History
In prehistory Mammoths used to freely roam the area now encompassed by the village boundaries, evidenced by the Mammoth tusks occasionally excavated by Surrey Archaeological Society.
The village has a very long history with remains in, or close to, the village from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Iron Age, Roman and medieval periods. In 1967 the Badshot Lea Village school master and amateur archaeologist William (Billy) Rankine discovered the remains of a Neolithic Long Barrow burial mound in Badshot Lea. The site was excavated by the Surrey Archaeological Society and many finds are on display at Guildford Museum. Little remains of the original mound due to quarrying and the excavation of the Railway cutting in the 1800s. The burial mound was sited close to the Harrow Way. The village also previously was surrounded by thriving farms, with a particular focus on hop growing; these played such an important role in the economic development of the village that hops feature in the village logo.
The Eastern end of village has suffered terrible flooding in times gone by. This led to the road near the Aldershot boundary being nicknamed the 'docks'.
Read more about this topic: Badshot Lea
Famous quotes containing the word history:
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—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)