"I will not cease from
Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword
sleep in my hand:
Till we have built
Jerusalem,
In England’s green
& pleasant Land."
The final verse of, “And did those feet in Ancient Time,”
also known as the hymn ,”Jerusalem,” England's unofficial national anthem. It
was first published as part of the preface to,” Milton,” by William Blake in
1804
In the late 1950’s very few people had cars. They were beyond
the income of the majority. People relied on buses, coaches and trains to get around the country. When I was about
seven years old, the Hants & Dorset bus company
had a small booking office situated on the corner of Portsmouth Road and
Victoria Road in Woolston. Woolston was the
part of Southampton where myself and my family lived, next to the Itchen River.
I was always fascinated by a large colourful poster displayed in the window of
the booking office. It advertised, “Mystery Coach Tours.” The tours promised a
drive through a picturesque part of the Hampshire countryside. You would pay
for your ticket a day or two in advance, arrive at the coach office at a given time, board the coach
and be taken on a mystery trip in one of the distinctive Hants & Dorset dark green single decker buses. Nobody knew where they were going. However, those people who had been on one of
these trips would return and tell neighbours and friends and in turn they would
tell others. The mystery trips that left from the coach office in Woolston
always travelled along the beautiful valley of the Meon River, north east of Southampton
and situated to the east of Winchester.
West Meon High Street in the heart of Hampshire.
Over the last forty years I have lived in Wimbledon, South
London and my parents, in their old age have continued to live in Woolston,
Southampton. I always enjoy driving down to Southampton along the rural route
by way of Guildford, Farnham, Alton and along the Meon Valley. I drive through
the village of West Meon that is situated on the A32 road. It is a very beautiful
part of Hampshire, rolling chalk downland, lush green fields, thick clumps of
woodland interspersed with small villages of rose and wisteria clad thatched
cottages and clay tiled roofed houses, walls of flint and, locally made russet
red bricks. Cars are required to slow to 30 miles per hour or less as you drive
through West Meon. So I always get a chance to look and take in the beautiful
gardens and rustic buildings. Sometimes I stop and park the car. It is a
wonderful experience to just walk around the village. West Meon surrounds you with old buildings, stone walls and thick shrubbery. There are modern houses but they are hidden within groves of trees off
the main road and out of site but the old is most obvious and prominent
in the village. The village hall commemorates Queen Victoria's Jubilee. Cottages cluster together and stretch around the
curving serpentine high street winding downhill towards the valley bottom and
the River Meon that slips like pure liquid silver and as clear as glass over it’s pebbled bottom through and
on past the village.
The stone cross at the centre of the village.
In Kelly’s Directory of 1878 it is described thus;
“WEST MEON, a parish and a large village, pleasantly
situated on the banks of the small river Aire, or Meon, 8 miles W of
Petersfield and N.E. of Bishop’s Waltham, in Droxford union and county court
district and Meon Stoke hundred, had about 931 inhabitants in 1871 and
comprises 3774 acres of generally light and fertile land, rising in bold
undulations and including WOODLANDS hamlet, two miles north of the village, and
several scattered farms.”
Nowadays West Meon has shrunk slightly in population to 690
inhabitants. It was possibly mentioned in Anglo Saxon documents. A few miles
away at Corhampton there is a very rare example of a complete Saxon church that
is dated 1020. The Normans didn’t leave many Saxon buildings untouched. They preferred
to eradicate the world of the Saxons, ruthlessly. There is evidence of early Stone
Age activity going back 50.000 years in the vicinity. Old Winchester Hill,
nearby, a good defence point to protect against attack from neighbouring
tribes, has evidence of flint tools 20,000 years old. The village of West Meon
itself has remains dated to the Iron Age and bronze ages when people had
progressed from the hunter gatherer period to create settlements and become farmers. There is also evidence that the Meonwara tribe lived here. There are the remains of a Roman Villa in
Lippen Wood.
A West Meon thatched cottage.
The manor of West Meon was listed in the Domesday Book as
being owned by the Bishop of Winchester. The Domesday Book was instigated by
William I (The Conqueror) .The first draft was completed in 1086 and contained
records of 13,418 settlements. William
wanted to know what exactly was in his kingdom and what it was worth. This
enabled the Normans to assess the taxes they could exact and what wealth
they could derive. The book was written in Winchester. Data was gathered from
all over England. William’s officials scoured every corner of Britain. They
recorded landholders and their tenants,
the amount of land they owned, how many people occupied the land (villagers,
smallholders, free men, slaves), the amounts of woodland, meadow, animals, fish
and ploughs on the land and buildings such as churches, castles, mills and salt
houses.
