destroyed by workmen during road construction in the 1960s. An old photograph notes its site tucked into a roadside hedge. Apart from the accident of boundaries, 'Four Marks' for almost all its prehistory and most of its modern times was an empty, but busy, place. People passed through, or near by, without great notice using the Roman Road or King's Highway through Chawton Park Wood or, later, the Alton to Winchester turnpike (now the A31). The high point of the roads at about 215 metres was a chalk ridge, capped with clay and flints, lying between Telegraph Lane and the centre of Medstead. Rainwater flows to the north to the River Thames and, to the south, to The Solent. Under fifty inhabitants clustered away from the through road around small farms dotted along the old river bed called Lymington Bottom and, for instance, at Hawthorn, Kitfield and Kitwood. The area was not well known and did not feature in lists of hamlets in nineteenth or early twentieth century gazetteers. Around 1900, a few houses near the Windmill Inn took the name Four Marks. In 1897, there was a small post office near this point at Four Marks House. The birth of the new village came in the years between 1894 and World War I. At least five major developers, one unidentified, descended on Four Marks intent on social improvement or plain commercial gain. Winchester College Estate conducted at least two major sales: 350 acres in Medstead and Soldridge offered in April 1894 and, in May 1912, around the main road in Four Marks. The Land Company of London held two auctions at Lymington Park Estate in 1896 offering over 140 plots with a hotel and shops on a farm bought from Charles Frederick Hemming. Lymington Park Estate surrounded Lymington Farm, a substantial set of buildings on the corner of Brislands Lane, grandly renamed Lymington Park Road for the auction, and Lymington Bottom, called Medstead Main Road. At almost the same time, William Carter, owner of Herbert Park, offered large opportunities in Alton and Kitwood Lanes. A local man, Frank Gotelee, who in 1901 acquired much of the land in Medstead which had been accumulated in the 1850s and 60s by William Ivey, tried to sell freehold plots for development although with less success. Carter's development was initially called The Homestead Movement. Its defining characteristics were cheap, rural or semirural land