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With thanks to Sean Edwards. *aka The Sailor's Murder, see links below.

The Guardian article shows how writers have been drawn to The Sailor's Murder, one of two historic murders to have taken place in Thursley (see links at the bottom of this article). Gibbet Hill by Bram Stoker is published by The Rotunda Foundation on 26 October. Paul McKinley’s exhibition Péisteanna is now on at Casino Marino, Dublin. More information on the Dublin City Council Bram Stoker festival can be found at bramstokerfestival.com https://rotundafoundation.ie/gibbet-hill/ Guardian article: Reader stumbles on Dracula’s ancestors in a Dublin library The unknown Bram Stoker story Gibbet Hill, published soon before the author began working on Dracula, has eerie echoes of his vampire classic by Ella Creamer, Sat 19 Oct 2024 In a Dublin library once frequented by James Joyce and WB Yeats, beneath a turquoise and white domed ceiling and surrounded by oak shelving, Brian Cleary stumbled across something by Dracula author Bram Stoker he believed no living person had ever read. Cleary, who had taken time off from his job at a maternity hospital after suffering sudden hearing loss, was looking through the Stoker archives at the National Library of Ireland when he came across something strange. In a Dublin Daily Express advert from New Year’s Day 1891 promoting a supplement, one of the items listed was “Gibbett Hill, By Bram Stoker”. He had never heard of it, and went searching for a trace. “It wasn’t something that was Google-able or was in any of the bibliographies,” he said. Cleary tracked down the supplement and found Gibbet Hill. “This is a lost story,” he realised. “I don’t think anyone knows about this.” The story follows an unnamed narrator who runs into three children standing by the memorial of a murdered sailor on Gibbet Hill, Surrey, which is also referred to in Dickens’ 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby. Together, the four walk to the top of Gibbet Hill. Distracted by the view, the narrator loses sight of the children. He takes a nap among some trees, and wakes to see the children a short distance away, before a snake passes over his feet towards the children, who appear able to communicate with and control the snake. Later, the children attack the narrator. The story culminates with the snake wriggling out of the narrator’s chest, gliding away down the hillside. Cleary approached Stoker biographer Paul Murray to authenticate the story. Though Murray was excited by the finding, he wasn’t surprised – he had already discovered three similar stories, so he knew there was more Stoker material out there. But “as I learned more about the story I became more and more intrigued, because it was published – and almost certainly written – in 1890,” he said. “That’s the year that Bram Stoker begins working on Dracula”. The quintessential gothic horror novel “didn’t come out of nowhere”, said Murray, who has been researching Stoker’s development from the mid-1870s to Dracula’s publication in 1897. “To me, Gibbet Hill was a very exciting new piece of that jigsaw. It fitted very well into my theory of the long gestation of Dracula. And so this seemed to me to be a kind of waystation on that journey of over 20 years that Stoker spent evolving his fiction.” Gibbet Hill has parallels with Dracula. There is the gothic imagery, a trinity of malevolent characters, and a description of eyes that “gleamed with a dark unholy light” – anticipating the eyes that “blazed with an unholy light” in Dracula. Another thematic parallel is that of “reverse colonisation”, said Murray. In Gibbet Hill, two of the children are Indian. In Dracula, you have “the Count coming from Transylvania, which is on the borders of the known world at that time, coming back to threaten England”. While Dracula might be read as a critique of British imperialism, it is also a “reverse colonisation fantasy inviting the British to see themselves as potential victims”, wrote David Higgins in his book Reverse Colonization. A book featuring the story, commentary and artwork by Paul McKinley is now being published by the Rotunda Foundation, the official fundraising arm of the Rotunda hospital where Cleary works. All proceeds will go to the newly established Charlotte Stoker Fund – named after Bram’s mother, who was a campaigner for deaf people – to fund research on risk factors for acquired deafness in newborn babies. An accompanying exhibition is showing at Casino Marino in Dublin, and the first public reading of the story will take place at the Dublin city council Bram Stoker festival. It is “not very often” that a discovery of such magnitude is made, NLI director Audrey Whitty said. Yet she emphasises