If your internet breaks down you can still phone home.
A charter in 1205 showed that the land was granted to the
prior and Convent of St Swithun. St Swithun was important to Winchester because
he was the local patron saint who pilgrims came to pray to in the great
cathedral.It remained in the hands of the convent until the dissolution of the monasteries. In 1541
it was granted to the dean and chapter of Winchester Cathedral.In 1544 Henry VIII
granted it to Thomas Wriothesley Earl
of Southampotn. Thomas Wriothesley is
most famous because of his friendship with Shakespeare. There are suggestions
that Shakespeare visited and stayed on the earls estates at Titchfield in the
Meon Valley and wrote some of his sonnets in honour of the Earl.
During The English
Civil war West Meon was the sight
of several skirmishes before The Battle
of Cheriton, which took place about six miles from West
Meon to the north west, which was fought on
29th March 1644.
Some famous people, who lived and died in West Meon, are
Thomas Lord (1755-1832) the founder of Lords cricket ground in St Johns Wood,
North London. Also there is the grave of the infamous Guy Burgess. Guy Burgess (16
April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British radio producer, intelligence officer
and Foreign Office official. He was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring that
passed Western secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War.
St John the Evangelist, West Meon.
The fine flint built church in the centre of the village, St
John the Evangelist, was designed by Gilbert Scott and was built in 1846 on the
site of the ancient church. In an extraordinary twist, the design was taken to
New York where an exact replica was built as the church of St Thomas,
Mamaroneck.
West Meon is situated in a beautiful valley in the South
Downs about 66 miles south of London, 15 miles
east of Winchester and 25miles north of Southampton. The South Downs is
a range of chalk hills that extends for about 260 square miles across the
south-eastern coastal counties of England from the Itchen Valley of Hampshire
in the west to Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, East Sussex, in the east. It is
bounded on its northern side by a steep escarpment. The South Downs National
Park forms a much larger area than the chalk range of the South Downs and
includes large parts of the Weald.
It is characterised by rolling chalk downland
with close-cropped turf and dry valleys, and is recognised as one of the most
important chalk landscapes in England. It was formed from a thick band of chalk
which was deposited during the Cretaceous Period around sixty million years ago
within a shallow sea which extended across much of Northwest Europe. The rock
is composed of the microscopic skeletons of plankton which lived in the sea.
The chalk has many fossils, and bands of flint occur throughout the formation.
The Chalk is divided into the Lower, Middle and Upper Chalk, a thin band of
cream-coloured nodular chalk known as the Melbourn Rock marking the boundary
between the Lower and Middle units.
The strata of south-east England, including the chalk, were
gently folded during a phase of the Alpine Orogeny to produce the Weald-Artois
Anticline, a dome-like structure with a long east-west axis. Erosion has
removed the central part of the dome, leaving the north-facing escarpment of the
South Downs along its southern margin with the south-facing chalk escarpment of
the North Downs on the northern side.
The River Meon begins its life high on the South Downs as
spring water seeping out from the edge of the water table contained within the
structure of the chalk downland. Chalk is porous and so absorbs rainwater
easily and acts as a great aquifer. It naturally regulates the flow of water
into the river systems of the South Downs. Chalk streams transport little
suspended material but are mineral-rich.
The surface water of chalk streams is often described as 'gin clear'. The
channel bed consists of angular flint gravel
from the natural flint deposits found embedded within the chalk.
The unique characteristics of chalk stream ecology are due
to a stable temperature and flow combined with transparent water and lack of sand grade sediment
particles. The river stretches for 21 miles flowing through the Meon Valley.
The river supports valuable wildlife
habitats. Within the river system it is home to water crowfoot, brown trout,
kingfishers and otters. The reed beds at Titchfield create their own unique habitat
too.
A thatched cottage in West Meon.
The River Meon is renowned for its fly fishing particularly
at The Meon Springs where the river is stocked with brown trout and rainbow
trout. Izaak Walton, who wrote The Compleat Angler in the 17th century lived towards the end of his life, in Winchester. His tomb is in the Silkstead Chapel inside Winchester
Cathedral. It is a chapel dedicated to anglers. He went to Droxford, near West
Meon, to fish in The River Meon. He said that it was the best river in England
for trout.
