Dunsfold

Within a generation of the oak being cut for Forge Cottage, a much larger undertaking began at Church Green. About 1270-1290 masons and carpenters raised the church now dedicated to St Mary and All Saints as a coherent cruciform building, with nave, chancel and north and south transepts planned together. Bargate stone rubble was strengthened and enlivened with ironstone galleting, Horsham stone was used at the eaves, and the roof depended on the timber resources of the Western Weald. The chancel contains a triple sedilia for the clergy and a piscina for washing the sacred vessels; each transept has its own piscina, evidence that subsidiary altars once occupied the arms of the cross. The south porch and doorway preserve medieval carpentry and stonework, while a freestanding pier in the south transept carries the beginning of an arcade that was never continued, suggesting that an aisle was contemplated before the compact plan was completed. A timber bellcage and spire were added in the fifteenth century. The surviving fabric makes the church an unusually ambitious foundation for a community whose homes remained scattered across farms, woods and the Common.

By 1291 the building belonged to an independent rectory. The Taxatio Ecclesiastica valued the church of Duntesfalde at twenty marks, £13 6s 8d a year, and assessed a papal tenth of £1 6s 8d. A pension of 3s 4d remained payable in recognition of Shalford’s older rights, preserving in money the relationship with the mother church from which Dunsfold had separated. On 3 April 1294 Bishop John de Pontissara made temporary provision for a vacancy after John of Wingham, rector of Shalford and then patron of Dunsfold, presented an unnamed chaplain. On 27 February 1294/95 Alan de Dollyng, also read as de Rollings, was instituted and became the first rector whose name can be followed securely in the episcopal register.

The right to nominate future rectors soon moved far beyond the Weald. In 1305 Edward I granted the advowson – the legal right to present a priest when the benefice fell vacant – to the Hospital of St Mary outside Bishopsgate in London, generally known as St Mary Spital. The hospital became patron, while Dunsfold retained its own rectory, glebe and tithes and the Bishop of Winchester continued to institute each priest. A royal licence in 1342 would have allowed St Mary Spital to appropriate the benefice and turn it into a vicarage, but the arrangement never took effect. Later antiquarian stories sometimes made the London canons into Dunsfold landowners or builders. The chronology is clearer: the church was already standing before their patronage began.

A medieval parish of rectors, benches, frontier chapels and scattered farms, 1310-1525

One of the earliest incidents to survive after the church was built began with trees in the churchyard. In March 1310/11 Bishop Henry Woodlock ordered the rural dean to summon Richard, the Dunsfold sacristan or sexton, after trees had been cut and carted away against the rector’s wishes. Richard was said to have admitted his part publicly before clergy and lay people. The register preserves the summons rather than the verdict. Even so, the quarrel fixes several features of parish life in place: valuable timber grew within a managed burial ground, the rector claimed rights over it, and a resident church officer served at Church Green. A dispute in a remote Wealden parish could also pass into the formal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester.

The episcopal registers then become crowded with rectors, and their movement is more revealing than a bare list of names. Thomas de Nonnington, probably the Thomas later called de Kynemersford, held Dunsfold by 1318/19, received permission to study and in 1319 brought an action after men allegedly seized his cattle. William of Chester followed in 1339, Robert of Watford in 1345 and Walter of Stratton in 1349/50. William of Chesterton arrived in 1359, Gilbert Neel in 1361/62 and John Skot in 1362; John of Lewes held the benefice by 1363. Peter of Barton and William Ashrygg both entered the rectory in 1370, William Bakere followed in 1375/76, and further exchanges brought William FitzRobert FitzHenry, Thomas Fawkes and Alan Gardiner before Thomas Jordan was instituted in December 1388. Study, exchange and preferment could move a rector rapidly between benefices. The people who kept the church open, rang the bells, maintained the churchyard and walked there from the farms gave the parish a continuity that the clerical appointments alone can obscure.

Dunsfold also stood close to the southern edge of the Diocese of Winchester. Thomas Southam, rector in the early fifteenth century, served as an official of the Archdeacon of Chichester and as commissary to the Dean of Chichester. He attended the election of a new prior at Shulbrede in 1404 and in 1406 acted for the Bishop of Winchester during an inquiry into the vacant living of Clandon Regis. His career crossed a diocesan frontier that ran through a closely connected landscape. South of Dunsfold, Plaistow belonged to the great Chichester parish of Kirdford, and a deed of 1527 names its Chapel of St Thomas beside the highway towards Chiddingfold. Farther east, Loxwood belonged to Wisborough Green; in 1404 the Bishop of Chichester licensed an oratory in Loxwood because the journey to the mother church was long and difficult, especially in winter. Dunsfold and Alfold looked to Winchester, while Chichester carried regular worship to its boundary through neighbouring chapels at Plaistow and Loxwood. Farms, roads and family connections crossed the boundary even when church jurisdiction did not.

At Dunsfold itself the nave acquired one of its most distinctive survivals during the same period. Early writers placed the heavy oak benches almost alongside the thirteenth-century walls, but tree-ring analysis has dated their timber to trees felled between 1409 and 1441. Their ends rise into paired knobs divided by a deep cusp, and their scientific dating places them securely in the generation when fixed seating was becoming more common in English parish churches. Across the diocesan boundary, eight ancient oak pews from the early chapel at Loxwood survive in the later church of St John the Baptist and have been dated to 1407. The Dunsfold benches still stand where fifteenth-century parishioners sat while lights burned, Mass was celebrated and prayers were offered for living and dead.

Wills put names and possessions around those benches. John Maundefyld in 1483 left four pence to the mother church of Winchester and 3s 4d for work at Dunsfold church. Thomas Hook followed in 1486 with the same offering to Winchester and a heifer for a light at Dunsfold, turning livestock into an income for wax. Henry Dyer, instituted as rector in 1462, remained long enough for such gifts to belong to a settled phase of parish life. The rectory itself had fallen in value and was repeatedly exempted from clerical tenths because its income had dropped below ten marks, yet the parish continued to maintain a substantial church, resident clergy, lights and fabric.

The households making those gifts were spread over a geography that would remain recognisable for centuries. Dunsfold Farm, later Dunsfold Grange, stood apart from High Loxley, Mill Farm, Great Rickhurst, Wintershull, Hurlands, Spronks, Blacknest, Tickner’s Heath and the Common; Markwick and Monkton Hook linked Dunsfold with Alfold, while Smithbrook and Bramley West formed other units. Spronkesland is recorded in 1313. Ollard later traced part of the western boundary of Blackheath Hundred past Markwick, Field Place, the mill and Blacknest. The precise age of every lane cannot be fixed, but repeated farm names in deeds, registers, censuses and maps reveal a durable patchwork of holdings rather than a village gathered around a single street.

Burningfold had already taken shape within that southern patchwork. Records of 1228-35 refer to woodland at Bruningefold or Burningfold and Witherfold, associated with the wider Bramley landscape and the Hospital of Sandon at Esher; later summaries describe about 200 acres of wood or coppice. Richard de Burningfaud appears in the 1260s and 1270s, and Simon de Brunyngefold in 1318. The line towards the later estate becomes clearer in 1386/87, when Robert Marche and his wife Agnes acquired land in Dunsfold, Chiddingfold and Kirdford in a transaction that also referred to Joan, widow of John of Burningfold. Robert Marche was one of three Dunsfold gentlemen sworn in 1434 under legislation aimed at those who maintained peace-breakers, and Thomas Marche appears repeatedly in the court records of Wintershull between 1487 and 1517. Woods, tenures and family property crossed parish and county lines with little regard for the neatness of a later map.

