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Four Marks tourist guide map of landmarks & destinations by Walkfo

Four Marks history

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The modern village of Four Marks was founded at the end of the nineteenth century on little developed old commons and wastes mostly left from the 1709 Ropley enclosure. Four Marks became a parish in 1932 under Alton Rural District Council when parts of six parishes were annexed: Chawton (1%), East Tisted (2%), Farringdon (17%), Medstead (4%), Newton Valence (13%) and Ropley (64%). According to Bartholomew’s Gazetteer, the village of Four Marks is the only so named place in the United Kingdom. A pre-Roman ridgeway from the Old Sarum area, the Lunway, crosses through Four Marks from the north following the drier southern side of the ridge and is itself crossed near the old Windmill Inn (now the Co-op store) by a summerway from Alresford and its river following the quickest, driest, ‘up-and-over’ route to the River Wey. The area was given by King Cenwalh of the West Saxons to the bishopric at Winchester starting a chain of ecclesiastical management through to the current day. The commitment was confirmed in writing by a successor, King Ine, in A.D. 701 in a disputed charter. The charter listed many local gates and watering places, mostly identifiable today, showing that the area contained important Saxon husbandry. The first known mention of Four Marks appears in a large document c. 1550 which deals in part with a Perambulation of Alresford Manor which then contained modern Four Marks: “a certain empty piece of land called Fowrem’kes near Bookemere and named thus because four tithings abut there mutually, that is to say, the tithings of Medsted Ropley Faryngdon & Chawton”. “Bokmeres stile” occurs in the 701 charter. Four Marks was, therefore, not a place, but a four-way boundary point known as a quadripoint near the current Boundaries surgery. It was marked by a ‘large white stone’ in 1759 which was reported destroyed by workmen during road construction in the 1960s. An old photograph notes its site tucked into a roadside hedge. Apart from the accident of boundaries, ‘Four Marks’ for almost all its prehistory and most of its modern times was an empty, but busy, place. People passed through, or near by, without great notice using the Roman Road or King’s Highway through Chawton Park Wood or, later, the Alton to Winchester turnpike (now the A31). The high point of the roads at about 215 metres was a chalk ridge, capped with clay and flints, lying between Telegraph Lane and the centre of Medstead. Rainwater flows to the north to the River Thames and, to the south, to The Solent. Under fifty inhabitants clustered away from the through road around small farms dotted along the old river bed called Lymington Bottom and, for instance, at Hawthorn, Kitfield and Kitwood. The area was not well known and did not feature in lists of hamlets in nineteenth or early twentieth century gazetteers. Around 1900, a few houses near the Windmill Inn took the name Four Marks. In 1897, there was a small post office near this point at Four Marks House. The birth of the new village came in the years between 1894 and World War I. At least five major developers, one unidentified, descended on Four Marks intent on social improvement or plain commercial gain. Winchester College Estate conducted at least two major sales: 350 acres in Medstead and Soldridge offered in April 1894 and, in May 1912, around the main road in Four Marks. The Land Company of London held two auctions at Lymington Park Estate in 1896 offering over 140 plots with a hotel and shops on a farm bought from Charles Frederick Hemming. Lymington Park Estate surrounded Lymington Farm, a substantial set of buildings on the corner of Brislands Lane, grandly renamed Lymington Park Road for the auction, and Lymington Bottom, called Medstead Main Road. At almost the same time, William Carter, owner of Herbert Park, offered large opportunities in Alton and Kitwood Lanes. A local man, Frank Gotelee, who in 1901 acquired much of the land in Medstead which had been accumulated in the 1850s and 60s by William Ivey, tried to sell freehold plots for development although with less success. Carter’s development was initially called The Homestead Movement. Its defining characteristics were cheap, rural or semirural land suitable for market gardening or self-sufficiency, and the option of a basic house, usually single-storey ‘colonial’ style bungalows in a ‘do-it-yourself’ community. ‘Colonial’ was a trade name with the several standard designs, mostly one, two or three bedrooms with a living room and kitchen costing from £100 upwards. The higher prices also brought tile roofs instead of corrugated iron. Homestead’s developments were sold without utilities: no clean water (use of a water tank or a well to be dug), no electricity (generator, solid fuel stoves and fireplaces, kerosene or gas lamps) and no sewerage (outside earth closet toilet). In the ten years to 1901, the settlement around Four Marks doubled: inhabitants to 279 and dwellings to sixty-seven, and by 1911, a further increase to 334 people and to eighty-seven homes. Three maps of the sales survive for Winchester College, The Land Company and for Carter’s Herbert Park. Together, they contain 242 plots comprising an estimated 251 acres, about half the total acreage enclosed in the 1709 Ropley enclosure and on approximately the same land. The maps also cover almost every nook and cranny of the early Four Marks developments with the exception of the early bungalows on the southern side of Blackberry Lane; about twenty-three according to the 1912 map of Winchester College. Within five years, the population of this small area to the south and east of the London to Winchester road had almost trebled to close to 250 people with over thirty new homes. Many new inhabitants, noted in later censuses, came from ‘London’: Battersea, Bloomsbury, Bow, Bowes Park, Camberwell, Chiswick, Ealing, Holborn, Hornsey, Islington, Kilburn, Kingston-upon-Thames, Leyton, Old Bailey, Paddington, St Pancras, Stamford Hill, Tooting, Tottenham, Tower Hamlets, Walworth, Westminster and Windsor. Four Marks had no beating heart. The most needed infrastructure was built by its new inhabitants before the war. The school was largely a gift of two benefactors. Marianna Hagen of Ropley was the driving force. She bought the plot of land, part of Homestead Farm on Hawthorn Road, in 1902 from J Tomlinson, a farmer. Tomlinson, in turn, gave the purchase price towards the cost of construction. At first, church services were held in the school. In 1908, Miss Hagen moved the ‘Iron Room’, a corrugated iron and timber hut from Ropley Soke to opposite Belford House where it became the mission; now, sadly, a derelict eyesore. Around 1910, a social and multi-purpose Institute was formed which met in borrowed premises. A permanent building arrived in 1913 and this has since been incorporated into today’s Village Hall in Lymington Bottom. A separate development, which began slowly shortly after the turn of the century, was an entirely different example of social change. The invention of two new popular forms of transport, bicycles and motor vehicles, transformed Winchester Road along its length. This single-carriageway was eventually dotted with flowering cherry and ornamental apple trees. In a steady growth from between the wars and into the 1950s, businesses catered for a ‘mobile, fine evening and weekend pleasure pursuing population’ heading for the country. Premises ‘sprouted like mushrooms’ providing fuel and mechanical assistance for motorists and cyclists and, with the townies who came by railway, for sustenance with general stores, road houses, wholesome refreshment rooms, small shops, cafés, the Windmill Inn and, even, The Blinking Owl, a good class restaurant with a dance floor. Those smaller shops, which might otherwise have spread around the side streets with the bungalows, instead congregated prominently on Winchester Road taking best advantage of the needs of both visitors and locals. Many of the shops were made of rickety ex-Canadian Army huts. In its current and ongoing phase from 1961, the population of Four Marks more than tripled in the next fifty years, the number of dwellings quadrupling. There were 3,893 inhabitants in 2011. There has been an explosion in piecemeal and large estate development in the last ten years.

  

Four Marks map & travel guide with history & landmarks to explore

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Tourist Guide to Four Marks Map

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Walkfo Four Marks travel map key: visit National Trust sites, Blue Plaques, English Heritage locations & top travel destinations in Four Marks