Sandpits, Horsell, Surrey

I mentioned a couple of days ago that H G Wells was living in Woking when he wrote The War of the Worlds. He didn't live in the town long (1895-6) but long enough to write three of his most famous novels there. The first was The Time Machine and the other, The Invisible Man.
This is one of the sandpits on Horsell Common that Wells used as a setting for one of the Martian landings in The War of the Worlds. In the book he describes how the craft that brought the tripods were partially buried in the sand. Woking is destroyed pretty quickly in the book. But that was fiction. In reality it has taken the local council a little bit longer to ruin the place.
Today the common is popular with dog walkers and that's why we happened to be there. The only thing Pippa, our Jack Russell, found buried there was a stick.