that “anybody’s capable” of a find like Cleary’s. “Who knows what lies undiscovered in any national library in the world?” The story has also appeared in The New York Times: A Fan Discovers a New Story by the Author of ‘Dracula’ The work by Bram Stoker, previously unknown to scholars, will be read and included in a book launched during Dublin’s annual Bram Stoker Festival. By Sarah Lyall Published   Oct. 19, 2024 Updated Oct. 20, 2024 The discovery left Brian Cleary “gobsmacked,” he said. “I wanted to turn around and shout, ‘Guess what I found?’” Ellius Grace for The New York Times Brian Cleary, a clinical pharmacist in Dublin, was trawling through the archives at the National Library of Ireland a few years ago when he stumbled across something extraordinary: a virtually unknown short story by Bram Stoker, author of the Gothic masterpiece “Dracula.” The story, a creepy tale of the supernatural called “Gibbet Hill,” had been published in a now-defunct Irish newspaper in 1890, but had not appeared in print or, it seemed, been mentioned anywhere since. “I was just gobsmacked,” said Cleary, who works as the chief pharmacist at the Rotunda maternity hospital and has long been fascinated by Stoker. “I went and checked all the bibliographies, and it was nowhere. I wanted to turn around and shout, ‘Guess what I found?’ but there were proper researchers and academics there, and I was just an amateur.” Indeed, the story wasn’t included in Stoker’s archival papers, and was unknown to scholars, said Audrey Whitty, the director of the national library. While it isn’t unusual for something unexpected to turn up in the library’s archives — a collection of 12 million items — Cleary’s discovery stands out for the way he made it, she said. Cleary first saw a reference to “Gibbet Hill in a copy of the Dublin Daily Express published on New Year’s Day, 1891. Brian Cleary He first spotted a reference to “Gibbet Hill” in a promotional advertisement in the Dublin Daily Express on New Year’s Day, 1891. Then he tracked down the special section in which the story actually had appeared — two weeks earlier, on Dec. 17, 1890 — and where it had been “hidden in plain sight,” he said. The story takes place in Surrey, England, at a spot that became infamous when three men who had killed a sailor were hanged there in the 18th century. (A gibbet is a gallows.) In it, a young man goes for a stroll and comes upon a trio of eerie children — a boy “with hair of spun gold” and a wriggling mass of earthworms concealed in his clothes, and two pretty, dark-haired Indian girls. The trio perform a strange ritual involving music and a snake (for starters), tie the man up and menace him with a sharp dagger. Though he passes out and isn’t sure what happens next — they are gone when he wakes up — the unsettling experience has repercussions that do not bode well for his future. “Gibbet Hill” is a creepy little tale. It is also, according to Paul Murray, author of the biography “From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker,” and an expert on Stoker, “very significant” and “an important new addition to the canon.” He then found the special section in which the story had appeared, published on Dec. 17, 1890. Brian Cleary The story, and the book it will be included in, are to be unveiled to the public during Dublin’s annual Bram Stoker Festival , held this year on Oct. 25-28. (Ireland, a supremely literary nation, commemorates many of its writers with special festivals.) Cleary said he hoped the book would draw attention to the breadth of Stoker’s work — in addition to “Dracula,” Stoker wrote more than a dozen other novels and several short story collections, and worked for many years as the manager of the Lyceum Theater in London. “Gibbet Hill” was published at a pivotal moment in Stoker’s career, when the author was beginning work on “Dracula.” Many of the novel’s thematic preoccupations — the thin line between normalcy and horror; the shadowy transactions between the living and the dead; the elements of Gothic weirdness — show up in the story. And in common with “Dracula,” Stoker presents the events of “Gibbet Hill” so naturally that he makes “the incredible seem credible,” Murray said. “It’s a story you can’t explain rationally, and yet it’s so well presented that it carries you along.” Finally, it has a theme of colonial unease also expressed in other books from that era, like Wilkie Collins’s “The Moonstone," published some 20 years earlier: “the English fear of the threat coming from the periphery of the empire to exert revenge and disrupt English life,” Murray said. “It’s the idea that there would be this invasion of foreigners into England.” For Cleary, there’s a more personal dimension to his interest in the story. In 2021, he