Joan Marche’s will, made on 10 March 1525, brings one household especially close. She divided cattle among sons, daughters, a granddaughter, executors and other beneficiaries. She also ordered five Masses at her burial, another five at her month’s mind, and for seven years a Dirige and Mass for her husband, herself and her son; the services were to be followed by the commemorative drinking her family had already maintained. Livestock, inheritance, food and prayer for the dead belonged to the same domestic economy. Within a generation, the form of remembrance she expected her executors to maintain would be dismantled.

The church remade and Burningfold transformed, 1525-1607

The wills immediately before the Reformation make the change visible before any royal inventory reaches Dunsfold. Richard Mandefield in 1531/32 left four pence to Winchester and four pence to Dunsfold’s high altar for forgotten tithes, and endowed a yearly obit for himself and his friends from a field at Piper’s Hatch. Anne Mandefield’s will of 1533 ordered ten Masses at her burial and ten more at the month’s mind, left six pence to the high altar and gave a cow worth 6s 8d to maintain a one-pound taper before the Sacrament in perpetuity. Bedding, vessels, clothes and livestock passed to family and neighbours in the same bequests. The church’s two transept piscinae confirm that subsidiary altars had once occupied the arms of the cross; the wills supply the people, animals and money that kept lights and intercessory worship going. Patronage still belonged to St Mary Spital. When Hugh Garset was instituted in 1522/23, the right of presentation had passed through trustees including Sir Thomas More, whose appearance records a legal arrangement rather than local landownership. William Braynthwayte, instituted in 1528, was the last rector presented under the hospital’s patronage before St Mary Spital was dissolved in 1538 and the advowson passed to the Crown.

The Crown’s fiscal records catch the old system at the edge of dissolution. The Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1534-35 valued the rectory at £12 5s 6 1/2d from the parsonage, garden, arable, meadow, grazing, pasture and tithes, before procurations and synodals were paid to the Archdeacon of Surrey. St Thomas’s Hospital in Southwark received a small rent from Dunsfold. Waverley Abbey’s 1536 account recorded a modest interest at Markwick, most of the property lying in neighbouring Alfold: £1 19s 6d in annual rent and about 4s in court payments and fines were reduced by charges to roughly £1 7s 11d. A royal Benevolence of 1544-45 then names leading Dunsfold inhabitants and the curate Henry Brygges. These figures identify the rents and institutions through which parish worship and landed obligations had been financed before government policy began stripping some of them away.

By 1549 commissioners were valuing Dunsfold land and rent worth 9s 6d a year that had supported obits and lights. The money was transferred from the commemorative uses for which local people had endowed it. Three years later another commission entered the church and wrote down what survived: a silver chalice weighing four ounces, a second double-gilt chalice of three ounces, an embroidered blue velvet cope, a fine silk vestment, two surplices and three great bells in the steeple. Thomas Pulter, William Bobroke, Thomas Bromall and Stephen Downs received the goods into custody, while the inventory noted that small parcels had already been given to the poor by the parish priest. Royal orders changed the building as well as its income, although the surviving local evidence does not date every act. Canon Ollard judged that the stone altars were probably taken down and the medieval wall paintings whitewashed in 1560; the royal order of 1561 required the figures of the rood loft to be removed and replaced by a simpler crest. Fragments of painting uncovered centuries later show what the whitewash had concealed. The inventory and later fabric place that transformation inside the same building where Anne Mandefield had endowed her perpetual taper.

A document made at Burningfold in July 1552 gives the change a family scale. John Marche asked for burial in Dunsfold church or churchyard, left five shillings to the poor and 13s 4d towards repairing the highway from his house to the church. His grandmother Joan had arranged years of repeated Masses; John’s surviving provisions concentrated on burial, charity and the road that carried his household to Church Green. A royal survey of 1548 had already recorded him holding a messuage called Burningfold, formerly held by his father William, at a rent of 19s 10d, with the associated holding Danyells at 12d. The two names continue closely together in later deeds, preserving a real connection even though the precise relationship between the principal house and the older tenure remains uncertain.

The Elizabethan settlement left its own objects. John Cullyer was instituted on 30 December 1558, but the surviving record suggests that he may never have secured possession of the benefice. By July 1560 the rectory had been vacant for some time and was under sequestration; Thomas Bromeham and William Wood temporarily held its rents and tithes until William Langborough was instituted on 5 December. Langborough took the Oath of Supremacy, settled in Dunsfold and remained associated with the parish for more than forty years. Under him the church acquired the Communion cup dated 1564 and the silver cover of 1578 that could also serve as a paten; in 1583 William Knight of Reading cast a bell whose Latin inscription wished that “John’s bell” might sound for many years. The sequence from the chalices, cope and vestment of 1552 to Communion cup, cover and bell records the new worship through things made to be handled and heard. Local agreement was not complete. A deposition among the Loseley papers in 1561 records religious dissenters in Wonersh and Dunsfold; Ollard later suggested that they may have belonged to the loose radical circle known as the Family of Love, though the evidence establishes dissent rather than the group’s exact identity. One man, David Orch, had previously been sought at St Catherine’s Fair.

Langborough’s long incumbency also brings the parish economy into clearer focus. Visitations name William Poulter and John Manfield as churchwardens in 1575, Nicholas Yoman and John Woods in 1578, William Gold and John Puttock in 1579, with other householders appearing beside them. Wills identify Peter Ede, Edmond Hewett and Richard Carr as yeomen, Richard Burte and William Haslett as sawyers, Arnold Elyot as a mason, Thomas Woodier as a labourer and Henry Maundefield as a wheelwright. Household inventories included iron firebacks and fire-irons. Langborough eventually bought a house, garden, orchard and land in Dunsfold and resigned the rectory in 1602. By then specialised manufacture had begun to alter the wooded border country on a much larger scale.

The neighbouring glasshouse at Knightons in Alfold gives one glimpse of that industrial landscape. Excavation close to Sidney Wood uncovered melting furnaces, an annealing furnace, clay pits and stores, with products ranging from crown window glass, bottles and drinking vessels to urinals, linen smoothers and parts of distilling apparatus; a shilling of Edward VI helped date the activity. The glassworks stood outside Dunsfold parish, yet its fuel, carts and skilled labour belonged to the same woodland economy that now fed a far larger enterprise at Burningfold.

A legal recovery of 1570 described Burningfold with houses, cottages, orchards, gardens and an iron mill. Richard Marche was recorded as owner of a forge in 1573-74, while Thomas Gratwicke farmed the iron mill. The works drew together resources spread across the estate. Coppiced wood became charcoal; ore was smelted in a furnace whose bellows were driven by a water wheel; cast iron was reheated at the forge and worked beneath a heavy water-powered hammer. Ponds stored the head of water and earth banks retained it until sluices released power to the machinery. Henry Elliot Malden, the Surrey historian who reconstructed Burningfold’s documentary history in 1910, found accounts recording 1,645 tons of iron in three years. That scale helps explain what happened to the house above the works. Philip Mainwaring Johnston, an architect and antiquary who examined Burningfold in 1909, found an older open-hall core absorbed into a more elaborate residence and dated its patterned timber-framed front to about 1580. Projecting gables, an overhanging upper storey, moulded doorways and a winding oak newel stair turned the home of the Marche family into a conspicuous Elizabethan house while the medieval frame remained inside it.

Richard Marche died in February 1583/84, leaving Burningfold, Danyells, Parsons, Little Benham and other holdings still owing rent through several older lordships. His heir William Marche inherited both the industrial assets and the complicated tenure. On 17 May 1604 he sold the manor and capital house of Burningfold, together with ironworks, forges, furnaces and land in Dunsfold, Alfold, Chiddingfold, Hascombe and Kirdford, to George Duncombe of Bramley for £886. Duncombe entered a partnership with John Middleton of Horsham, Richard Wyatt – a London citizen and carpenter with Godalming connections – and Thomas Burdett of Abinger. When Duncombe sold his quarter share in 1607, he received £345 and seven and a half tons of iron, with another twenty-two and a half tons guaranteed by the remaining partners. At Burningfold, iron itself had become part of the currency of ownership.

