History

The inhabitants of the area around Furzehill were never wealthy, their cottages have come and gone with hardly a trace left to show for their existence. Much of the evidence of past activity is ancient and this is documented very well by Heywood Sumner in his ‘Cuckoo Hill – The Book of Gorley’ which although out of print can still be had as used copy on Amazon for a few ££ .

If you walk the hills you will see all kinds of lumps and bumps and it’s fun speculating as to their origins, some will be very ancient, others could be evidence of the activity here during WW2

One interesting ancient feature lies just a few yards from the entrance to the caravan site. It’s a boiling mound from the Bronze age, see if you can find it, it’s pretty obvious once you get your eyes working properly.

Here’s some info about boiling mounds:

Little is known about boiling mounds (mounds of burnt fire cracked flint). Potentially, many thousand may remain scattered across the New Forest National Park. Like the burial mounds these are thought to date from the Bronze Age. They are small mounds usually close to a stream or water course and excavated examples have evidence of a wooden water trough. It is assumed that water was heated by placing pre-heated flint into the water filled trough. There are many varied suggestions as to what these sites were used for. These theories include the possibility that they were quasi-ritual in origin, possibly associated with imitation rites or were even related to historic evidence for Scandinavian saunas or Irish sweat houses simply for bathing and personal hygiene purposes.An unusually large quantity of burial and boiling sites has survived within the heathland and areas of common pasture within the National Park. This is probably because these areas have not been ploughed since the sites were created. It is likely that the areas outside the heathland and commons had a similar density of sites but these have largely been obscured by subsequent human activities