woke up one morning to find that he had gone deaf in one ear. The discovery of “Gibbet Hill” was made after he got a cochlear implant and undertook a grueling program of auditory therapy, including listening to music in the library as he did his research for what he hopes will eventually be a novel with Stoker as a character. “I was like a baby learning to hear again,” he said. The story will be read in public during Dublin’s annual Bram Stoker Festival, held this year on Oct. 25-28. Along with its back story, it will be included in a book as well. Ellius Grace for The New York Times Cleary lives not far from the street where Stoker was born, Marino Crescent on the north side of Dublin, and passes Stoker’s old house frequently. But there are other connections between him and the author. By an odd confluence of events, “a thread of deafness” runs through the history of the Stoker family as well as his own story, Cleary said. Stoker’s mother, Charlotte, was a social reformer and campaigner for the deaf. In 1863, she became the first woman to present a paper to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, arguing that the state should pay for housing and education for deaf people. (Using the now-jarring language of the time, her paper was called “On the Necessity of a State Provision for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb of Ireland.”) In the small world of 19th-century Dublin, she had the support of Sir William Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s father, a renowned eye surgeon and polymath who had initiated a special census of the deaf in Ireland in 1851. Deafness touched the lives of the Stokers in other ways. One of Bram’s brothers, George, published a paper on deafness in The Lancet medical journal; the wife of another of his brothers lost her hearing after taking malaria medication. Though he was omitted from the novel itself, a deaf character featured in the original notes Stoker kept for “Dracula.” Proceeds from the sales of the book, Cleary said, will go to the newly founded Charlotte Stoker Fund at the Rotunda Foundation , which is associated with the hospital where he works. The money will finance research into risk factors for acquired deafness in newborn babies. In the preface, Cleary writes about listening to lullabies from the library’s collection — streamed directly to his cochlear implant — while reading Stoker’s descriptions of the “eerie musical ensemble” in “Gibbet Hill” for the first time. “A lot of things wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t suffered from hearing loss,” he said. Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections. The story provoked wide interest and it has been covered by the news media at home and abroad. This from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g9119l64qo

This article by Jackie Rickenberg was published in the Parish Magazine, December 2023 You will forgive me if I make this month’s article all about me! Well, not really. In fact, it is all about us i.e., Thursley History Society. We are at a very pivotal time as we work to complete a task that has been years in the making, and has involved many, many volunteers. It is currently being driven by our very own David Young, with his extensive and invaluable experience in the world of publishing. The task I speak of is (drum roll) the launch of our beautiful updated and incredibly fascinating website. Firstly, a little about us. The Society was inaugurated at a public meeting in April 1991, so fairly recently by village standards. In those days it was known as History of Thursley Society but it was changed to Thursley History Society in order to extend its remit. In its constitution it states: “The object of the Society shall be to discover, record, discuss, collect, purchase and display artefacts, written materials and records and other matters relating to the history of the village of Thursley, for the interest of local people and to undertake anything which shall be deemed by the committee to be desirable in order to achieve the objectives of the Society”. With the change in name, it allows us to include the whole parish, including Pitch Place, Warren Park, High Button and Bowlhead Green, and to also include research into other matters relating to but perhaps not restricted within the boundaries of the parish. Our first chairman was the Rev Edmund Haviland and others have included Michael O’Brien and Anthony Langdale. Today it is Leon Flavell. In 2007, when the archives were stored in a cupboard in the village hall, there was a flood from the upstairs flat. The result was, according to the chairman at the time “the grievous and total loss of much irreplaceable material put together by the original founders of the