Rain circles animate the Basingstoke canal as I walk west beside it from the Wey Navigation towards Woking. A waterside sign declares: “Sheerwater says no to mass destruction”, and for a moment I presume it refers not to the demolition of a housing estate but to its proximity to Horsell Common, where HG Wells set the arrival of the Martians in his 1898 classic The War of the Worlds.
During his stay at nearby Maybury Road in Woking in 1895, Wells learned to ride a bicycle, like the unnamed narrator of the book; one can visualise him wobbling up the quiet, pine-lined road to the common every day.
As is often the case with common lands, the history of Horsell Common is intriguing, and this one fortunately has many people who take great care of it: the Horsell Common Preservation Society achieves a fine balance in making this natural environment as accessible for all without turning it into a nature theme park.
The woodland trails – one of which is named after Sir Alec, the more successful of the Surrey cricketing Bedser twins, who learned their craft locally – are apparent without being obtrusive and allow visitors to admire the open heathland, which as always seems mauve-tinted even when the heather isn’t blooming. Swaths of mast-like silver birches and sunset-pink/reddish-barked Scots pines creak in the wind. Gorse is starting to flower, its serpentine thorny stems flailing like viper’s-bugloss.
The sandpit area of the common resembles an inverted crab shell, the result of many years’ quarrying of sand for local use. Here, the first Martian cylinder to arrive had, according to Wells, caused “the sand and gravel [to be] flung in every direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and half away”.
The sand has a curious saffron-orange tinge to it, particularly on the “beach”, akin to one in France, at Deauville say, where the sand is raked by a tractor every morning to make it pristine for the beautiful people who come to bathe. Like a child in wellies, I plant my feet where the Martians landed.
- This amended on 10 March to correct a misspelling of Scots pines.