Registers, changing houses and the last furnace fires, 1602-1762

A bell cast in 1621 carried the words “Our Hope is in the Lorde” across Dunsfold’s fields. The initials associated with it include Philip Gringoe, churchwarden in 1622, and the bell-founder Richard Eldridge. Nicholas Wildear had then been rector for more than a decade, and his initials “N.W.” were later noticed cut into the Sussex-marble shafts of the medieval sedilia. In 1628 the surviving parish register begins. Baptisms, marriages and burials could at last be followed in a continuous local record, giving Dunsfold a documentary memory to stand beside its church fabric and bells.

John Shipsey, a Cambridge graduate and Doctor of Divinity, was instituted in November 1633 and was later described on his lost chancel gravestone as a chaplain to Charles I. He remained through the Civil War and the execution of the king until his death in 1651/52; another bell, cast by Bryan Eldridge in 1647, belongs to those unsettled years. National disputes over monarchy, church government and worship leave little detailed narrative in Dunsfold’s surviving register. Children continued to be baptised, the dead were buried and the bells were recast while governments changed.

John Holney arrived as rector in 1652 during the Commonwealth and turned the parish register into something much richer than a list of births and deaths. He recorded twelve of the fourteen children born to himself and his wife Jane, sometimes noting the exact hour of birth, and used the same pages for parish officers, discipline, accidents and custom. Stephen Holney was appointed parish register in December 1653 under the Commonwealth system; after the Restoration Robert Arnold became parish clerk in October 1661. Titles changed with government, while the task of keeping Dunsfold’s local record continued.

One long entry written largely by 1663 turns the churchyard fence into a map of the parish. Dunsfold Farm, Great Rickhurst, Wintershull, Hurlands, Pond, Spronks, Abbot’s Garden and Mill Farm, Hookhouse, Blacknest, Rushett and Coppid Kitchen all carried specified duties. The list continued with the Gate Place or Crosshouse, High Loxley, Tickner’s Heath, New Inn, Common House, Ifold Farm, Pound Farm and Burningfold, each responsible for rails, gates or stiles. Some of those households lay several miles from Church Green, and Rushett would later leave Dunsfold for the new parish of Graffham. Yet each had a measured obligation at the common burial ground. The entry also fixes “New Inn” as a seventeenth-century property name, although it cannot by itself prove that the house was then licensed to sell drink.

The houses behind those names were being altered as families changed the way they lived with fire and space. Old Orchard makes the process easiest to follow: it began as a compact two-bay timber frame with a central smoke bay, a narrow enclosed route through which hearth smoke could rise, and was later reorganised around a masonry chimney. Elsewhere, Elm Corner began as a low timber house and gained an upper floor when its roof was raised into a half-hip, while Yonder Lye developed as a three-bay frame. Old Knightons retained an end bay once open to the roof, and Upper Ifold belongs to the smoke-bay tradition that preceded widespread brick chimneys. Pound Farm, begun about 1600, later acquired a parlour wing marked by a diagonal brick plaque dated 1687 with the initials W.P.; its seven-bay barn stands on an ironstone plinth beneath a pegged tiled roof. High Loxley preserves a five-bay seventeenth-century barn with opposing central entrances, while High Billingshurst Farm House combines timber framing with galleted sandstone, brick and tile hanging. Joan Harding, founder of the Domestic Buildings Research Group in Surrey, later selected Dunsfold examples in her study of vernacular building because one parish preserves several stages in the transition from open hall to floored, smoke-controlled and chimneyed house.

Holney’s register brings the same period back from carpentry to individual lives. Sarah Pick performed public penance in a white sheet in March 1665/66; J. Barnes and his wife Ann performed private penance in September 1667. When E. A. Judges, the Guildford writer who later published Some West Surrey Villages, examined Dunsfold traditions he also noted a register reference to a “house at the Whipping Post”, although the place could no longer be identified. In October 1669 William More of Mill Farm was returning from Petworth when his team mortally injured him. Holney recorded the accident, added a warning from St Luke and buried him late on 25 October. Robert Penfold was killed by a load of chalk in 1671. The lanes that connected Dunsfold with markets, building materials and neighbouring towns were indispensable, and the register records their dangers through the men who failed to return home.

Mill Farm appears repeatedly beside the orchard called Abbot’s Garden. The name encouraged later stories of a monastic house, although the property lay outside the small Dunsfold interests of Waverley Abbey and the Knights of St John. Ollard instead connected it with John Abbot, also called John Wheler, who appears in a Dunsfold property transaction of 1405. E. A. Judges still found Abbot’s Garden remembered as the orchard beside the mill in 1901. A medieval personal name had survived long enough to acquire a monastic legend.

Burningfold meanwhile passed through mortgages and partnerships. Henry Wyatt mortgaged the estate, also called Danyells in the deed, for £50 in 1625 and recovered it in 1629; in 1638 he sold his one-third share to Arthur Middleton. Deeds of 1656-57 still referred to works and two mills, keeping the industrial water system inside the legal description, and in 1657 the whole manor passed to Henry Goring, later Sir Henry Goring. The owners changed, while house, farms, wood, water and mills remained parts of one property.

At the Rectory, Joseph Richardson created a different network. The son of a Yorkshire landed family and a graduate of University College, Oxford, he was instituted in 1680 and remained associated with Dunsfold for more than sixty years. His daughter Jane married Edward Eliot of the Busbridge family in 1708; another daughter, Elizabeth, married the clergyman and poet Thomas Warton at Dunsfold in February 1720/21. Their son Joseph Warton was born at Dunsfold Rectory in 1722 and later became a poet, critic and headmaster of Winchester College. Richardson resigned the benefice to his son-in-law Edward Eliot in 1722 but continued to live in the parish until his death in 1742; Edward was followed in 1739 by his son William Eliot. For three generations, marriages, baptisms, burials and memorials tied the Rectory to clerical and landed families around Busbridge, Hambledon and Alfold.

The Goring ownership of Burningfold reached the speculative world of the South Sea Bubble. In 1720 Sir Henry Goring negotiated a sale in which the financier James Colebrook acted for the prospective buyer, Mr Houlditch, a director of the South Sea Company. Standing timber became one of the disputed values: one side put it at about £6,666, the other at about £12,100. The transaction collapsed with the speculation. Two years later John Tanner bought Burningfold, and the 1722 conveyance described two houses, 100 acres of land, 30 of meadow, 200 of pasture, 500 of wood and 40 of heath and furze. An earlier schedule had described extensive water and two mills; the later wording suggests that parts of the old water system were being reduced, drained or valued differently as farming and timber assumed a larger place in the estate’s economy.

The furnace still had one final phase. William and George Jukes, experienced Wealden ironmasters, worked Burningfold Furnace and Forge in the middle of the eighteenth century, when war created heavy demand for guns and shot from government, East India Company and private customers. A militia return in 1758 still described William Gardiner of Dunsfold as a furnaceman, while John Rocque’s map of Surrey, published in 1762, no longer marked Burningfold Furnace. Taken together, those records place the end of active furnace working in the years around 1760, leaving the pond bay, slag and later address “The Furnace” to carry the industrial name forward.

Rectors, roads and a parish entering the nineteenth century, 1751-1811

John Tanner died in 1751, and his executors sold Burningfold during the 1750s to Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague, whose family owned estates across the Surrey-Sussex border country. Later county histories differ over the exact date at which the manor left the Montagues; land-tax evidence and an enrolled deed place it in their ownership after 1768 and record Edmund Woods junior purchasing Burningfold in 1790 for £14,021. By then the estate drew its value mainly from house, farms, woods, rents and timber, while the old furnace landscape survived as part of an agricultural property.

