Hindhead Common

On Thursday I was in no great mood to go out, but was in the end glad I made the effort! Hindhead Common and the Devil's Punchbowl is not far away from me and thanks to my underused National Trust card I didn't even need to pay for the car park. Of course I've been before several times though I managed to find a couple of things I had never seen, and the dreary weather was actually rather comforting. 

Not far from the old route of the London-Portsmouth road is the Sailor's Stone, a monument to an unnamed sailor murdered here in 1786, which now looks out across the Devil's Punchbowl. The Punchbowl is one of those landscapes which I find rather fascinating as, though it is now pretty much wilderness, it was once a home to quite a community of scattered souls - broom-makers and turf-cutters and the like.

A green cathedral ...

Not so far then

This is all that's left of the Temple of the Four Winds, a hunting lodge built by Whitaker Wright, he of the underwater ballroom - go on, look it up if you don't know about it already - but ambitious though photographs show it was, it could only ever have seated four hunters, and then at a squeeze. It was ruinous by the 1950s and only years later volunteers unearthed the stone floor, still surviving under the soil.

The cross was put up by a local landowner in the 1850s to counteract the reputation the area had for being haunted - unsurprisingly, considering the murder, and the gibbet that once existed there. Around the base are encouraging Christian mottos:

Ah, one would very much like to think there was.

And that's a nice thought, considering everything.