‘Devil’s Punch Bowl: broom squire’s way’
Hindhead, 1925. George Mayes is setting off for a walk around the Devil’s Punch Bowl. He’s seen a lot of change around here in his time.
Not so very long ago, Hindhead and its wide tracts of heathland were seen as a forbidding rural backwater along the London to Portsmouth road. Turner sketched it in 1808 as an ominous landscape overlooked by gallows on Gibbet Hill, named after a hanging there in the late eighteenth century. In the 1820s, the political reformer William Cobbett called it “the most villanous spot God ever made”.
But that wasn’t to last. In George’s lifetime Hindhead became firmly established as a place of natural beauty. Increasingly accessible by road and rail, it became a fashionable destination for the middle classes in the later 1800s, an escape from the pollution of London – an “English Switzerland”, as one writer put it at the turn of the century. In 1905, conservationists led by Sir Robert Hunter, a local resident and the legal architect of the recently founded National Trust, raised the money to buy the Punch Bowl. In the following year it became one of the fledgling Trust’s major acquisitions.
George is based on the real George Mayes, who lived in the Devil’s Punch Bowl all his life. Now in his sixties, he has witnessed these transformations taking place around him. George and his neighbours keep cattle and sheep, grow vegetables, and make part of their living as broom squires, a craft very strongly associated with the Punch Bowl’s residents. For generations, men like him have used the land’s resources to make and sell brooms around this area and beyond – though it is now a dying art. George is pictured below at the cottages in Highcombe Bottom in the 1910s or early 1920s with a bundle of hazel, used for broom handles.
In the app trail, George will take you for a walk through Hindhead as it was a century ago. You’ll discover the role that broom squires, keeping scrub woodland at bay, played in the local ecosystem. You’ll also discover the wider heritage of this fragile heathland landscape, from long before George’s time to the present day.
You can download the free HistoryScapes app on the ‘Home’ page or through your phone store. The brief articles here expand on the app’s audio content and invite you to dive deeper into each of the 8 sites on the ‘Devil’s Punch Bowl: broom squire’s way’ trail.