The Rectory moved in the opposite direction, away from residence. Thomas Bund, instituted in 1756, was already vicar of Woking and signed the Dunsfold register only once; James King followed in 1774, Thomas Bray in 1776 and Thomas Roger Filewood in 1785. Curates performed the ordinary parish ministry, among them Edward Eliot, already rector of Hambledon and later Alfold, who signed regularly in Dunsfold from the 1770s. Filewood lived at Mickleham, where declining sight and mental illness ended with his suicide on 10 August 1800. Richard Bartholomew, a former Dunsfold curate, succeeded in October and restored a resident rector to Church Green after roughly forty-five years in which the legal incumbents were usually elsewhere.

A different kind of institutional presence had already arrived on the road. Parliament authorised the Guildford-Arundel turnpike in 1757 from Dapdune Wharf near Guildford through Bramley and the Dunsfold district, then south through Lakers Green and Alfold towards Loxwood, Newbridge and the Arun valley. Toll income paid for drainage, bridges and a more dependable surface over the Wealden clay. A notice of 1784 referred to receipts on the Guildford-to-Alfold section during the preceding fifteen years, placing regular collection there by 1769; an 1809 realignment at Alfold Gate strengthened the road towards Horsham. Horses needed shoes, carts needed wheels and ironwork, travellers needed food and stabling, and carriers gained a route that could be maintained systematically. The Sun Inn developed beside Dunsfold Common from late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century buildings, while Holney’s much older property name “New Inn” still echoed in the parish record.

The parliamentary population return of 1811 captures Dunsfold at the end of this road-dominated phase. It counted 518 people – 276 males and 242 females – in 103 inhabited houses occupied by 113 families; one house was being built and four stood empty. Eighty-four families were principally employed in agriculture, seventeen in manufacture or handicraft and thirteen in other work. Farming remained dominant, yet millers, timber workers, smiths, builders, carriers and estate servants already formed the mixed economy that the canal would soon encounter.

Cutting a canal across Dunsfold, 1811-1839

In August 1811 supporters of a canal linking the River Wey system with the Arun Navigation met at the White Hart in Guildford, approved the project and opened subscription books towards proposed capital of £90,000. George O’Brien Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont and owner of Petworth House, was the leading promoter; Josias Jessop, an engineer from a family already associated with canal construction, surveyed the route. Parliament authorised the Wey and Arun Junction Canal in April 1813. Dunsfold lay on the watershed, and the line through its eastern fields became one of the most demanding parts of the undertaking. Opposition and route changes in the Dunsfold-Alfold district turned the canal towards Sidney Wood, adding about a mile and a half and, in the Canal Trust’s reconstruction of the original contract, roughly twenty per cent to the cost. The altered alignment created Dunsfold Cutting, the largest single engineering work on the navigation. Jessop designed the highest pound to a depth of about six feet, with a water surface roughly thirty-three feet wide, so the summit itself could store additional water for the locks descending on either side.

Once work began, the engineering became a matter of clay, muscle and water. Labourers cut the channel with picks and shovels, pushed spoil into barrows and used horses for heavier loads; bridges had to be built where existing roads crossed the line, while culverts and drains carried water beneath or around the new summit. Contractor Zachariah Keppell became bankrupt during construction, leaving surveyor May Upton among those who helped carry the difficult final stages through. Spoil rose into long banks on either side of the cutting. Every lockful released below the summit had to be replaced, so the deeper pound had to work as reservoir and navigation channel at the same time. After about three years of excavation and bridge building, the navigation opened on 28 September 1816. Near the summit at Alfold, 220 labourers were given beef and ale during the celebrations. Their meal is one of the few moments when the men who physically dug the route appear together in the surviving story.

The finished canal gave Dunsfold a new east-west corridor. Barges carried coal, lime, stone, timber, grain and general merchandise across the summit, while carts still completed the first and last miles between farms, wharves and customers. Fast Bridge, Farnhurst Bridge, Compasses Bridge and Tickner’s Heath became fixed meeting points between the artificial waterway and older lanes. Traffic on the whole Wey and Arun Junction Canal rose to about 23,000 tons in 1839, and every through cargo had to cross Dunsfold. Water supply and a lightly populated rural market limited what the navigation could earn, but for half a century the summit placed boats and towing horses into fields that had previously known only roads and farm tracks.

Church Green changed more gradually during the same decades. Richard Bartholomew died in December 1826; in 1827 the church was presented as being out of repair, and on 1 May 1828 the vestry agreed works costing £150 11s 6d, raised through the church rate paid by local ratepayers. A hatchment bearing the arms of George IV and the date 1828 survives from the repaired interior. The Honourable John Evelyn Boscawen, rector from 1827, lived elsewhere and relied on the resident curate Charles Courtenay, but he left two conspicuous marks: a singers’ gallery was erected at the west end, and in 1832 he presented a silver paten inscribed with his name. Courtenay examined the old registers and supplied information to the Bishop of Winchester that fed into the Parliamentary Returns of 1831.

Henry Wellesley succeeded Boscawen in November 1833. An Oxford scholar and antiquary and a son of the Marquess Wellesley, he married Charlotte Ann Mackenzie Vandyck at neighbouring Hascombe in June 1835. Their daughter Henrietta Mary was born at Dunsfold Rectory and baptised by her father in the parish church on 17 July 1836. Wellesley’s handwriting continues through the baptism register until June 1838, after which he left Dunsfold and later became Principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford. Erskine William Holland followed and would hold the living for almost fifty years.

Another institution had begun only weeks before Wellesley arrived. Dunsfold’s old Whit Monday fair brought livestock, traders, food and drink into a parish normally dispersed among farms; in September 1833 the newly founded Dunsfold Friendly Society chose the same feast day for its annual dinner and procession. Its members became known as the Old Blues from the colour of their printed rules and paid regular contributions to support one another during sickness and hardship. By 1839 canal traffic was at its recorded peak, the Friendly Society had turned a traditional fair day into an organised mutual event, and a new stone building was rising beside the Common that would change where Dunsfold children went every weekday.

Katherina Woods’s school, the Common and the railway, 1839-1871

The inscription on the schoolmaster’s house gives the foundation its clearest contemporary evidence: Katherina Woods of Shopwick in Sussex and Burningfold in Dunsfold paid for the National School in 1839. The central house rose through two storeys between separate single-storey classrooms for boys and girls, placing the teacher’s household physically between the children. Katherina’s will made the gift a continuing institution rather than a building alone. It referred to a school being built “for the benefit of poor children” and left £3,106 in three-per-cent consolidated bank annuities, with William Leyland Woods, George Henry Woods and the rector of Dunsfold as trustees. Investment income paid a master and mistress, bought books and materials for needlework and other useful work, and provided rewards on the anniversary of the opening; voluntary subscriptions, also named on the foundation stone, added support. The original rules tied eligibility to Dunsfold residence or parentage and to the Established Church. The Surrey topographer Edward Wedlake Brayley later credited Charlotte Woods with the foundation, and the Victoria County History associated Charlotte with a school in 1850, but the dated stone, Katherina’s will and modern listing evidence place Katherina at the centre of the 1839 foundation.

Children now crossed the parish towards the Common each day, while the 1841 census recorded where their families lived. Erskine Holland, aged thirty-seven, was at the Rectory, and the enumerator then moved through a parish larger than the modern one: Church Green, the Common, High Loxley, Hurlands, Mill Farm, Blacknest, Knightons, Burningfold, Graffham and Rushett all appear along the routes. Agricultural labourers fill many lines, accompanied by farmers, servants, gardeners, sawyers, carpenters, blacksmiths and carriers. The returns read like journeys because enumerators followed roads and clusters of houses rather than a single street; changes in headings from one decade to another can disguise the continuity of farms whose names and neighbours remained stable.