Society”. It was at this time that the decision was made to move the archive to a more secure location within the village. Until now! As so much of this archive is extremely precious and unique, the current committee have been keen to finish the complete digitisation process – begun many years ago – in order to be in a position to hand the entire archive over to the Surrey History Centre, where it will be indexed and most importantly, safe and secure. At the same time, the records are being uploaded onto the new Thursley History Society website, as alluded to by James Mendelssohn in his PC column in last month’s magazine. There have been many villagers through the years who have contributed to this enormous effort, including but not exclusively: Alie Hanbury, Sukey Langdale, Sally Scheffers, Lisa Woods, Simon Treadwell, Peter Rickenberg, Leon Flavell and of course the project leader, David Young. Our thanks go to everyone who has helped through the years and indeed all previous and current members for keeping our history so alive and available. However, a special mention must go to Tim Walsh, who has been our efficient and steadfast archivist over many years. Had it not been for the tireless and thankless task of studiously scanning, recording and filing these priceless archives, the current task of uploading them onto the website would be a far more laborious and time consuming one. The village owes him a huge debt of gratitude. Thank you, Tim, from all of us. We are so excited by the new site, brilliantly built by Helena Traill’s company Nooh Studio, and managed by the committee. It will allow each and every villager, and indeed, any interested party, to have the archives at their fingertips. This will allow everyone access to research their family, their house or many other matters relating to the village, using the new linking systems which allows for much richer and extensive results. The absolute wealth of information will be incredible, but it will always be a work in progress, as material will be added both current and from the archives. As extensive as our records are, we are very happy to take copies of any documents that you may have access to, in order to save them for posterity and future generations to enjoy. Finally, Happy Christmas from the Society and watch this space for details of an exciting launch event. If you can’t wait until next Spring, here is an example of a photograph from the archives, showing two Edwardian ladies standing in a spot that will be familiar to many of us. Can you identify where it is? Answer and article next month. The first meeting of the History of Thursley Society, 14th May 1991 :

The Harvest Supper was celebrated in the village hall to great acclaim on Saturday, 21st Septermber 2024. The idea of resurrecting the event came from Susanne Hunter, Sally Scheffers, Tamsin Taylor Matthews, Lisa Woods and Lizzie Young (who also selected the readings). Sarah O'Brien spoke on behalf of her father, Michael, who unfortunately could not attend. His well-chosen words are below.    Welcome.   I am not the only one here who will remember the first Thursley Harvest Supper in 1972   - 52 years ago - but we are becoming fewer.   That first supper was the idea of the then vicar, Kenneth Matthews, who had a distinguished service record serving as the padre onboard HMS Norfolk during her major actions during WWII. During that time, he witnessed the important role ‘community spirit’ played in bonding everyone together.   One of my roles that first year, and many times after, was to organise the seating plan. It was hard to please everyone, and a certain Brian Camp was often very critical!  I am happy to have relinquished that task.  So, if any of you have complaints about who you are seated next to this evening - I am not your man!   This leads me to thank everyone who has worked so hard to revive this wonderful supper.   The committee: Lisa Wood, Lizzie Young, Sally Scheffers, Susanne Hunter and Tamsin Taylor Matthews and the many others of you who have cooked the food and helped set up the hall.  It all looks wonderful and I hope this custom can be continued for many years to come.     Michael O’Brien, The Lodge     A huge effort had been made to make the tables attractive and the night sky joined in to help Photographs by Alex Smart Between the main course and dessert, these readings were given by villagers: Photographs by Alex Smart

