Chapter 16: Vandalism

October, and back on the road again; this time the road in question is a quiet little country lane called the M25, which led me to Epping Forest, from where I struck out north, only to find myself bewildered and disappointed by some of the trigs I found.

S4750 Monkhams Hall and S4474 Bromley Common both fall into the bewildering category, for similar reasons – both are accessible via lengthy driveways which are clearly signed as Private, and in the latter case, watched over by CCTV.  Ordinarily, I would apply Rule One here and either find an alternative route or move on to the next one…  but the same driveways were also clearly signed as PROWs just a few metres away.  Confused by the contradictions, I strode purposefully up the tracks regardless.  I was spotted at both locations, but nobody paid me any interest, so I’m assuming that the Footpath and Bridleway signs at these locations take preference – for pedestrians, at least.  The latter trig is sited beside the track itself, a few hundred metres along, and has sunk sufficiently far into the verge that its bracket number was covered.  The former one was supposedly reached atop a hill from a footpath which led from the driveway…  and indeed, it is, but it’s so very easy to miss, as I found out when I reached the large houses at the top of the hill.  This is where I was spotted, initially by two very large shaggy coated canines (I’m a trigpointer, not a dogpointer, so I couldn’t tell you the breed, but I’ve seen smaller St. Bernards so I certainly wasn’t going to argue with them!) who bounded over to check me out.  Having figured that I had nothing for them, they soon returned to their owner who had come around the corner.  I hailed him, asking after a footpath, but he replied in another language and took his dogs through a break in the fence and into an open field.  Okay, that’s not the path I was expecting, but let’s follow him down it, then double back for a bit…  and the pillar soon hoved into view, with a fairly well-trodden path leading back down the hill behind it.  Oh, so that’s where I should have walked.  I proceeded to take my usual selfies – a handful of myself posing by the pillar for Facebook, and a couple of “hero shots” of the pillar itself for Trigpointing UK, along with a shot of the flush bracket and one of the top surface with the spider and the central tube, in which someone had hidden a clear plastic tub full of pills, with a marijuana leaf etched onto the lid.  I’ve found someone’s drugs stash!  Over 600 pillars bagged, but this silly hobby still has surprises for me!  No, of course I didn’t take them – that would break Rule Three, remember.  I will take only photographs.  It’s amazing what you can take from trig pillars, though, if you put the effort in, as the next pair of trigs demonstrated to my disgust.

S4709 Hunsdon and 10682 Mathams both fell into the disappointing category, also for similar reasons.  Both are hidden a few metres into a wood, and are easily accessible via rough vehicle tracks which double up as PROWs, and Hunsdon in particular gave me a decent walk across a former RAF base turned private airfield, followed by a little bit of woodland exploration, but neither of these pillars were any trouble to find.  Perhaps they’d be less sorry-looking if they had been.  Some pillars get damaged or toppled after they’ve been knocked once too often by farm machinery.  Some are deliberately moved because they inconvenience a landowner, or stand in the way of a construction project.  Some have simply fallen foul of the elements – there’s at least one example of a brick-built pillar blown apart by a lightning strike.  It’s always sad to see a chobbled or recumbent pillar, or to learn of a pillar’s removal or destruction, but I can usually understand the reasons for it.  What I don’t understand is mindless theft and vandalism, and I can think of no other explanation why both these pillars should be missing their flush brackets (and the latter also missing its spider) – there are great gouges in the concrete where some character has spent a great deal of time and effort hacking out the metalwork.  I mean, why?  It’s an awful lot of effort to go to for a couple of lumps of brass – is there a profitable market in random lumps of alloys?  Apart from being encased in the concrete, the flush brackets have a stem which culminates in a ball, digging deep into the concrete behind them to absolutely ensure they can’t be easily removed – certainly not without significantly damaging the pillar.  It’s an inexplicably pointless bit of vandalism, which only results in spoiling the hobby for future rockbothering visitors.

I failed to get run down by a plane at Hunsdon or shot at by paintballers at Mathams, so wanting to push my luck, I proceeded to S4515 Chapmans Field, where I then failed to get electrocuted.  This pillar was sited in the middle of a field, but has been moved for the convenience of the farmer, and now sits beneath an electricity pylon.  Its front surface is significantly cracked, but not through a deliberate act of vandalism, and its metalwork is all intact.
 