Population was rising without concentrating into one dense settlement. The parliamentary return had counted 518 inhabitants in 1811 and 578 in 1821; The topographer Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary gave 669 in 1848. The school brought a daily public institution to the Common, and other services increasingly gathered there, but children still walked from outlying farms, labourers lived close to the holdings that employed them and the church remained at Church Green. The Common became more useful because school, smithing, licensed trade, postal work and later shops offered repeated reasons to come there while cattle still grazed the open grass.

The historic parish itself changed shape before the railway arrived. Henry Woodyer, the Guildford-born Gothic Revival architect who had made his home at Graffham Grange, designed St Andrew’s Church at Graffham in 1861 and contributed substantially to its cost. On 24 March 1863 a new ecclesiastical parish was formed from parts of Bramley and Dunsfold, transferring Rushett and other north-eastern holdings out of the old parish. The seventeenth-century fence duties and the 1841 census therefore preserve a Dunsfold larger than the one later maps show.

Two years later, on 2 October 1865, trains began running between Guildford and Horsham through stations at Bramley and Wonersh, Cranleigh, Baynards and Rudgwick. Dunsfold never gained a station of its own; the railway entered parish life through carts and carriers. Passengers, milk, livestock, parcels and farm produce went by road to Cranleigh or Baynards, while coal, fertiliser, machinery and building materials returned along the same lanes. The first and last miles remained local, but the middle of the journey became faster and more dependable. Canal traffic had almost disappeared by 1868, and the Wey and Arun Junction Canal closed legally from 22 July 1871. Its deep cutting, bridges and banks remained after the boats had gone.

By the same year the Common contained two blacksmiths, a post office, the school and an inn. The Sun Inn combined a late-eighteenth-century house with an early-nineteenth-century cottage, and pumps supplied water before mains services reached every household. Pond Cottage, Oak Tree Cottage, Oak Tree House, Yonder Lye and Hope Cottage formed part of the irregular line along the western edge. Forge Cottage, New Inn Cottages, Wheelwrights or North End Cottage and Gratton Corner continued the same loose settlement, separated from the principal road by grass and access tracks. Forge Cottage was already more than six centuries old. The Common had become Dunsfold’s everyday centre without ever turning into a conventional village street.

Victorian Dunsfold: worship, chapels, trades and households, 1871-1901

Erskine Holland’s long rectorship carried habits from the pre-Victorian church deep into a changing village. From 1873 declining health kept him mainly in Brighton and curates-in-charge performed much of the local ministry, but memories later gathered by Ollard reached back to the interior before restoration. Men sat mainly on the south side of the nave and women on the north; an old bench on the north side was remembered as the churching pew used by women returning to public worship after childbirth. Older men touched their forelock before taking their places. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer formed the ordinary Sunday pattern, with one sermon and Holy Communion celebrated less frequently than later Victorian practice would make usual. The singers’ gallery, enclosed pews and medieval benches had accumulated into an interior shaped by several centuries at once.

Jonathan Botting, who had served for years as parish clerk, died in 1870 aged seventy-five. Holland placed a memorial praising his “faithfulness, efficiency and trustworthiness in Church and State”, joining parish administration and worship in one career. In 1881, eleven years after Botting’s death, the building in which he had served became a major work site. Canon Vernon Musgrave of Hascombe, the rural dean, and the curate-in-charge A. W. Watson promoted the restoration and engaged Henry Woodyer, already familiar with the district through Graffham. Woodyer widened and heightened the chancel arch, raised the east window, blocked the priest’s doorway in the south chancel wall, altered floor levels in the transepts, removed later box pews and created an organ chamber. The medieval sedilia, piscinae, transept arches and surviving benches remained, while nave, chancel and sanctuary acquired the relationship seen today. The removal of enclosed seating belonged to a wider nineteenth-century movement towards freer church accommodation. Between 1818 and 1856 national church-building schemes provided about 900,000 additional sittings, more than 700,000 of them free, although Dunsfold’s surviving evidence supports local church-rate funding for the 1828 repairs rather than a grant from the Incorporated Church Building Society.

William Henry Winn succeeded Holland as rector in 1888 and saw the work through a second campaign in 1892-93. Medieval wall paintings emerged as the nave was restored; later accounts identified St Christopher and St George on the north wall, while traces of floral colour also survived beneath the porch roof. The bells were reorganised at the same time. The cracked bells of 1583 and 1621 were recast, three new bells were added to create a ring of six, and the medieval timber bell structure was taken down, repaired and rebuilt. A lychgate followed, together with a painted list of rectors on the north-west wall. That list omitted William Langborough, whose forty-year Elizabethan incumbency is securely documented. Even a Victorian object installed to preserve history became part of the evidence that later research had to correct.

A new place of worship had meanwhile opened beside the Common. A Baptist chapel was erected in 1883, supported within a wider network by Samuel and Elizabeth Barrow of Burningfold, whose family wealth came from the leather trade. The Barrows also assisted evangelical chapels at Alfold and Burningfold. From the middle of the 1880s the Reverend F. Joseph served the linked congregations, travelling across the same Surrey-Sussex border landscape through which the Burningfold estate had long extended. Preaching, Sunday school, Bible teaching, temperance work and meetings gave the chapel a public role alongside the parish church, school, inns and Reading House. Joseph remained with the linked ministry until 1903.

The 1891 census offers the nearest thing to a walk through the late-Victorian parish. At the Rectory, William Henry Winn lived with his wife Edith, their children Walter and Isabel and domestic servants. Dunsfold House was occupied by John Bittlestone, a retired leather factor, with his daughter and servants. Farther south, Samuel and Elizabeth Barrow lived at Burningfold Hall with family and household staff; a coachman and his family occupied Stable Cottage, while Henry Agate, the farm bailiff, lived at Burningfold House with his wife, children, a governess and a domestic servant. Labouring families occupied Burningfold Hatch and Burningfold Cottage, and one household was entered simply at “The Furnace”, preserving the industrial name more than a century after smelting ended. The route then moves through a blacksmith and carpenter at Hurlands and Knightons Lane, William Child the brickmaker near the Common, John Knight the carrier at Wrotham Hill, John Puttock farming Tickner’s Heath, and George Remnant and his sons at New House. At the School House the schoolmaster’s wife taught sewing, while children in neighbouring families were recorded as scholars.

The school archive extends those census snapshots into everyday institutional time. Logbooks begin in 1874, followed by admission registers, a punishment book, stock books and later parent-teacher records. An additional classroom wing enlarged the 1839 school group in the early twentieth century as elementary education became a permanent part of village life. Around the Common, Underwood and Sons gave local trades a more conspicuous architectural legacy. The Dunsfold building firm, founded in 1825, worked in carpentry, brickwork, farm buildings and domestic repair and later took part in major Arts and Crafts houses elsewhere in Surrey, including Munstead Wood and Orchards. In its home village the firm erected or worked on Old Store House and Goose Green, where ground-floor shops brought retailing into buildings made by local craftsmen. The post office operated among general trade; pumps remained important for water; the Old Reading House provided space for instruction and sociability. By the opening of the twentieth century several shops and two public houses served the Common while cattle still grazed in front of them. Agriculture remained Dunsfold’s largest field of work, and dairying made particular use of the railway connection to Cranleigh and Baynards.

The 1901 census routes make the old geography even more explicit. One enumerator passed Old Gate House, Pea Tree Green, Church Green, the Rectory, Field Place, Dunsfold Farm, Shop Hill, Mill House, the Common, Wetwood, Blacknest and Dunsfold House; another moved through High Loxley, Dunsfold Cottages, Tickner’s Heath, Rickhurst, Knightons, Hurlands, Furnace and Burningfold. The sequence matters because the enumerator’s walk, rather than a modern street address, organised the page. Farms and settlement clusters can be followed from decade to decade even when headings change.

