the North Downs, creating a 170 m high river cliff on the western flank of Box Hill. The bedrock is permeable chalk and the water table lies permanently below the level of the riverbed, allowing water to drain out of the river through swallow holes in the bed and banks. The amount water lost from the river is significant and in very hot summers the channel can become dry between Mickleham and Thorncroft Manor, (most recently in 1976). At Leatherhead, the river leaves the chalk and flows across impermeable London Clay. It is at this point that the water table rises sufficiently, enabling the water to flow back into the main river channel.

In a survey in 1958, the geologist C.C. Fagg, identified twenty five active swallow holes between Dorking and Mickleham, finding that most were only a few centimetres in diameter and were located in the vertical banks of the river below the waterline. Most holes were difficult to observe in times of normal or heavy flow and were susceptible to silting up as new holes were continually being formed. A few much larger swallow holes were also observed separated from the main river by a channel of about a metre. An area to the west of the Burford Bridge containing half a dozen of these larger swallow holes was located along the projected course of the A24 Mickleham Bypass. During the construction of the bypass in 1936. Initially the surveyors attempted to to fill the holes with rubble to prevent the foundations of the new road subsiding. However this proved to be impractical and they were instead covered by concrete domes (up to 18 m in diameter) each fully supported by the surrounding chalk and provided with a manhole and access shaft to allow periodic inspections. During the late 1960s the domes were reopened and inspected and the alluvium in the largest swallow hole was observed to have subsided by 1.5 m under the centre of one of the domes. When the Dorking to Leatherhead railway was constructed in 1859, a fossilised swallow hole was discovered in the cutting at the south end of Box Hill and Westhumble railway station, suggesting that even in its early history, the river possessed swallow holes.

The author, Daniel Defoe (who attended school in Dorking and probably grew up in the village of Westhumble) described the swallow holes in the River Mole in his book A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (first published in 1724): .. the current of the river being much obstructed by the interposition of those hills, called Box Hill ... it forces the waters as it were to find their way through as well as they can; and in order to do this, beginning, I say, where the river comes close to the foot of the precipice of Box-Hill, called the Stomacher, the waters sink insensibly away, and in some places are to be seen (and I have seen them) little channels which go out on the sides of the river, where the water in a stream not so big as would fill a pipe of a quarter of an inch diameter, trills away out of the river, and sinks insensibly into the ground. In this manner it goes away, lessening the stream for above a mile, near two, and these they call the Swallows.

Not all of the water removed from the river by the swallow holes, is returned to the channel at Leatherhead. The chalk aquifer also feeds the springs at the southern end of Fetcham Mill Pond, which have never been known to run dry. A survey carried out in March 1883, estimated that the Fetcham springs were producing approximately 3.6 million gallons of water every day. A second survey performed in 1948, estimated that the same springs were yielding approximately five million gallons of water a day. The water table in the chalk of the Wey Gap is significantly higher than might be expected from natural rainwater percolation alone. It has been suggested that a proportion of the excess water originates from the Mole Gap.

Extra Stepping Stones sentence
The earliest written record of the stones themselves is from 1841, however there has been a ford at the same site since ancient times.