Farley Mount
Farley Mount is a hill and one of the highest points in Hampshire. The elevation here is 168m. It is located within Farley Mount Country Park, situated about four miles west of the historic city of Winchester, Hampshire. It is locally famous for being the subject of a folk song, 'On Farley Mount'. It featured the line oh on Farley Mount the clouds drift by, rustling the trees, on Farley mount I wonder why, what troubles you and I, blue is the sky and so are your eyes, oh left alone on Farley Mount. It is believed to date back to at least the sixteenth century and can is still sung in pubs in the area.
The pyramid here is the 'Horse Monument' which celebrates a horse, named "Beware Chalk Pit", which carried its owner to a racing victory in 1734, a year after having fallen into a chalk pit whilst out fox-hunting
The inscription on the plaque on the north wall reads:
Underneath lies buried a horse, the property of Paulet St. John Esq., that in the month of September 1733 leaped into a chalk pit twenty-five feet deep afoxhuntiing with his master on his back and in October 1734 he won the Hunters Plate on Worthy Downs and was rode by his owner and was entered in the name of "Beware Chalk Pit".
The views all around the Hampshire landscape are stunning, and the monument can also be seen from many distant places, particularly when the sun is reflected from the white walls.
The monument is a very different shape to that shown in a picture in a book c1860' and there are other references to a second monument having been built, perhaps to replace the square building above with one more capable of shedding the weather?
It is thought that the 2 cast iron plaques detailing the escapades of "Beware Chalk Pit", may have been commissioned for the second building, and this is reinforced by the discovery that the bricks used to build the pyramidal shape were not at all contemporary with the period of Paulet St. John.
The picture is from "The Winchester Countryside", by Alan Rannie (1947), published by Allen and Unwin. It shows the monument in poor repair, presumably as a result of neglect during the Second World War.
The most bizzare picture known of the monument is that of chimp riding a horse past the monument, a PG Tips tea card from the mid 1990s.
The concrete post in the foreground is a triangulation pillar or trig point, and sometimes informally as a trig, is a fixed surveying station, used in geodetic surveying and other surveying projects in its vicinity. The names of triangulation stations vary regionally; they are generally known as trigonometrical stations in North America, trig points in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, trig stations or points in Australia, and trig beacons in South Africa; triangulation pillar is the more formal term for the concrete columns found in the UK.
The station is usually set up by a government with known coordinate and elevation published. In the United Kingdom, trig points are typically concrete pillars, and were erected by the Ordnance Survey. Many stations are located on hilltops for the purposes of visibility. A graven metal plate on the top of a pillar may provide a mounting point for a theodolite or reflector.
Trigonometrical stations are grouped together to form a network of triangulation. Positions of all land boundaries, roads, railways, bridges and other infrastructure can be accurately located by the network, a task that is essential to the construction of modern infrastructure. Apart from the known stations set up by government, some temporary trigonometrical stations are set up near construction sites for monitoring the precision and progress of construction.
Some trigonometrical stations use the Global Positioning System for greatly improved accuracy.
Although many stations are no longer required for surveying purposes, they remain useful to hikers as navigational aids when hill-walking.
The process of placing trig points on top of prominent hills and mountains began in 1935 to assist in the accurate retriangulation of Great Britain. In low-lying or flat areas some trig points are only a few metres above sea level and one is even at -1 m (in Norfolk, TL6189). When all the trig points were in place, it was possible, in clear weather, to see at least two other trig points from any one trig point but subsequent vegetation growth means that this is not necessarily still the case. Careful measurements of the angles between the lines-of-sight of the other trig points then allowed the construction of a system of triangles which could then be referenced back to a single baseline to construct a highly accurate measurement system that covered the entire country.
In most of the United Kingdom, trig points are truncated square concrete (occasionally stone) pyramids or obelisks tapering towards the top. On the top a brass plate with three arms and a central depression is fixed and this is used to mount and centre a theodolite used to take angular measurements to neighbouring trig points. A benchmark is usually set on the side, marked with the letters "O S B M" (Ordnance Survey Bench Mark) and the reference number of the trig point. Within and below the visible trig point, there are concealed reference marks whose National Grid References are precisely known. The standard trig point design is credited to Brigadier Martin Hotine (1898–1968), the then head of the Trigonometrical and Levelling Division of the Ordnance Survey. Many of them are now disappearing from the countryside as their function has largely been superseded by aerial photography and digital mapping using lasers and GPS measurements. To quote from a page at the OS site: "Like an iceberg, there is more of trig pillar below the surface than above it." From the same source: "Today the receivers that make up the OS Net network are coordinated to an accuracy of just 3 mm over {the entire length of Great Britain}".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farley_Mount
www3.hants.gov.uk/countryside/fmcp/monument.htm
Farley Mount
Farley Mount is a hill and one of the highest points in Hampshire. The elevation here is 168m. It is located within Farley Mount Country Park, situated about four miles west of the historic city of Winchester, Hampshire. It is locally famous for being the subject of a folk song, 'On Farley Mount'. It featured the line oh on Farley Mount the clouds drift by, rustling the trees, on Farley mount I wonder why, what troubles you and I, blue is the sky and so are your eyes, oh left alone on Farley Mount. It is believed to date back to at least the sixteenth century and can is still sung in pubs in the area.