This trip was not without its highlights – S4364 Clavering was accessed via a footpath that led directly across a field and into a wood, where a network of secret pathways squiggled and tunnelled their way through the tight-packed vegetation before emerging onto a couple of field-edge PROWs that led to the pillar hiding beside a well-worn gap in a hedge that opened up onto a vast, wide crop field bordered with colourful flowers.  It was a very picturesque walk with an almost fairytale quality in the wooded section and beside the pillar itself.  S4469 Burnham Green is perhaps one of the easiest trig pillars in the UK – in fact, I think it’s harder to miss this pillar than to find it, as it has pride of place in a large village green, and is very close to a rather good pub.  And then there’s S4472 Hertford Heath, in a large uncultivated… err, heath, surrounded by trees and bushes of variable spikiness, which rob it of a far reaching view but instead provide it with an extremely beautiful verdant backdrop.  All absolute joys to bag, and I had high hopes that my final visit on this trip – S4466 Parsonage Farm (Hatfield) - would be similarly pleasurable.
 
Lesson Thirteen:  However recently it may have been updated, the images on Google Streetview do not necessarily reflect the situation at the pillar.  Expect the unexpected!
 
Pulling up in a side road at the southern edge of Hatfield, my first disappointment was crossing the footbridge over the A1001 and seeing the rubbish so liberally piled up below it at each end.  From the bridge, the path led through a patch of woodland and beside a pond, and then via a kissing gate into Bunchley’s Nature Reserve.  The Nature Reserve is clearly a popular dog walking location, as evidenced by the bagged up dog poo that dotted both the ground and the fieldside hedges.  The trees around the pond were covered in bright red graffiti; there were several patches of charcoal and ash along the way, where bonfires had clearly been lit.  As the PROW continued on around the edges of the fields, so the tall brambly hedge beside it became more and more festooned with carelessly discarded household rubbish, both on the ground and tangled high up in the branches above my head height.  Google Maps had led me to expect a succession of beautifully kept grassy meadows.  The photos on Trigpointing UK gave me the same impression.  But the way they’ve been treated over the last eighteen months is truly disgusting, and brings shame on the people of Hatfield – as of October 2025 this location could rival Bristol in the fly-tipping stakes.
 
Worse was to come.  I expected the pillar to be sited beside a large solitary tree, an iconic sight with bare branches twisting up into the sky.  Surrounded by some much larger black bonfire patches, the tree has been felled and chopped up, and the top surface of the pillar brutally hacked away in a (failed) attempt to remove its spider, which itself has been significantly bent and dented in the attempt.  This sorry handiwork is then topped off with graffiti tags.  A very disheartening and dispiriting sight to see.  I let Hatfield wallow in its own filth and headed back down the A1(M) and home, fuming all the way that some people really don’t deserve to have nice things.

Post Script, March 2026:  I have subsequently learned that S4466 Parsonage Farm has been further vandalised since my visit just six months previously, and that in the intervening time, both the spider and flush bracket have been hacked off.  It seems that I was the last person to photograph this pillar with its metalwork still in place.  
 
So Hatfield didn’t make it into my 2026 calendar, which I put together after this trip, thinking it would be unlikely that I’d get many more chances to venture out in 2025, the weather having taken a turn for the worse pretty much the day afterwards.  I thought I’d give myself some time to research potential future trigspedition locations and compile the itinerary for my next roadtrip at a nice, sedate, leisurely pace, and maybe get Christmas out of the way first…  only then to spend Hallowe’en night scribbling down directions well into the small hours…
 
Lesson Fourteen:  Trigpointers’ gossip is worth its weight in gold.
 
That isn’t really a new lesson, as Dennison Barracks and Heckfield Heath bear witness (to name but two).  I noticed that the Trigpointing UK website had recently been updated with a couple of visits to S1694 Bere Hill, a pillar on the southern edge of Andover which I had long since written off as ungettable with great regret as it left a gap in a numerical sequence.  Given that the chief (but not only) obstacle to bagging this trig was a tall, sturdy, barbed wire topped chain link fence that enclosed the pillar within a reservoir compound, I was curious to read the newly-added logs to see how my fellow rockbotherers had managed to bag it.  And I learned that the fence had been breached – an act of vandalism which meant that if I moved quickly, I might be able to get this pillar after all.  As it happened, a mate’s band was playing a gig in Salisbury on November 1^st, so I looked to see whether I could turn that day into another gigspedition. 
 
