Tall tales and true: of Yorkshire moors and the byways of Surrey: War and peace and fiction

Martians landed on Horsell Commons near Woking just a few seconds after midnight on a Friday in June in the year 1900. The first person to discover their entry craft was Ogilvy, an astronomer, out walking on 'the commons'. He found a crater with a large space craft cooling from its entry into earth. And that was the beginning of chaos.

We were out on those very commons ourselves today, unaware of all that, just wandering in between showers, spending a quiet afternoon that we had never anticipated would turn out so interesting. Ogilvy wasn't the first person to notice lumps and bumps in the landscape here.

More than 4,000 years ago Bronze Age man dug deep into the ground creating burial chambers for tribal leaders. They interred cremated remains in clay urns, then heaped great mounds of earth, in the way of small pyramids, atop those chambers for protection and, very likely, as a mark of respect. What is unusual about these Horsell Commons barrows is that they are not the widely found ball barrows from most everywhere in England, but are bell and disc barrows, more commonly found over in Wesssex, so not this far east. Theories abound as to why such unusual barrows happen to be formed here. The most prevailing being that the Bronze Age population was growing fast and needed more land for food, so these folk might even have come from the west and colonised this area. With their strong bronze tools they would have been able to fell trees and farm the land they cleared, which would subsequently have depleted it, so that it soon became heathland, as it is today. These burial chambers are clearer from the air now than on the ground as they have been messed with over many ages.

These were not the only burial sites on the common, either, we discovered. From the road we have driven by, and could see, tucked way back under tall trees, an exceptional looking walled garden area of red brick with decorative domes, arches and minarets. Today we walked to it, rather than drive past as usual. Amazingly, it turned out to be a Muslim Burial Site, as during the first world war England recruited over a million Indian continent soldiers to help in battles, particularly in Africa. Wounded soldiers were brought to hospital in Britain for care. Most of the soldiers who were buried here died whilst in the Brighton Hospital. As they were Muslims they needed burial. There were cremation sites elsewhere placed for Hindus and Sikhs, but when a furore broke out about the need for appropriate burial sites and rites for particular religions England rose to the fore and built this site for the Muslim dead. It held 19 bodies of soldiers who died in the first war, and later 5 more were buried here after the second world war. Their bodies, though, have had to be re-sited to the larger, more protected, Brooklands cemetery close by, so recently the old Muslim Burial ground on the heath has been turned into a Peace Garden for the dead soldiers. With rosemary for remembrance growing in the garden beds. It is beautiful.

We wandered further, wondering as we did so, how and why Martians would choose to land on the heath here, just before that first great war. It turns out that the writer, H G Wells, lived in Woking. One day in the late 1800s, he and his brother were chatting, reflecting on what it must have been like for the indigenous population of Tasmania, Australia, at the time that white man landed on their shores and invaded their space.

The War of the Worlds became H G Well's conceptualisation of what might have ensued. Men, as if from Mars, landing in unfamiliar craft, bearing fearsome weapons and tools unrecognisable to the locals, terrifying them so much that the population who were not killed, ran in fear and terror, those remaining alive fleeing across the sea.

What H G Wells could never have guessed as he penned his tale of fiction and desperation was that some fourteen years later, there would be a really desperate war of the worlds, called the Great War, which ended with the Muslim dead being interred close to where his fictional space craft landed, neither of those sites at all far from the unusual burial mounds of bronze age folk.