Church Green was also drawing visitors from beyond the parish. A spring between the church and the river was known as the Holy Well, and E. A. Judges, the Guildford writer who visited while preparing Some West Surrey Villages, recorded in 1901 that people still sought its water for sore eyes. Winn told him that it rose naturally, never ran dry and surfaced only a few feet from the river without being fed by it. Judges also found Roman Catholic priests from St John’s Seminary at Wonersh visiting the church and well several times each year, while Murray’s travellers’ handbook associated Dunsfold with a belief in the Virgin Mary’s presence. Ollard later searched for documentary evidence of an apparition and found none. The visits and medicinal reputation of the spring are recorded; the apparition belongs to tradition. Another story placed the poet Edward Young in the Rectory’s Filbert Walk composing Night Thoughts. Ollard could find no evidence for that either and suspected that the tale had grown from the genuine Warton family connection to the Rectory.

Dunsfold remembers itself: dialect, antiquarians, Winn Hall and the Burningfold sale, 1901-1916

Gertrude Jekyll, the Surrey garden designer and writer, published Old West Surrey in 1904; the book caught pieces of village speech that official records missed. She recorded Dunsfold’s teasing rhyme about Chiddingfold – “Poor Chidd’n fold, hungry an’ cold” – and the local claim that Dunsfold people “won’t be druv”: they could be led, but not driven. Bell folklore linked neighbouring towers as well, with Dunsfold calling “Who beats we?” and Hascombe answering “We do”. Such sayings cannot establish a date or ownership, but they preserve the sound of a parish whose identity was expressed through neighbours, bells and dialect.

On 15 July 1909 the Surrey Archaeological Society turned Dunsfold into the subject of an organised historical excursion. Members travelled by carriage from Godalming, inspected the parish church, took lunch at the Bricklayers’ Arms and visited the timber-framed house called Willards before continuing to Burningfold, where the tenant C. T. A. Robertson admitted the party. Henry Elliot Malden, the county historian later closely involved with the Victoria County History, presented the documentary descent of the estate. Philip Mainwaring Johnston examined the old hall, Elizabethan framing, moulded doorways and oak stair. Their studies appeared together in the Society’s 1910 volume, recording houses while they still functioned as dwellings and working estates rather than preserved historical sites.

William Henry Winn was planning a building for contemporary village life at the same time. In 1913 he announced that Mr Godman had given a site beside the Common and that money had already been placed in the bank for a parish hall intended as common ground across differences of creed, social position and politics. Winn died on 27 December 1913 before construction began.

Underwood and Sons started work the following year and completed the hall in 1916 at a recorded cost of about £700. Tile hanging, tall chimneys and details drawn from Surrey vernacular building gave it a familiar local character, while its purpose was deliberately broad: concerts, clubs, lectures, entertainments and parish business now had a room beside the school, shops, inn and chapel. The project carried Winn’s name because the building outlived the rector who had promoted it.

Ollard arrived as rector in March 1914 and remained only until October 1915, yet his research into Dunsfold’s registers, wills and clergy became the most detailed documentary study of the parish church. He also tested traditions that had hardened into apparent fact. Medieval wills use conventional invocations to the Virgin Mary and all saints without naming the church’s dedication. The seventeenth-century antiquary Richard Symmes explicitly called it All Saints; Ecton’s Thesaurus in 1763 called the rectory St Mary, Thomas Allen in 1831 used All Saints, and Samuel Lewis in 1848 used St Mary. The modern title St Mary and All Saints preserves both strands, while the date at which the combined form became established remains uncertain. Ollard’s conversation about “Pharisees and Sadducees” belonged to the same attempt to keep local memory and documentary evidence in the same story without confusing one for the other.

Burningfold reached the end of another long form of ownership during the First World War. On 4 July 1916 the estate was offered for sale. The catalogue gathered Burningfold Hall with gardens and stables, Burningfold Farm, Blacknest Farm, Wintershall Farm, Basket Cottages, Hurlands Cottage, Mill Cottage, Post Office Cottage, Wrotham Hill Cottage and other properties in Dunsfold, Alfold and Chiddingfold into one description of the holdings. A house still containing its medieval hall and Elizabethan front stood at the centre of farms, cottages, woods and service buildings accumulated through centuries of woodland management, ironmaking and agriculture. The sale dispersed that estate structure; the old property names and furnace earthworks remained.

War, remembrance and eighteen weeks of construction, 1914-1942

The First World War drew men from Dunsfold’s farms, shops, building trades and households into military service while those who remained kept food production and village services working. Winn Hall opened in the middle of the conflict and became one of the places where the parish could assemble. A larger civic memorial followed in 1934, when a stone cross was unveiled at the junction of Dunsfold Common Road and Alfold Road. The original monument carried its dedication rather than a complete roll of names; bronze plaques added in 1996 now record seventeen men who died in the First World War and eleven in the Second.

Between the wars Dunsfold’s ecclesiastical map altered after more than six centuries. In 1927 the new Diocese of Guildford was created from part of Winchester’s old Surrey territory, changing the bishop and diocesan administration while worship continued in the same later-thirteenth-century church. Roads changed more visibly. Buses, cars and lorries joined traffic on routes formed for horses, and the A281 became the principal regional road east of the Common. The abandoned canal still lay beside it as a cutting, a chain of bridges and a water-filled obstacle through farmland.

In 1942 the Air Ministry selected a large tract of farmland and woodland across Dunsfold and Alfold for a military airfield. The old Guildford-Horsham road crossed the chosen site and had to be diverted around the perimeter at Pains Hill; cast-iron milestones were altered by one mile to account for the longer journey. Work began on 11 May. The principal construction force came from 2 Battalion Royal Canadian Engineers, supported by 2 Road Construction Company, the Canadian Forestry Corps, other Canadian units and civilian contractors. British estimates had allowed about eighteen months; the Canadians produced an operational station in eighteen weeks. American earth-moving machinery, explosives and eighteen-hour working days divided between two shifts accelerated the change. Hedges and woodland disappeared, heavy Wealden clay was drained and levelled, concrete runways and perimeter roads spread across former fields, and aircraft dispersals occupied ground that had been organised for farming. At Fast Bridge the diverted road crossed the abandoned Wey and Arun Canal on a new causeway. Airfield drainage was also led into the old channel, helping to keep water in the summit pound while carrying fine silt that later restoration would have to remove.

By 1944 the airfield had three runways, the longest about 2,000 yards and the two subsidiary runways about 1,400 yards, each roughly fifty yards wide. Twelve blister hangars, two T2 hangars, thirty-eight frying-pan dispersals, technical buildings, perimeter roads and extensive drainage supported flying operations; accommodation had been provided for about 1,241 personnel. The airfield crossed the Dunsfold-Alfold parish line. Farms and boundaries that had organised the eastern landscape for generations were now overlaid by a controlled military plan.

One engineer left a permanent object inside that new landscape. Sapper Stephen Trenka, a Hungarian-born Canadian sculptor who had exhibited at the Tate Gallery before the war, carved a hexagonal limestone memorial carrying the badges of the Royal Canadian Engineers and Canadian Forestry Corps. On 16 October 1942 Lieutenant-General A. G. L. McNaughton unveiled it during the formal handover of the station to Air Marshal H. Edwards for the Royal Canadian Air Force. The memorial stands on the Alfold side of the historic airfield boundary; the later engine-running pens and V/STOL blast grid lie in Dunsfold, while the runways pass between the two.

Bombers, returning prisoners and civilian aviation, 1942-1950

Canadian squadrons were the first to fill the new station. Units including 168, 400, 414 and 430 Squadrons used Mustangs for training, reconnaissance and army co-operation, and by August 1943 Dunsfold had become a medium-bomber base. RAF 139 Wing later brought British and Dutch crews, including 98, 180 and 320 Squadrons, whose North American Mitchells flew operations over occupied Europe. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands visited Dutch personnel in June 1944; later that year General Dwight D. Eisenhower inspected Mitchell bombers and crews during the Allied campaign in north-west Europe. Fuel bowsers, ammunition lorries and crew transport moved around perimeter roads that had not existed two years earlier, while farming continued immediately outside the wire.

