High on the Hurtwood Common, Peaslake has grown out of a disreputable and independent hamlet in the parish of Shere.
Although it gathered substance when local men began building handsome Victorian and Edwardian residences for the gentry in search of pine-scented air and fine landscapes, at the same time it became favoured by the suffragettes, who were only the latest in a long succession to find refuge here.
Peaslake's history reaches back through labourers and washer women, yeomen farmers and woodmen, to smugglers and Gypsies on the one hand, and on the other to one of the earliest Quakers, at whose Peaslake home Quaker Meeting was held over three centuries ago.