Izaak Walton born August 9th 1593, died December 15th 1683 fished in the River Meon.
In and around West Meon there are watercress beds to be
found. Long regular troughs have been dug into the land bordering The River
Meon. Through the use of sluice gates to regulate the flow of the water they
are filled with pure chalk stream
water from the river. At times of the
year they are lush with the greenery provided by the water cress floating on
the surface of these ponds. The stems of watercress are hollow so this makes
the plant buoyant on the surface of the water. The leaves are pinnately compound, which means petals are arranged on either side of a stem and the watercress produces small white flowers in clusters. The Latin name for
the watercress is nasturtium officinale,N. microphyllum.
Many of the cottages, garden walls and houses in West Meon,
as well as the church ofSt John the
Evangelist, are constructed with knapped flint. West Meon’s position in the chalk South Downs is well situated near to a
source of good quality flint for building.
Flint is one of three forms of compact crystalline silica
which have been used in building. It is found in Chalk geological formations.
It is closely related to quartz, chalcedony, chert and jasper. Flint, chert and jasper are
important rocks for building, with flint the most common.
A young flint knapper with Box Hill behind him. (The Stonebreaker by John Brett exhibited 1858)
Its
origin is generally thought to be the siliceous sponges once inhabiting the
waters of Cretaceous seas.
Flint and chert are concretions, natural growths of mineral
matter which form around a centre or core. Sometimes the core may have been a
sea urchin or a sponge. The silica solutions from which flint was created could also have flooded cavities formed by marine borers. The
colours of flint are black or dark blue-grey, and they are usually nodular in
form, and coated in a white calcium carbonate. The nodules break forming sharp
edges. Axes, adzes, spear points and arrowheads were made from flint by Stone
Age tribes by hammering and flaking the flint.Flint knappers were common in the Victorian countryside.
There is a Pre-Raphaelite painting of a knapper working on Box Hill in Surrey.
West Meon is full of buildings constructed with blue, black, glassy silica flint
pieces.
A flint wall in West Meon churchyard.
Another characteristic of buildings in West Meon are the
number of thatched cottages. Many of the cottages have clay roof tiles too
which proved to be a cheaper option but
both thatched roofs and clay tiled roofs provide a warm natural effect and fit
perfectly side by side within this rural community. A thatched cottage looks
warm and cosy like a house topped with a thick head of hair. It’s contours are rounded,
and rough textured. Thatched cottages are built with local materials. The
houses people live in are the soil and rocks and grasses grown and formed naturally scooped up and skilfully fashioned. The straw from the wheat fields or the reeds
from the marshes become the roofs. People used whatever was available locally. This meant materials as diverse as broom, sedge, sallow, flax, grass, and straw
were used. Most common is wheat straw in the south of England, and reeds in
East Anglia. Norfolk reed is especially prized by thatchers, although in
northern England and Scotland heather was frequently used. Some of the cottages in West Meon have walls constructed from timber frames formed from large oak or ash branches
hewn from the local woods and dragged to the building site. The spaces between the
oak beams were filled with wattle and daub, itself a mixture of ash fencing, clay
from the ground mixed with straw to bind it and solidified with cow
dung and sealed by lime from the lime quarrys. Some were constructed in bricks
from local clays baked in fiery kilns. The very elements were combined and
used to form these homes.
In constructing a thatched roof first
the thatch is tied in bundles, then laid in an under-layer on the roof beams and
pegged in place with rods made of hazel or withy. Then an upper layer is laid
over the first, and a final reinforcing layer added along the ridge line It is
at the ridge line that the individual thatcher leaves his personal
"signature", a decorative feature of some kind that marks the job as
his alone. In West Meon a couple of the cottages have straw pheasants standing
on the roof ridges. There also seems to be decorative stitching created with
twigs along the roof lines. These are individual
designs to show the thatcher’s personality and trade mark.
Having visited West Meon many times, it is a diverse and vibrant
community. Not only does it have it’s church community with it’s social gatherings, festivals and religious year, there is a village hall for community parties and meetings. There is a junior school for the young children of the village and
there are two pubs to socialise and relax in. There are a number of local
grocers and general stores too. It comprises people of all ages and situations amongst it’s
numbers. It appears to me to be a happy and lived in place.
The Thomas Lord pub in West Meon.
Notes:
