History in motion
The Devil’s Punch Bowl is marked by the history of transportion. The first London-Portsmouth Road – which most of this HistoryScapes trail follows – passed through Liphook and Thursley. In the 17th century as Portsmouth’s naval importance increased, it was rerouted south of Thursley. By the early 18th century, Parliament set up turnpike trusts to maintain the roads under licence. The Portsmouth Road was run by the Kingston-upon-Thames to Sheet Bridge Turnpike Company from 1749-1873. The Red Lion Inn (now a private residence) in Thursley, where travellers stopped before tackling the Punch Bowl, doubled as the toll house.
It was a difficult road. Horses got tired on the climb, and Hindhead Hill – Gibbet Hill from the late 18th century – was often shrouded in mist and had a dangerous reputation, a haunt for highway robbers. As carriages, and traffic, got heavier, the turnpike trust moved in the 1820s to carve out a new ‘coach road’, later the A3, down the hill, employing hundreds of labourers to dig through the eastern hillside.
The new road was one element of what drove the gradual transformation of Hindhead and the Devil’s Punch Bowl in the 19th century from a place of transit to a destination. The arrival of the railway in 1859 was another. The station at Haslemere, a journey of about an hour from Waterloo, helped reverse the area’s isolation and economic decline. As London’s population expanded, rural Hindhead, increasingly celebrated for its clean air and dramatic scenery, began to be seen as an attractive proposition for the wealthier middle classes, those who needed access to London but preferred not to live there.
With the massive increase in car traffic in the second half of the twentieth century, the single-carriageway A3 became a problem, a bottleneck, and the Hindhead Tunnel, first proposed in 1993, got the go-ahead in 2006 and opened in 2011. The plaque at this site, pictured at the top of the page and on the original turnpike, sits directly over the tunnel, 65 metres below. The old A3 was duly closed and, for the National Trust, this meant that the process of reuniting Hindhead Commons and the Devil’s Punch Bowl could begin.