Contested Landscape at The Devil's Punchbowl

The Portal sculpture at The Devil’s Punchbowl has been there, apparently, since 2013, so I must surely have seen it before giving my repeated visits – but can’t remember doing so before going there yesterday. The change in the landscape here is hard to exaggerate. Before its diversion, the London-to-Portsmouth A3 road skimmed the lip of the Punchbowl: it regularly snarled up with traffic due to its constricted site. In 2011 it was rerouted to run through a mighty tunnel, avoiding the nature reserve completely. The site of the old road is now a broad path, a pebbly strip between the trees; and in the middle of it sits Portal, a great block of what else but Portland Stone all the way from Dorset, carved into enigmatic and sometimes indistinct shapes. Among those shapes a Celtic cross and a great crouching Devil can be discerned most easily. The organisation behind the sculpture was A3D, an arts initiative set up by a Hindhead resident to provide a legacy of the vast engineering project that was the A3 diversion. A team of twenty students from local schools worked with sculptor Jon Edgar to produce the sculpture, although I’m not completely clear how the various ideas were arrived at. Over the winter of 2012-13 Mr Edgar spent a lot of time outside in the snow and ice and was occasionally joined by the schoolchildren who gave the stone a thwack or two with a mallet. There was always going to be a Devil and a Cross, though the latter moved about a bit and, if I understand rightly, the whole stone was upturned at some point. It wasn’t until 2014, nearly a year after the sculpture was unveiled during a snow shower, that it was named Portal: although the artwork isn’t obviously a literal portal of any sort, the name alludes to the tunnel to which it owes its existence, and also suggests it might be the starting-point of an imaginary journey.

I am wary of representations of the Adversary, especially if they are formed in a massive block of limestone that will last for centuries. In Portal, he is trapped within the stone, but also pushes away the Cross on the stone’s other side, and I can’t put lightly aside the reason why the real Cross was put on the top of Gibbet Hill a few hundred yards away – to defuse the malign energies of the place, generated out of fear and superstition. These are not positive things. And yet the sculpture admits that the landscape is a contested place, not a site of one meaning. Its ambiguity refuses to tell a single story, and that’s an admirable decision for a memorial to make. And a memorial to a road at that!