One Dunsfold name on the later war memorial belongs to another part of the air war. Flight Lieutenant Leslie George Bull, connected with the parish, took part in the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944. He was recaptured and became one of the fifty escaped airmen murdered on Hitler’s orders. His death occurred far from Surrey; the bronze plaque added at the Common in 1996 brought his name back into the permanent local roll.

After victory in Europe the runways acquired a purpose almost opposite to bombing. From 15 April to 25 June 1945 Dunsfold became one of the principal reception points for Operation Exodus, bringing Allied prisoners of war home from the Continent. Dakotas, Lancasters, Stirlings and Halifaxes landed in rapid succession, and the Dunsfold Airfield History Society records 47,529 returning prisoners passing through the station. Men arriving after months or years of captivity were fed, medically checked, registered and sent onwards; hangars built for wartime operations became reception spaces, while roads that had carried bombs and fuel carried former prisoners towards hospitals, dispersal centres and home. The scale of the operation briefly made Dunsfold a gateway through which tens of thousands returned to Britain.

Dunsfold was declared inactive in August 1946, yet the airfield could no longer simply return to fields. Skyways Ltd leased the runways, hangars and workshops and converted the wartime station into a major engineering and charter base. Spitfires and Hurricanes were repaired, test-flown and delivered for the Portuguese Air Force; Yorks, Lancastrians and Halifaxes passed through the workshops, and the company supported long-distance commercial work including overseas oil exploration. By 1948 more than 1,300 people worked at Dunsfold, including about 350 aircrew. The change reached beyond the perimeter: a parish whose censuses had listed labourers, smiths, builders and carriers now drew engineers, fitters, clerks, stores staff and aircrew along the same roads and into the same shops and public houses.

When the Soviet blockade cut land access to West Berlin in 1948, Skyways joined the Berlin Airlift. Its Dunsfold-linked crews and engineering organisation took part until the blockade ended in 1949; the Dunsfold Airfield History Society attributes 2,730 flights to Skyways out of 21,785 civilian flights during the operation. Three years after Operation Exodus filled the hangars with returning prisoners, the same workshops were supporting an international airlift. Skyways entered voluntary liquidation in March 1950, leaving behind a large technical site and a skilled workforce ready for the company that followed.

Hawker, the Hunter and the arrival of vertical flight, 1950-1974

Hawker Aircraft took over Dunsfold because the new generation of jets required long hard runways and a large experimental base close enough to the company’s Kingston works for daily use. Farnborough’s Royal Aircraft Establishment and the National Gas Turbine Establishment at Pyestock were also within practical flying distance. New hangars and technical facilities appeared from 1951; Sea Hawks and Avro 707 research aircraft used the site, while engine-running pens allowed complete aircraft to be secured and their engines operated at high power before delivery or during trials.

The Hunter became the defining Dunsfold aircraft of the 1950s. The first production Hunter, WT555, flew from the airfield on 16 May 1953. On 7 September that year Hawker test pilot Neville Duke flew a modified Hunter to a world air-speed record of 727.6 miles per hour off the Sussex coast after preparation by Dunsfold’s workshops and flight-test organisation. Later in September he set a 100-kilometre closed-circuit record of 709.2 miles per hour. The celebrated numbers rested on repetitive industrial work. Components arrived by road, airframes moved through assembly, engines were run in the pens, taxi tests exposed faults and acceptance flights preceded delivery. Machinists, toolmakers, electricians, draughtsmen, planners, inspectors, stores staff and test crews turned an airfield built for war into a production and development factory.

The old parish institutions continued beside the jet works. In 1957 the northern classroom range and later additions of Dunsfold School were transferred through the Diocese of Guildford for continuing Church of England school use, while the southern School House passed to Surrey County Council for £1,000 subject to the headteacher’s occupation. On 9 March 1960 the parish church and Burningfold Manor both received statutory protection: the medieval church at Grade I and Burningfold at Grade II. A thirteenth-century church, an Elizabethan ironmaster’s house and a jet-development airfield now occupied the same parish under very different systems of use.

In July 1960 Hawker brought to Dunsfold an aircraft designed to reduce dependence on the kind of runway that had made the site so valuable. The P.1127 used the Bristol Siddeley Pegasus engine, whose rotating nozzles could send thrust downwards for lift and rearwards for forward flight. Cold War strategy gave the idea urgency because a combat aircraft able to operate from short or improvised sites would be less dependent on major bases. The first prototype, XP831, arrived on 15 July; its Pegasus engine was run in the aircraft on 31 August inside an engine-running pen modified with a deeper diffuser, metal lining and controls able to cope with exhaust directed in changing directions.

The ground itself then had to be redesigned. At the western end of the main runway engineers sank a purpose-built V/STOL blast grid into the surface, using steel box sections and curved vanes to disperse hot gases into a void below while tethering points secured the prototype during early tests. Bill Bedford achieved a tethered hover on 21 October 1960 and the first free hover on 19 November. XP831 made its first conventional flight on 13 February 1962. The grid and modified pen were part of the experiment as surely as the aircraft, because engineers had to learn how a jet could hover without destroying the surface beneath it or drawing its own hot exhaust back into the engine.

Development moved from the P.1127 to the Kestrel, whose XS688 first flew from Dunsfold on 7 March 1964, and then to the Harrier. The pre-production aircraft flew in 1966 and the type entered RAF operational service in 1969; from 1971 Dunsfold produced AV-8A aircraft for the United States Marine Corps, followed by the Sea Harrier for the Royal Navy. Outside the perimeter, the railway that had connected Dunsfold by cart since 1865 closed on 14 June 1965. On 26 March 1974 Dunsfold Common was designated a conservation area, protecting the shape and spacing of the old village centre while another aircraft programme prepared to make its first flight from the airfield.

Harrier, Hawk and British Aerospace, 1974-2000

On 21 August 1974 prototype XX154 lifted from Dunsfold with Hawker Siddeley chief test pilot Duncan Simpson at the controls. The flight lasted fifty-three minutes and reached 20,000 feet. XX154 became the first Hawk advanced trainer, a type that entered RAF service in 1976 and later served air forces around the world as well as the Red Arrows. Harrier development was still expanding, so one technical organisation now handled vertical-take-off combat aircraft, trainer development, naval fighters, export production and the conversions that brought aircraft back through the workshops after entering service.

Hawker Siddeley Aviation became part of British Aerospace in 1977, but Dunsfold retained final assembly, development and flight test. The Sea Harrier FRS.1 had its first flight from the airfield in 1978, a new control tower followed in 1980, and Harrier II work expanded through the next decade. During the Falklands conflict in 1982 the Dunsfold workforce moved to double shifts for urgent Harrier and Sea Harrier modification and support. Historic England records 1,435 operational Harrier sorties during the conflict, with twenty-eight enemy aircraft destroyed and no Harriers lost in air-to-air combat. The first British Harrier II GR5 flew from Dunsfold on 30 April 1985. Across the complete programme Historic England records 879 Harriers built at Dunsfold and tested in the engine-running pens before delivery.

Experimental flying also carried risk. On 2 July 1986 Hawk 200 development aircraft XG200 crashed during a test flight and deputy chief test pilot Jim Hawkins was killed. Development continued; an aircraft for the Sea Harrier FA.2 programme flew in September 1988, while Hawk variants for overseas customers and later Harrier work kept engineers, fitters, machinists, inspectors, draughtsmen, planners and test crews employed. The two surviving engine-running pens and the V/STOL blast grid were later listed at Grade II, with the grid described as probably unique and as a central surviving structure of English vertical-flight development.

