In July 1802, Mr Christie of Pall Mall advertised in the Oracle and the Daily Advertiser,
A COMPACT and most DESIRABLE estate called ROBERT’S HOLE FARM, consisting of a farmhouse with gardens, barns, stabling, outhouses etc… in the whole one hundred and six acres and upwards, of Arable, Meadow, and woodland …desirably situated about one mile and a half from the respectable Market-town of Reigate’-
Visible on early 19th-century maps just east of the ridge of Red Hill Common, ‘Roberts Hole’ was a prominent natural depression in the local landscape. In old English maps, the term "Hole" usually designated a valley, a deep hollow, or a natural depression in the landscape.
On the N. W. of this farm, a flexure or depression of the strata brings down one of the principal beds of fullers’ earth to the level of the railroad, near the Redhills (or Reygate) station; and this was exposed, some months ago, in a bank immediately behind the original Station House of the South Eastern Company.
In the 1830s, this low-lying pocket became a focal point for early geologists and industrial mining due to its rich surface deposits of Fuller’s Earth - a rare clay like mineral highly valued by the textile industry. A geologist wrote of Robert’s Hole Farm:
Unfortunately for its owner, Robert’s Hole was a natural low point through the Redhill ridge making it the obvious route when engineers London and Brighton Railway engineers planned their route in the early 1840s. During the construction of the railway the deep rail cutting and the building of Redstone Hill station, then located in Hooley Lane, were cut through the geological banks stretching right past the farm boundaries. The entire hollow was filled and flattened.
If you look at a modern street map, the old Robert’s Hole Farm footprint sits beneath the heavily developed area just east of the modern Redhill railway station track beds, roughly where the commercial and residential roads step up toward the lower western slopes of Redstone Hill.
Source: The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 1845