Four Marks

Four Marks
Hampshire
Medstead & Four Marks Station
Location
Grid reference:	SU669351
Location:	51°6’40"N, 1°2’38"W
Data
Population:	4,799
Post town:	Alton
Postcode:	GU34
Dialling code:	01420
Local Government
Council:	East Hampshire
Parliamentary constituency:	East Hampshire

Four Marks is a village in Hampshire, four and a half miles south-west of Alton, on the A31 road. It is at the edge of the South Downs National Park on a long-distance walking route known as the Pilgrims' Way that leads from Winchester to Canterbury. It contains within it the mediæval hamlets of Kitwood, Hawthorn and Lymington, although now the whole parish is relatively closely settled.

Name

The village is first mentioned within the c. 1550 Perambulation of the Manor of Alresford (a Perambulation being a detailed description of the boundaries of land) as 'Fowremarkes' . The relevant excerpt details;

"a certain empty piece of land called Fowremarkes near Bookemere and named thus because four tithings abut there mutually, that is to say, the tithings of Medsted Ropley Faryngdon & Chawton".

The 'Marks' element comes from Old English mearc, meaning boundary, or border, so, Four Marks directly translates as 'Four Borders'.

History

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.

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 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.

Four Marks was the meeting point of four parishes, near the current Boundaries surgery (SU67163527). 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.

For almost all its prehistory and most of its modern times was an empty, but busy, place. The Roman Road or King's Highway through Chawton Park Wood came through the Four Marks, and was later the Alton to Winchester turnpike (and now the A31). 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 First World War. 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.

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. 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.

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.

About the village

The village has a goodly range of local shops and services.

Four Marks has its own restored railway station, Medstead and Four Marks Station on the Watercress Line, services from which connect with the nearest national rail station four miles to the north-east, at Alton, although being a heritage railway it does not run commuter services.

The village has a large recreation ground including football, cricket, tennis courts, local bowls club and BMX ramps.

Four Marks surrounded some of the finest unspoilt Hampshire countryside. It is about half way along the St Swithun's Way passing through the south-western fringe of the village, which links the South Downs Way at Winchester to the North Downs Way at Farnham.

Blackberry Lane was host to an important twin-dome observatory built in 1913 by James Worthington. Worthington agreed with Percival Lovell, the owner of the now revered Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, that there were canals on Mars built by intelligent beings. The observatory was sold in 1919 when the theory was disproved to great embarrassment and pulled down about 1939.

Telegraph Farm in Telegraph Lane was once part of an unfinished chain of semaphore stations intended to link The Admiralty in London to Plymouth to combat the threat of a French invasion. The station was determined to be redundant in 1847.

Literary associations

A surprising number of authors and others with literary associations wrote in Four Marks. Here is a current list of books known to have been written in the village:

• David Cornick, "Early Memories of Four Marks"
• C. V. Durell, world best selling author of books on mathematics including "School Certificate Algebra" (1958)
• Chris Heal, "Sound of Hunger" (2018), "Disappearing" (2019), "Reappearing" (2020), "The Four Marks Murders" (2020), "Ropley's Legacy" (2021)
• Jessie Louisa Rickard, "Murder by Night" (1939) among some forty light comedy and detective novels
• W. C. H. Hudson, "Myself When Young, Memoirs of a Tea Planter" (2001)
• Betty Mills, "Four Marks, its Life and Origins" (1995)
• Denis Rolleston Gwynn: "The Vatican and the War in Europe" (1940) among dozens of books on Irish political figures
• John De Walton, illustrator of many books like children's author Percy F. Westerman’s "The Flying Submarine" (1912)
• Gerald Wyeth, "Four Marks School Boy’s Memories"

Local media

• Newsprint:
  • The Alton Herald
  • The Hampshire Chronicle.
  • The Four Marks News.
• Radio: The Breeze

Outside links

("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Four Marks)

• Google Maps Aerial Photograph
• Four Marks Primary School
• Local Radio
• Alton Herald
• Local Brewery

References

Books

• Cornick, David, Early Memories of Four Marks (No publisher, undated).
• Heal, Chris:
  • 'The Four Marks Murders' ISBN 978-1-9161944-2-7 (Chattaway and Spottiswood, 2020, 2nd edition 2021)
  • 'Ropley's Legacy' ISBN 978-1-9161944-3-4 (Chattaway and Spottiswood, 2021)
• Holmes, T.W.: 'The Semaphore, The Story of the Admiralty-to-Portsmouth Shutter Telegraph and Semaphore Lines 1796 to 1847' (Stockwell 1983)
• Mills, Betty: 'Four Marks: Its Life and Origins' (1995) ISBN 978-0-9526603-0-9
• Scotland, Campbell E.: 'Exploring Four Marks and the surrounding Countryside' (Four Marks News, second edition 2013)
• Wyeth, Gerald: 'Four Marks School Boy’s Memories' (No publisher, undated)