SOUTH POND, Midhurst

South Pond Spring Clean

Monday 22nd March 2010, 1 pm - 4 pm Weeding - Pruning - Planting - Light Spade Work - Equipment Provided If you wish to attend please contact Amanda Kennett on 07766 224460 or email her on: midhurssouthpond@hotmail.com Chichester District Council

Historical Overview by Bridget Howard

SOUTH POND
Midhurst's South Pond has a history as old as the town itself. It is fed by two streams which were once the boundaries of Saxon settlements. For more than a millenium those streams have seperated Cocking from Bepton on one side and from Heyshott on the other. They join together and become the division between the oldest part of Midhurst and what is technically West Lavington, although now subsumed in the sprawl of Modern midhurst. These two estates once belonged to different lords. The lands to the north were held by the owner of Cowdray as his manor of Midhurst, the southern area by the Earl of Arundel, part of what was then the manor of Woolavington.

The South Pond was formed when one of the medieval lordfs of Midhurst dammed the streams with the object of making a breeding pool for the fish which the household ate on Fridays and in Lent. There were perch, bream, tench, roach and carp. The lord's servants netted them from a boat but the Earl was only permitted to catch those in his own sector, using a rod and line. The old boundary disappeared when the land was flooded, and was marked by a row of stakes. These details come from a document of 1522, and further searches of the archives suggest that the dam is likely to have been erected in the mid-1100's by Gelwin de Bohun who built the manor house on St Ann's Hill.

SOUTH MILL
A South Mill was in existence by 1284, used to grind corn and powered by the pent-up waters of the pond. In 1634 it was leased to William Warde, a clothmaker from Woolavington, and converted to a fulling mill - the cloth was beaten with wooden hammers, known as fulling stocks. The purpose of fulling was to shrink the newly woven cloth to make it more dense and have better wear and weather resisitance. This was originally done by treading the cloth in a wooden trough but advancing technology replaced human effort by water mills. By the mid-1700's, however, little cloth was being made in this area and South Mill changed to leather production. This continued until the 19th century.

The mill has been converted to a private house but its pool can be seen from the road; opposite is the penstock, or sluice, that still controls the flow of water out of the pond.Two other features are visible on the western parapet. One is the remains of a pump which drew water to damp down the dust of the road. The other is the Ordnance Survey benchmark, an arrow pointing at a horizontal line. This indicates the height above sea level at Liverpool: OS maps of 1875 and 1895 show this as 83 feet. (Similar marks may be found on the parish church, Ebenezer chapel and Clock House.)

LOWER POND
On the Midhurst side of the bridge, a lane runs east through a little valley, enclosed on one side by St Ann's Hill and one the other side by the former pleasure gardens of Close Walks. Down one side is a brook, formed by the overflow from South Pond. Most of this area was flooded deliberately in the mid-16tth century by the first Viscount Montague of Cowdray with the object of creating another holding place for his fish. This was necessary because the pond had become polluted. The slaughterhouses of butchers in West Street were illegally dumping carion there and this, combined with excreta from humans and from their pigs kept in backyards, made it very unwholesome. When Queen Elizabeth 1st visited Cowdray in 1591, an entertainment with songs, speeches and fancy costumes was presented to her on the banks of what was described as a 'goodly fish pool'. More formally, it was His Lordship's Lower Pond .See map of 1632 above.

CANAL TERMINUS
Three hundred years later, in 1791, the bottom of the valley became the terminus of a canal linking Midhurst with the River Arun at Stopham Bridge. Financed by the Earl of Egremont at Petworth, it survived until the coming of the railways in 1860 (Petersfield Line) but although it no longer carried commercial traffic, it was not formally closed until 1936. Because of this canal the valley is still called 'The Wharf'.

The picturesque and historic South Pond has known many famous people. The young H.G.Wells, struggling unwillingly to become the dispenser for a local chemist, was given evening tuition in Latin byn the headmaster of Mdhurst Grammar School who lived in one of the houses at the bottom of South Street. The lessons were in vain but the novelist praised Midhurst in several of his books. On the opposite side of the street, the Spread eagle Hotel has welcomed guests ranging from Herman Goering and Von Ribbentrop to Gordon Richards, David Belamy, Trevor Howard and Cliff Richards amd most recently Michael Kitchen and the stars of 'Foyle's War'

Today, South Pond with its treasury of wild life remains a haven of peace in an otherewise turbulent world.

 

More soon.......

 

 

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