British village conceals intriguing heritage

Found in the Surrey Heath district of Surrey and municipal parish that spans Lightwater and Bagshot in the same region. Its name comes from the Windle Brook which runs southwards of the hamlet into Chobham and the usual suffix 'ham', the Old English phrase for 'dwelling'.

These days, Windlesham has a main grouped area with many different member's only clubs. The primary public parkland is connected by footpath over the motorway cutting throughout the southern regions of the land, Windlesham Arboretum. Passing through its northern sections are Heathrow Airport, the A30 (London Road) and a couple of local rail stations, which make the settlement financially a mostly city working village. It has 1 chapel, 6 community houses and two educational facilities including Woodcote House School and Windlesham House School.

A few good sized enterprises of late-20th-century beginnings have based themselves in the community, for example Rainbow Play Systems and the Linde Group.

The region has made bronze instruments, currently in the Archaeological Society's Museum, Guildford, and certain new stone age flints.

The community was once a nice little society within Windsor Great Park, constructed as a distant farming settlement around vast grasslands, comparable to Sunninghill. At Ribs Down, in the northern parts in exclusive Updown Court and bordering areas, the property extends to ninety-nine metres above sea level with a minimum descent of 31 metres, ranking 35th of thirty-six Surrey hillsides indexed in the countrywide hill-hiking databases and the tallest privately owned hill in the British countryside.

This cranny of the district seems, as it is absent from the Domesday Book, to have been very sporadically lived in. Writing about the community, Malden stated:

"The aged avenue had been the provider of exceptional wealth in Bagshot till it was replaced by the railway. 30 carriages each day passed through, and there were numerous inns, since closed. The most fascinating background of the area is in connexion with Windsor Forest, and its bailiwick in Surrey. The tenure of Bagshot in the Red Book of the Exchequer is per serjentiam veltrariae, i.e. offering a leash of hounds. The subsequent historical past is filled with the feats of outlaws, who found the untamed space hereabouts particularly advantageous for their purposes."

The Manor appears among the lands granted to Westminster by Edward the Confessor in his cornerstone charter. It was supposedly transferred to the small local Broomhall Convent at an unidentified time.

Newark Priory had an allotment of acreage in the community in the XIII century, and had the advowson (prerogative to nominate the vicar) of the chapel. Joan Rawlyns made a voluntary forfeit of the premises of her residence in 1522 ahead of the 1538 Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the next year Windlesham was awarded to St. John's College, Cambridge, who still owned it in 1911.

In the 20th century the hamlet was, due to the heath, described as practically entirely modern. Surrey's outdoors was tamed somewhere around the beginning the twentieth century, being generally made up of gorse, heather and fern and ideally suited for grass and laid out evergreen trees.