Four Marks

Four Marks is a village and civil parish in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, England. It is southwest of Alton, on the A31 road. It is situated on the borders of the South Downs National Park on the Pilgrims' Way that leads from Winchester to Canterbury. It contains within it the medieval hamlets of Kitwood, Hawthorn and Lymington, although now the whole parish is relatively closely settled.

Etymology

First mentioned within the c. 1550 Perambulation of the Manor of Alresford 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 'mark' meaning boundary, or border, so, Four Marks directly translates as Four Borders. The borders being those of Medstead, Ropley, Farringdon and Chawton.

History

Prehistory

In the New Stone Age there seems to be significant evidence of activity and settlement spread about the parish, which includes several Neolithic polished axeheads found near Headmore Farm, and others found near Swelling Hill pond and Brislands Lane. Several arrowheads and other flint tools have been found scattered within the parish too, suggesting not insignificant amounts of settlement. In the Early Bronze Age three barrows were constructed as graves for important members of the local community. These sit just South of Barn Lane. Some additional individual finds from this period have been found by hobby archaeologists near to the parish.
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. It is itself crossed near the old Windmill Inn by a summerway from Alresford and its river, following the quickest, driest, 'up-and-over' route to the River Wey.
Several features and finds dating to the Iron Age have been found in the village over the decades; these show a densely settled and worked landscape. Evidence of settlement was uncovered by pre-construction works near to Brislands Lane. This has been reinforced by finds of pottery, loom weights and coins around Four Marks and neighbouring villages over the years. In the Roman period a road was built from Winchester, then known as Venta Belgarum, to London, although this theory is not without controversy. The area around Four Marks was very active in this time, with villas and farmsteads, although little is known of within Four Marks except for the occasional coin.

Early history

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. In the following centuries Four Marks seems to be quite empty as the soil was not attractive enough for farmsteads and water access was an issue as the village lies on a ridge. It was because of this fact that Four Marks became the site of the commons of various neighbouring parishes, especially Ropley, whose commons expanded over most of the current settlement of the village.
The earliest medieval settlement in Four Marks was Lymington, likely a small farmstead, which stood halfway between the railway bridge and Five Ash Pond on Lymington Bottom Road. This was first recorded in 1307 as Lenynton meaning the farmstead by the lime trees. This settlement disappeared by the 15th century and survives only in the lane name Lymington Bottom Road.
The oldest still inhabited part of the village is the hamlet of Hawthorn, first recorded in 1424 as Horethornes, which sits north of Hawthorn Road. It saw a great deal of activity from as early as the 15th century, and has been continuously settled since the 1500s. Here are also the oldest houses in Four Marks.
As mentioned, Four Marks referred to the meeting point of four parishes. It 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, first recorded 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 history 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, then later the King's Highway through Chawton Park Wood, and, beginning in the 18th century the Alton to Winchester turnpike. 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 50 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.

Historic buildings

By the 18th century Four Marks was home to several farmsteads, many of which still stand today. Below is a list of properties built prior to the 1830s:

Historic buildings

By the 18th century Four Marks had grown in size and was home to several farmsteads, many of which still stand today. Despite the listing of some historic buildings, several have gone unlisted. Below is a list of properties built prior to the 1830s:

Name	Date of construction	State
Headmore Farm	1500s	Well preserved & grade II listed
Jayswood Cottage	Circa 1680	Well preserved & grade II listed
Beech farm	1730s	Well preserved
Keepsake cottage	1700s	Well preserved
Kitwood Farm	1700s	Disappeared
Brislands Farm	1700s	Disappeared
Windmill Inn	1790s	Burnt down and rebuilt in 1920s
Willis Farm	Early 1800s	Well preserved
Cobb Farm	Early 1800s	Well preserved
Semaphore Farm	1827	Well preserved & grade II listed

Modern history

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 had 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, no electricity and no sewerage.
In the ten years to 1901, the settlement around Four Marks doubled: inhabitants to 279 and dwellings to 67, and by 1911, a further increase to 334 people and 87 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 23 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 30 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.
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, East Tisted, Farringdon, Medstead, Newton Valence and Ropley. According to Bartholomew's Gazetteer, the village of Four Marks is the only so named place in the United Kingdom.
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 50 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.