The Bere Hill pillar is beside the old route of the A303, the Micheldever Road, which runs in a straight line from edge of the town until it peters out and comes to an abrupt stop where it’s been cut off by an expanded and re-routed A303.  Well, that’s my parking place sorted, then.  Alongside it, a path runs next to a field, diverging from the road to accommodate a small but dense wood which surrounds the far end of the reservoir.  And in that wood, a narrow trail has been hacked out which, with a little bit of branch-whacking, led round to a large makeshift encampment, deep in the wood and backed up against the fence.  If it had any residents, they were not present, so I ignored it and inspected the fence.  Sure enough, a few metres down from the camp, there was a patched up section in the fence which had been rolled back and opened up more than wide enough for my ungainly frame to pass through.  Whilst I in no way condone such sabotage, I have no problem making use of it.  A couple of steps behind the breach is a large, earthy embankment which can be scrambled up by grabbing the branches of the trees in turn and pulling yourself up (all the while wondering exactly how you’re going to get down again afterwards).  The pillar is at the top, but hiding under a thick coating of ivy which covered every part of it bar the flush bracket, and with the embankment so very overgrown with dense vegetation, you wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t actively looking for it.  All obstacles duly overcome, though, it felt very rewarding to finally start taking my usual trig pillar selfies, even if the lack of light here meant said selfies came out rather blurrier than I’d have liked.
 
Several miles (and three more pillars) down the road, S2806 East Dean gazed down at me from the top of a ridge the best part of a kilometre away as I trudged up the concrete farm track-cum-footpath that led to it.  It’s probably the furthest I’ve ever been from a pillar whilst having eyes on it, and it stuck out like a pimple on the horizon against the bright blue sky.  I was very happy to reach this one, as the view back down the valley from the pillar itself was suitably impressive, particularly in the clear midday light that I hadn’t had at Bere Hill.  I paused for breath and took my camera out, noticing that there was a rainbow beginning to form across the path I’d just ascended.  Which was odd because it wasn’t raining.  And no sooner than I’d had that thought…  yep, you’re ahead of me.  As far away from the shelter of my car as I’d find myself on that day, a cloudless heaven somehow managed to deposit a light shower of rain on my head, and mess up my photos at what should have been the most picturesque location of the day.
 
The rain continued sporadically through the afternoon, and the sky slowly turned to grey as I made my way to the sixth and final pillar on my shortlist that day: S2621 Royal Oak, which is inconveniently sited in a field adjacent to the National Trust managed sections of Pepperbox Hill.  I wonder whether this pillar’s given name is different to the name used by the NT to make it clear that it’s not on their land.  Either way, bagging it requires scaling a fairly sturdy crotch-high barbed wire fence, for which I made sure I wore my long leather battledress, as this certainly saved me from castrating myself once I’d taken it off and thrown it over the barbs.  The field was claggy, but the mud that stuck to my boots soon washed off when I splashed my way through the puddles on the pathway on my return to the car park.  More importantly, because it was securely fenced off, the field was devoid of litter and the pillar was in good, unmarked condition.  Pepperbox Hill is also home to a toposcope and a large octagonal folly, both of which are publicly accessible, which may explain why the latter structure has had a myriad names and tags and love hearts and slogans scrawled across its brickwork and carved into its stones, above the discarded dog poo bags that decorate its base.  No, actually, that’s no explanation at all – whilst the area is nowhere near as uglified as Hatfield, there is still no excuse for it whatsoever, and as I drove into Salisbury, I started to have a lot of sympathy with the farmers (and water boards) who go to such lengths to keep people off their land.  I am very keen to “tread lightly” wherever I may roam, and leave no evidence of my presence in my wake.  Should I be crossing fences in pursuit of this silly little pastime?  Almost certainly not, so the least I can do is ensure that I cause no damage and create no mess when I do.  I am saddened and sickened by those who do not share this attitude, because if there was no littering or theft or vandalism, there’d be no need for chain links and barbed wire in the first place.