Four Marks

Four Marks is a village and civil parish in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, England, 4.4 miles (7.1 km) southwest of Alton on the A31 road. It lies on the edge of the South Downs National Park on the Pilgrims' Way that leads from Winchester to Canterbury, and it contains the medieval hamlets of Kitwood, Hawthorn and Lymington, although the whole parish is now fairly closely settled. The name is recorded in a c. 1550 perambulation of the Manor of Alresford as Fowremarkes, a piece of empty land where four tithings met, those of Medstead, Ropley, Farringdon and Chawton, and the Old English mark means boundary, so the name translates as Four Borders. Neolithic polished axeheads and arrowheads have been found in the parish, and three Early Bronze Age barrows stand just south of Barn Lane. For most of its history the area was sparsely settled common land of neighbouring parishes, especially Ropley. Settlement grew with the sale of plots around the turn of the twentieth century, when the number of inhabitants rose to 279 by 1901 and 334 by 1911.