[6] Several features and finds dating to the Iron Age have been found in the village over the decades; these show a densely settled and worked landscape.

In the Roman period a road was built from Winchester, then known as Venta Belgarum, to London (Londinium likely crossed through Four Marks), although this theory is not without controversy.

[clarification needed] The area was given by King Cenwalh of the West Saxons to the bishopric at Winchester, starting a chain of ecclesiastical management through to the current day.

[7] The charter listed many local gates and watering places, mostly identifiable today, showing that the area contained important Saxon husbandry.

[8] In the following centuries Four Marks seems to be quite empty as the soil was not attractive enough for farmsteads and water access was an issue as the village lies on a ridge.

People passed through, or near by, without great notice using the Roman Road, then later the King's Highway through Chawton Park Wood, and, beginning in the 18th century the Alton to Winchester turnpike (now the A31).

[12] The high point of the roads at about 215 metres was a chalk ridge, capped with clay and flints, lying between Telegraph Lane and the centre of Medstead.

Under 50 inhabitants clustered away from the through road around small farms dotted along the old river bed called Lymington Bottom and, for instance, at Hawthorn, Kitfield and Kitwood.

Winchester College Estate conducted at least two major sales: 350 acres in Medstead and Soldridge offered in April 1894 and, in May 1912, around the main road in Four Marks.

[18] The Land Company of London held two auctions at Lymington Park Estate in 1896, offering over 140 plots with a hotel and shops on a farm bought from Charles Frederick Hemming.

A local man, Frank Gotelee, who in 1901 had acquired much of the land in Medstead which had been accumulated in the 1850s and 60s by William Ivey, tried to sell freehold plots for development, although with less success.

Its defining characteristics were cheap, rural or semirural land suitable for market gardening or self-sufficiency, and the option of a basic house, usually single-storey 'colonial' style bungalows in a 'do-it-yourself' community.

[22] Together, they contain 242 plots comprising an estimated 251 acres, about half the total acreage enclosed in the 1709 Ropley enclosure and on approximately the same land.

[23] Within five years, the population of this small area to the south and east of the London to Winchester road had almost trebled to close to 250 people with over 30 new homes.

The modern village of Four Marks was founded at the end of the nineteenth century on little developed old commons and wastes mostly left from the 1709 Ropley enclosure.

In a steady growth from between the wars and into the 1950s, businesses catered for a 'mobile, fine evening and weekend pleasure pursuing population' heading for the country.

Premises 'sprouted like mushrooms' providing fuel and mechanical assistance for motorists and cyclists and, with the townies who came by railway, for sustenance with general stores, road houses, wholesome refreshment rooms, small shops, cafés, the Windmill Inn, and even The Blinking Owl, a good class restaurant with a dance floor.

Those smaller shops, which might otherwise have spread around the side streets with the bungalows, instead congregated prominently on Winchester Road taking best advantage of the needs of both visitors and locals.

A close examination of the occupants in 1861 shows no war-weary from Sevastopol, but a less exciting handful of fertile local families who worked the land on scattered existing farms: leaseholders, agricultural labourers, carters and a shepherd.

[27] Four Marks has a large recreation ground including football, cricket, tennis courts, local bowls club and BMX ramps.

Marianna Hagen of Ropley was the driving force; she bought the plot of land, part of Homestead Farm on Hawthorn Road in 1902 from John Joseph Tomlinson, a London-based wholesale stationer.

At first, church services were held in the school until in 1908, when Hagen moved the 'Iron Room', a corrugated iron and timber hut, from Ropley Soke to opposite Belford House where it became the mission.

Steam locomotives, restored and operated by the Watercress Line, run regular services between Alton and Alresford (Hampshire), stopping at Medstead and Four Marks and Ropley railway stations.

Blackberry Lane was host to an important twin-dome observatory built in 1913 by James Worthington, precocious, wealthy, and the epitome of a new style of aggressive amateur astronomer.

[34][35] Worthington agreed with Percival Lovell, the owner of the now revered Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, that there were canals on Mars built by intelligent beings.

Bruce used to land her wooden, single-seat aerobatic biplane, the only Miles Satyr ever built, in the field across the road from her home at Pooks Hill in Alton Lane.