Peter Hunter tells the story of years of debate, planning and construction of the tunnel from Thursley's point of view. (See also 'Old A3 by the village' and 'A Walk Through the A3 Tunnel, May 2011'). All photos and Hindhead Project diagram are from Wikipedia.   The saga of the Hindhead tunnel dates back as far as 1948 when even then it was realised that the crossroad of the A3 arterial highway and the East-West A287 would cause trouble as traffic volumes increased. The matter became of increasing importance to the Ministry of Transport as by the early 70s the accident rate had risen by approximately 40%. A full study of the possible diversionary routes was undertaken between 1970 and 1976. However, it was not until 1983 serious proposals began to emerge as to what the solution might be, with options of nine different routes. They became known as; The Red Route, the Yellow Route, etc.  The Red Route was the one favoured by the Ministry of Transport as this was the one that was most financially viable and was declared as the ‘Preferred Route in 1988.   It was, however, the Red Route that posed the most serious threat to the Parish of Thursley as it included a major four lane viaduct crossing over the Smallbrook Valley and the ‘Devils Punch Bowl’. Within the borough of Waverley various groups began to emerge either in support or against a particular route and ones that had the greatest impact on respective local communities. Within Thursley a group was setup in 1988 in order to object to the Red Route that would decimate the tranquillity of The Devils Punch Bowl ‘An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ (AONB) as well as being a ‘SSSI’ (Site of Special Scientific Interest).  The group was led by the farmer Pat Coles and monthly meetings were convened at Quirrell House in Pitch Place with the sole objective of campaigning against the Red Route.  The Proposed Red Route, with thanks to Sean Edwards   Much coverage was given to the objector groups by the local and national press as well as the BBC’s nightly South Today programme. During this period in the 80s Virginia Bottomley was the MP for South West Surrey, (now Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone) and her husband, Peter Bottomley MP was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Transport. It was at a meeting convened at Milford Village hall that in his address to the panel, chaired by Virginia Bottomley, that Peter Hunter announced that: The crossroads at Hindhead was the only set of traffic lights between Marselles and Dundee!   Though this statement rested somewhat on poetic licence it certainly caught the attention of all those concerned and greased the wheels of parliamentary progress.   After much debate and two public enquiries, it was generally agreed that a tunnel under the Hindhead hill was the best option.  Pat Coles was at that time a vocal member of the National Trust and managed to convince the Board of NT to give up the land that they owned to the North and South of the proposed tunnel. There was general agreement except that the National Trust insisted that their agreement was conditional on the land currently occupied by the existing A3 Trunk Road be reinstated to nature thus allowing the Hindhead Common and the Devil's Punch Bowl to be integrated again as it was pre-1826 when the main London to Portsmouth road was built around the Punch Bowl. Taking into consideration the reported adverse environmental impacts of the overhead routes the Government adopted the tunnel option of 2001 as being the preferred option.   Aerial view of the Devils Punch Bowl, before the closure of the old A3.  This proposed tunnel would be the most expensive of its type in the United Kingdom with the possible exception of the Limehouse Link tunnel. The final budget for the tunnel was some £371 million equating to £155,000 per metre. Further Public Enquiries were held throughout 2004 to hear local objections and to consider a late alternative proposal from a Mr Bernard North of Shropshire that was a variation of the Red Route and came even closer to the village of Thursley. Thursley Parish Council was represented by Peter Hunter at this enquiry held at the Olivetti Centre in Hindhead and the day was finally won, with the tunnel option coming out the winner.   The project was then delayed many times due to budgetary constraints under John Prescott’s Ministry of Finance but when London was awarded the 2012 Olympics political pressure was exerted when it became known that the sailing events would take place off the South Coast and the A3 would provide the main artery between London and Portsmouth and the teams would be subject to serious delays at Hindhead. The threat of a national embarrassment finally unleashed the necessary funds, and the project began in earnest in 2007 with the tunnelling aspect of the north portal commencing on 1st February 2008 with the south portal commencing some three months later on 14th May 2008.  Whereas the noisy excavation works on the south portal worked 24/7 the south portal was restricted to a five-day week and limited operating hours due to the proximity of residential properties.   