The pyramid here is the 'Horse Monument' which celebrates a horse, named "Beware Chalk Pit", which carried its owner to a racing victory in 1734, a year after having fallen into a chalk pit whilst out fox-hunting
The inscription on the plaque on the north wall reads:
Underneath lies buried a horse, the property of Paulet St. John Esq., that in the month of September 1733 leaped into a chalk pit twenty-five feet deep afoxhuntiing with his master on his back and in October 1734 he won the Hunters Plate on Worthy Downs and was rode by his owner and was entered in the name of "Beware Chalk Pit".
The views all around the Hampshire landscape are stunning, and the monument can also be seen from many distant places, particularly when the sun is reflected from the white walls.
The monument is a very different shape to that shown in a picture in a book c1860' and there are other references to a second monument having been built, perhaps to replace the square building above with one more capable of shedding the weather?
It is thought that the 2 cast iron plaques detailing the escapades of "Beware Chalk Pit", may have been commissioned for the second building, and this is reinforced by the discovery that the bricks used to build the pyramidal shape were not at all contemporary with the period of Paulet St. John.
The picture is from "The Winchester Countryside", by Alan Rannie (1947), published by Allen and Unwin. It shows the monument in poor repair, presumably as a result of neglect during the Second World War.
The most bizzare picture known of the monument is that of chimp riding a horse past the monument, a PG Tips tea card from the mid 1990s.
The concrete post in the foreground is a triangulation pillar or trig point, and sometimes informally as a trig, is a fixed surveying station, used in geodetic surveying and other surveying projects in its vicinity. The names of triangulation stations vary regionally; they are generally known as trigonometrical stations in North America, trig points in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, trig stations or points in Australia, and trig beacons in South Africa; triangulation pillar is the more formal term for the concrete columns found in the UK.
The station is usually set up by a government with known coordinate and elevation published. In the United Kingdom, trig points are typically concrete pillars, and were erected by the Ordnance Survey. Many stations are located on hilltops for the purposes of visibility. A graven metal plate on the top of a pillar may provide a mounting point for a theodolite or reflector.
Trigonometrical stations are grouped together to form a network of triangulation. Positions of all land boundaries, roads, railways, bridges and other infrastructure can be accurately located by the network, a task that is essential to the construction of modern infrastructure. Apart from the known stations set up by government, some temporary trigonometrical stations are set up near construction sites for monitoring the precision and progress of construction.
Some trigonometrical stations use the Global Positioning System for greatly improved accuracy.
Although many stations are no longer required for surveying purposes, they remain useful to hikers as navigational aids when hill-walking.
The process of placing trig points on top of prominent hills and mountains began in 1935 to assist in the accurate retriangulation of Great Britain. In low-lying or flat areas some trig points are only a few metres above sea level and one is even at -1 m (in Norfolk, TL6189). When all the trig points were in place, it was possible, in clear weather, to see at least two other trig points from any one trig point but subsequent vegetation growth means that this is not necessarily still the case. Careful measurements of the angles between the lines-of-sight of the other trig points then allowed the construction of a system of triangles which could then be referenced back to a single baseline to construct a highly accurate measurement system that covered the entire country.
In most of the United Kingdom, trig points are truncated square concrete (occasionally stone) pyramids or obelisks tapering towards the top. On the top a brass plate with three arms and a central depression is fixed and this is used to mount and centre a theodolite used to take angular measurements to neighbouring trig points. A benchmark is usually set on the side, marked with the letters "O S B M" (Ordnance Survey Bench Mark) and the reference number of the trig point. Within and below the visible trig point, there are concealed reference marks whose National Grid References are precisely known. The standard trig point design is credited to Brigadier Martin Hotine (1898–1968), the then head of the Trigonometrical and Levelling Division of the Ordnance Survey. Many of them are now disappearing from the countryside as their function has largely been superseded by aerial photography and digital mapping using lasers and GPS measurements. To quote from a page at the OS site: "Like an iceberg, there is more of trig pillar below the surface than above it." From the same source: "Today the receivers that make up the OS Net network are coordinated to an accuracy of just 3 mm over {the entire length of Great Britain}".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farley_Mount
www3.hants.gov.uk/countryside/fmcp/monument.htm