Outside the airfield the Common was becoming less commercial. Waverley’s later conservation study records shops and workshops closing or changing to residential use during the later twentieth century, although the Sun Inn, former stores, school, Winn Hall and timber-framed houses kept the earlier plan readable. British Aerospace used part of the abandoned canal summit for recreation, clearing sections with an amphibious machine in the early 1990s for staff fishing. In 1997 Winn Hall gained the Nugent Room through a bequest from Lord Nugent, with support from the National Lottery and Arts Council, extending the meeting place eighty years after its wartime completion.

British Aerospace announced the closure of Dunsfold operations on 24 June 1999, and BAE Systems ended work at the airfield in 2000. Fifty years of Hawker, Hawker Siddeley and British Aerospace development and production ended, but the runways, pens, blast grid, hangars and workshops remained. As with the canal after 1871 and the furnace after the eighteenth century, the structures outlasted the industry for which they had been made.

Dunsfold after aircraft production: school, heritage, canal and airfield, 2000-2026

After BAE Systems left, the airfield became Dunsfold Park, a private business and aviation estate using hangars, workshops, hardstanding and runways for companies, aircraft storage, vehicle work and filming. Top Gear gave the runway and perimeter track a new national identity, while Wings & Wheels returned aircraft and historic vehicles to the site in public events between 2005 and 2019. The Dunsfold Airfield History Society developed research, exhibitions and the Reg Day Museum, shifting part of the site from active aircraft production towards interpretation of the work once carried out there.

The school on the Common reached a more difficult ending. Dunsfold School closed in 2004 after 165 years, and the remaining infant pupils transferred to St Nicolas’s School at Cranleigh; St Nicolas ceased its infant provision in 2006 as local primary education was reorganised again. Oak Woods School House was listed Grade II in 2007. Trustees then sought permission to sell, reopening the question created by Katherina Woods’s nineteenth-century gift. Consent was refused in 2008 while a local educational use was still being considered, and the dispute eventually reached the First-tier Tribunal. The tribunal examined Woods’s will, the 1915 lease and the twentieth-century conveyances, including the 1957 division between diocesan school premises and the School House transferred to Surrey County Council. At the end of 2011 it identified schooling for children living in and around Dunsfold as the preferred charitable use and invited a viable local proposal. More than 170 years after the first classrooms opened, the legal argument still turned on the purpose written into the 1839 foundation.

St Mary and All Saints continued as a working church. A two-manual Copeman Hart electronic organ was installed in 2006, and the Surrey Churches Preservation Trust awarded £5,000 towards re-roofing in 2015. The six bells are still rung from the floor beneath the medieval timber structure. A large tapestry, Depicting Life in Dunsfold, sewn by eighty-five parishioners, places a modern communal record inside the building where centuries of local names entered registers and memorials. On 24 February 2025 the Reverend Canon Shane Griffiths was installed as rector of Dunsfold and Hascombe, ending a four-year period without a resident incumbent. Worship, weddings, funerals, concerts and visitors continue to use the medieval building.

Heritage protection has made the airfield and Common easier to read as historical landscapes. In 2017 Historic England listed the Canadian construction memorial, two engine-running pens and the V/STOL blast grid at Grade II; a Royal Observer Corps monitoring post records the Cold War nuclear-monitoring role, while Dunsfold’s 1934 war memorial is also protected at Grade II. The Common had already been designated a conservation area in 1974, and Church Green received separate conservation-area protection, acknowledging the two distinct historic centres rather than treating Dunsfold as a single street. Waverley’s 2017 Common appraisal measured 12.3 hectares, more than half of it common land, and recorded eleven Grade II listed buildings together with the Old Reading House as a building of local merit. The large oak near Oak Tree Lane was assessed as more than four centuries old. Nugent Close and later houses added residential development around the historic core, but ponds, the guidepost, the remembered pound site, former pumps, access tracks and gaps between buildings still allow the older pattern to be read across the open ground.

Burningfold’s industrial past survives more quietly in the ground. When the Wealden Iron Research Group surveyed the old furnace site in 1976, investigators measured a pond bay 117 yards long, about ten feet high on the upstream face and twelve feet downstream. They also recorded a dry pond, charcoal dust and green and brown furnace slag across the former working area. Burningfold Manor’s Grade II listing protects the house; the bank below it preserves the water system that once drove furnace bellows and forge hammers. The documentary names – de Burningfold, Marche, the 1604 syndicate, Goring, Tanner, Montague, Woods and Barrow – can still be set against an earthwork and a timber frame that have outlived every industrial owner.

The Wey and Arun Canal returned from abandonment in stages. Volunteers began restoring the wider navigation in the 1970s, while British Aerospace used an amphibious Watermaster in the early 1990s to dredge the Dunsfold summit for staff fishing and allowed canal volunteers to clear vegetation. Fast Bridge and Farnhurst Bridge were repaired during the same broad period; Simmond’s causeway was removed, and the wartime Burnsite causeway followed in 1997. Each intervention joined previously isolated lengths of water. What had survived as a private industrial drain and fishing lake was becoming a canal again.

Small boats returned before the whole route was clear. In 2012 the Wey & Arun Canal Trust brought the tripboat John Smallpeice to Dunsfold and ran public trips on selected days for two seasons. Compasses still blocked the line until a new road bridge was completed and formally opened on 2 October 2016 during the canal bicentenary year; the Thriscutt Slipway followed inside Dunsfold Park in September 2018. In 2019 the Trust craned in a second-hand dredger, tug and two silt barges for a volunteer programme that had cut a narrow navigable channel through much of the section by early 2020, when Covid restrictions interrupted the work. A footbridge and bridleway route at Tickner’s Heath were completed in 2022. The largest modern operation followed at the end of 2023, when contractors working through Dunsfold Park desilted nearly two kilometres between Fast Bridge and Tickner’s Heath and removed about 13,000 cubic metres of silt. Water equivalent to thirty-six Olympic swimming pools was pumped into temporary lagoons for treatment and return; large carp from the former British Aerospace angling water were rehomed before dredging, while unexploded wartime ordnance found in the silt required professional disposal. The material being lifted from the canal had accumulated through decades in which airfield drainage fed the abandoned summit. A channel first dug by labourers with picks and barrows now contained the physical residue of the aviation landscape above it.

At Tickner’s Heath the road-bridge project advanced beyond the completed footbridge before cost intervened. In June 2026 the Wey & Arun Canal Trust placed that phase on hold after tenders rose beyond its available cash and reserves, stated at about £0.9 million. Fast Bridge at the A281 remains the other major obstruction, where the wartime road causeway crosses the summit. Much of the restored Dunsfold length is still inside the controlled Dunsfold Park perimeter, limiting public access to authorised events and agreed visits. Water has returned; the crossings still decide where full navigation can return.

The airfield itself faces a transformation on a much larger scale. The Secretary of State granted planning permission in March 2018 for 1,800 homes, a school, community centre, expanded business park and supporting infrastructure at Dunsfold Park, the first phase of a wider Local Plan policy for around 2,600 homes. Government recognition as a Garden Village followed in June 2019, bringing the proposal into the national programme for planned new communities. Waverley Borough Council adopted the Dunsfold Park Garden Village Supplementary Planning Document on 22 February 2022, setting a masterplan and design framework for a site where the canal corridor, listed aviation structures, open space and employment land must be accommodated within a new settlement. As of August 2026 the council records that Trinity College has confirmed it is seeking to dispose of Dunsfold Park to a new owner. The next large change in Dunsfold’s landscape is therefore authorised but not yet built.

The old labourer’s fairy story from 1914 tried to explain why the church and Common stood apart. They still do. Church Green holds the later-thirteenth-century church and Holy Well, while Forge Cottage keeps oak felled in 1254 beside the long Common. Burningfold Manor stands above the former furnace ground; the canal again holds water; Canadian runways still cross the eastern parish. New centres have repeatedly appeared without erasing the older ones. Dunsfold’s history survives in the spaces between them.