borrowed premises. A permanent building arrived in 1913 and this has since been incorporated into today’s Village Hall in Lymington Bottom. A separate development, which began slowly shortly after the turn of the century, was an entirely different example of social change. The invention of two new popular forms of transport, bicycles and motor vehicles, transformed Winchester Road along its length. This single-carriageway was eventually dotted with flowering cherry and ornamental apple trees. In a steady growth from between the wars and into the 1950s, businesses catered for a ‘mobile, fine evening and weekend pleasure pursuing population’ heading for the country. Premises ‘sprouted like mushrooms’ providing fuel and mechanical assistance for motorists and cyclists and, with the townies who came by railway, for sustenance with general stores, road houses, wholesome refreshment rooms, small shops, cafés, the Windmill Inn and, even, The Blinking Owl, a good class restaurant with a dance floor. Those smaller shops, which might otherwise have spread around the side streets with the bungalows, instead congregated prominently on Winchester Road taking best advantage of the needs of both visitors and locals. Many of the shops were made of rickety ex-Canadian Army huts. In its current and ongoing phase from 1961, the population of Four Marks more than tripled in the next fifty years, the number of dwellings quadrupling. There were 3,893 inhabitants in 2011. There has been an explosion in piecemeal and large estate development in the last ten years. Crimean myth Claims have been made in Wikipedia based on a local history that Four Marks was initially settled by returning soldiers of the Crimean War, 1853–56. The idea that a grateful government would give out land it did not own for a tiny selection of ordinary veterans uniquely in Four Marks is dubious. No supporting evidence has been found in government papers or in histories of the Crimean War. In the ten years to 1871, the population in Four Marks increased unremarkably to 139. If the small increase had been the result of the war, it would have happened before 1861 and not ten years later. A close examination of the occupants in 1861 shows no war-weary from Sevastopol, but a less exciting handful of fertile local families who worked the land on scattered existing farms: leaseholders, agricultural labourers, carters and a shepherd. The attractive Crimean story is a myth. Local amenities The village has its own