Fans of the Lord of the Rings films will recall the lighting of the beacons between Minas Tirith and Rohan in The Return of the King. Well, it wasn’t too long ago that something very similar took place in the hills north of Farnham, with a gruesome story attached to one such episode.
In the days before radio, phones and the internet, news of war, victory or defeat would be flashed from one beacon hill to the next - historically by fire but later by semaphore and radio transmission.
Systems of this kind have existed for centuries over much of the world, and many hills in England were named Beacon Hill after such beacons, including a few examples locally.
According to a faulted local legend recounted in Roger Long’s book Haunted Inns of Hampshire (faulted for reasons that will become clear to military history buffs), it was by this method that news of the Duke of Wellington’s great victory at Waterloo was dispatched from the fleet in Portsmouth to the army top brass at Aldershot.
The closest beacon to Aldershot was located on the commons at Ewshot near Fleet, on the aptly named Beacon Hill, and so when the oil lamps flickered into action in March 1815 to carry news of a great victory over Napoleon in Belgium, a military orderly was rapidly dispatched to convey the good tidings to army HQ.
However, the unfortunate orderly would never make it. Waylaid en route at a place now called Alma Lane in Hale, the military messenger was beaten to death by three footpads who relieved him of his money. Or so the story goes.
Legend does not inform us of the poor soldier’s name, why he was picked upon, nor whether anybody was convicted for the murder.
Soldiers were notoriously hard up in the early 19th century and thefts were not uncommon, so perhaps it was an opportune attack by three locals well into their cups and unable to indulge further through lack of funds.
All is speculation - as is the legend that to this day, on moonlit evenings in June, the sound of heavy-booted running can occasionally be heard outside the Alma Inn in Alma Lane - the echo of the poor orderly who met his bloody demise 200 years earlier.
The great fault in this yarn is of course the fact Aldershot was not established as an army garrison until the 1850s, long after the Battle of Waterloo.
Another famous victory of the British army, the Battle of Alma in the Crimean War did, however, take place in 1854 and so Peeps wonders if this local legend has confused one great victory with another?
It could perhaps also explain how Alma Lane and its inn got their names, if this was indeed along the communications route for the news of the great victory in the Crimean War.
It seems unlikely though, as shortly after the Battle of Waterloo, the old beacon hills were replaced by a sophisticated system of telegraph towers between the fleet in Portsmouth and the Admiralty in London.
The 13 hilltop semaphore stations could transmit the news over the 70-mile distance in a matter of minutes, leaving the fleet-footed orderlies somewhat redundant.
Another more likely possibility is that Alma Lane was named later to honour the battle, rather than being directly linked to the transmission of news.
It is also worth noting that beacon systems remained in use for local signalling well into the 19th century, often employed for early warning of smuggling activity along the Hampshire and Sussex coasts in particular.
Can readers shed any light on the Alma orderly mystery, or perhaps how the beacon hills system functioned before the advent of radio? There are many mounds named Beacon Hill locally, with another in the Hindhead area of course. Are they all connected?