From the outset a tunnel was built rather than a cutting being dug to avoid spoiling an area of outstanding natural beauty and a  Site of Special Scientific Interest , much of which is owned by the  National Trust . Before digging started an environmental survey was carried out. Common lizards, adders and slow-worms found at Boundless Valley were relocated.   Environmental considerations resulted in many common lizards, adders and slow-worms found at Boundless Valley were relocated to National Trust land at Highcombe Edge while grass snakes were taken to Hurthill Copse. Tree felling was scheduled to minimise disruption to nesting birds and to other wildlife and in certain instances, animals such as dormice were removed to similar habitats elsewhere. In all some 2,173 tonnes of trees were removed to allow the construction of the North and South portals. After the works were completed, 200,000 trees were planted along the route of the old road.  The restoration of the old road to nature removed a barrier that prevented the migration of ground-nesting birds, such as woodlarks and nightjars from one part of the nature reserve to the other.   Breakthrough was achieved on both tunnels on 26 February 2009, 250 m from the south portal with the resultant progress rate for the southern portion was 1.2 m/day and for the northern portion very much quicker at 3.9 m/day. The method chosen for the tunnel excavation was the New Austrian Tunnelling Method that used appropriately sized excavators rather than a boring machine that would have been too expensive considering the relatively short distance to be tunnelled compared to something like the Channel Tunnel. This method also saved some 20% of excavated spoil due to it having a flat bottom to the 11.6 metre diameter bore. In all some 737,000 cubic metres of soil was excavated from the two tunnel bores and was used to provide various embankments that were required throughout the project. The tunnel themselves represent 1.14 miles of the total project dual carriageway of 4 miles and is the longest road tunnel in the United Kingdom of which 2/3 is within the Parish of Thursley and can therefore claim to have hosted one of the country’s major civil engineering works.     Open Day, 14 May 2011      On Sunday, 14 May 2011, one and a half months before the tunnel was due to open, the contractors staged an open day when 7,000 pedestrians were able to walk the full length of the tunnel while local music groups performed at the north end of the tunnel. These included the Haslemere Town Band, who performed the "Devil's Punch Bowl March" as the first VIPs emerged from the tunnel. This had been composed especially for the occasion by 16-year-old Band member, Eric Foster. The formal opening ceremony itself was performed by the then Secretary of State for Transport, Phillip Hammond on 29 July 2011 an event to which the Chairman of Thursley Parish Council was invited to attend.      The old A3 returned to nature. This view is taken from close to  Gibbet Hill, almost directly above the tunnel. October 2012    With all the fanfare complete and clean-up operations nearly finished the Thursley joys soon turned to cries of woe. Whereas the building of the twin bore tunnel was a great civil engineering success the same cannot be said for the electrical installations. The planned opening date of the tunnel was delayed by some two weeks when it was discovered that a major cable running the length of the tunnel was missing. During the first year of operation there were a number of closures often due to failures with the fire alarm systems and software issues.  The net result of these closures meant that unprepared motorist travelling both north and south, sought to find their way around the closure and put their faith in their trusted sat-navs.  For those travelling south this meant them coming through the centre of the village and continuing through Pitch Place. For those heading north they were brought along the same route in reverse leaving the A287 at Hindhead and heading down the Tilford Road. The Dye House Road and Pitch Place were never meant to cope with such a volume of traffic especially not HGVs. Chaos ensued.  One dark and stormy night saw two Parish Councillors attempting to unlock a Spanish gas tanker heading north opposite a late night theatre coach heading south!   Thursley Parish Council argued extensively over a period of some eight years with the Highways Agency (later renamed Highways England) that better traffic management was needed and the black and yellow diversion symbols were totally inadequate at times of such crisis. Meeting after meeting took place between Highways England, Surrey County Council, Thursley Parish Council, Haslemere Town Council and Waverley Borough Council and Surrey Police Traffic Division. Many participants grew increasingly frustrated as the number of tunnel closures increased due to either vehicle accidents, false fire alerts, real vehicle fires and system software errors.     