Fascinating Farnham

Farnham in Surrey is a pretty, Georgian market town, some thirty-five miles or just under an hour from London on one of the main train lines from Waterloo. This closeness makes it a commuter town, with all the advantages and disadvantages that distinction brings. It was my deep-seated love of walking in open spaces and Farnham's proximity to both the North Downs in Surrey and green fields of Hampshire that attracted me more than anything else. One of my other interests is local history. I love researching basic information, which I can then regurgitate for the benefit of walkers on the hikes that I lead. Naturally, my fellow ramblers were not interested in the detailed (or dare I say more-boring?) facts; they were only interested in the edited highlights. This fascination drove me to dig deep into stories, which I then distilled down to their essence, the fascinating parts that I could pass on. When I was younger, much younger, I lived in a house called Peregrines. At that time, I was blissfully unaware of the falcon species, but I knew the word peregrine meant a wanderer or a pilgrim from the Latin peregrinus. I took this to heart through my later life and wandered for more than thirty years. Eventually, in May 2017, I moved to Farnham, but before that I lived a nomadic life, pausing in London; Tennessee, USA; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Pattaya, Thailand and Siem Reap, Cambodia, to name a few of my temporary residences along the way. Unlike some of my previous dwellings, I fell in love with Farnham as soon as I arrived. That leads me to tell you about one of the central features of this book. The stories will wander from subject to subject, but each will link to the previous one (or occasionally to one that is substantially previous). Sometimes the connections are geographical, sometimes through a person or subject, occasionally they are very tenuous - but a link there will be. I also ought to point out from the start that although almost everything that follows is historical fact, an occasional streak of personal, unhistorical sarcasm does creep in. You have been warned! And the paragraph before this gives us our starting point, a pererine. But always the stories are fascinating, and that is the real central theme of this book - Fascinating Farnham.