things change

Hindhead was a village on the A3, the main road between London and Portsmouth, and was a notorious traffic bottleneck until a tunnel bypassing the village was completed in 2011. As a result of losing the through traffic, Hindhead has become pretty rundown. The village is famous for the Devil’s Punch Bowl, a large natural amphitheatre. The A3 used to go around the outside of the Devil’s Punch Bowl, which made for a very noisy beauty spot, but the area is now quiet, and the road has been dug up and removed.

Haslemere is a rather attractive small town a couple of miles from Hindhead, and has good train links to London. The Haslemere Bookshop is rather good, and I picked up Ryan David Jahn’s The Dispatcher. There is a large collection of second-hand books on the first floor.