One of the main frustrations for those that had to endure the consequences of these frequent closures was the discovery that neither end of the tunnel was properly equipped with emergency contra flow arrangements that would allow a relatively free flow of traffic both north and south. It was not until 2022 that ‘Swift Gates’ were installed either end of the tunnel allowing a quick diversion of traffic from one bore to the other facilitating single lanes of contra-flow traffic.  However, whenever there was a fire alert then all traffic had to be halted as a matter of prime safety.   These annoyances and inconveniences being imposed on local residents naturally raised the question as to why the old A3 road had not been kept open in order to cope with such emergencies ? The answer to which is many folds.  Firstly, it was part of the agreement with the National Trust that the two commons would be joined by the abandonment of the old carriageway. Secondly, whereas it would have been relatively easy to manage north bound traffic it would have been very difficult without massive overhead viaducts to route the southbound traffic onto the western carriageway that was once the A3. And thirdly, it would have been very costly to maintain a major road for occasional use by cars and HGVs (Heavy Goods Vehicles). Safety and proper drainage being of the essence.       Report in the Farnham Herald on the inquiry coming to an end: https://www.farnhamherald.com/news/hindhead-tunnel-inquiry-comes-to-an-end-158228 How the tunnel was constructed courtesy Hampshire News: https://www.hampshirelive.news/news/hampshire-news/gallery/the-construction-of-hindhead-tunnel-4470892 YouTube film 'Under The Devil's Punch Bowl - The Hindhead Tunnel Story': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBFZhwoLEbQ And for those of you who would really like to get into the weeds, here is the Inspector's report (courtesy Peter Hunter):

The Vestry Screen for Thursley's Church was designed by Tracey Sheppard FGE, was unveiled by the Dean of Guildford on 26th November 2024 The photographs above were taken by Sean Edwards Before these beautiful doors were made and installed, the work had to be specified, funds had to be raised and a designer found: Fund raising : The Designer : Programme of Work and Techniques Use d: The construction : The Design : The artisan at work : The Dedication : Press comment and appreciation :

Thursley History Society was delighted to receive this cookbook: many thanks, Lisa Woods. It contains recipes from villagers including Hilary Barr, Sue Ranson, Marion O'Brien, Patricia Coles, Sandy Hanauer, Sukey Langdale and Anne Wakeley. Featured recipes : The complete recipe book, which begins with an index, can be found in this pdf:

An article from The County Magazine, February 1965 This unattributed cutting from our archive is dated 27th November 1987:

Bowlhead Green Farm is a medieval three bay open hall house with the central bay open to the roof. Photograph taken from a report published in 1978 Photograph used in the Surrey farming personalities article below taken in December 1964 Sketch by an unknown artist Bowlhead Green Farm : extract from a 1978 report prepared by the Domestic Buildings Research Group, Surrey. The full report is in the pdf below: Bowlhead Green Farm Barn : extract from a 1978 report prepared by the Domestic Buildings Research Group, Surrey. The full report is in the pdf below: A pdf of this report will be available shortly. Mr and Mrs Tom Ranson, December 1964 The article below appeared in the Surrey NFU Journal in December 1964: The farmhouse in August 2024

The village's celebrations were many and varied. There was a classic car and tractor show: Camilla Daubeney's Coffee Pod did a roaring trade James Maclean generously provided a HUGE digger in which you had to pick up and egg and put it in a frying pan!: A game of cricket, of course: A huge hog-roast at the Three Horseshoes And a Tug-o-War! Here is another set of wonderful photographs by Andrew Kaplanovsk

Photographs only - courtesy Valérie Ferris (VF) and Andrew Kaplanovsky (AK) Starting in 2016 (VF) Many more entries in 2017 (AK) And more entries in 2018 (VF) 2019 (AK) 2022 (VF)

These have been held for many years on the lawn behind the Village Hall and enjoyed by children and adults. All photographs courtesy Valérie Ferris (VF) and Andrew Kaplanovsky (AK). 2016 VF 2017 VF 2017AK 2018 VF 2018 AK 2019 VF 2019 AF 2020