Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

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      ‘Netley Abbey ought, it seems, to be called Letley Abbey’, wrote Cobbett, ‘the Latin name being Laetus Locus, or Pleasant Place. Letley was made up of an abbreviation of the Laetus and of the Saxon word ley, which meant place, field, or piece of ground.’ But like Spike Island, the provenance of Netley’s name was disputed, its very identity surrounded in myth. Some writers considered Laetus Locus a play on the name of Letelie, which was already recorded in the Domesday Book; others believed that it originated from ‘Natan-leaga, or Leas of Naté, a wooded district extending from the Avon to the Test and Itchen’. Yet other sources attribute another old English meaning to the name: lonely, or desolate place.

      For thousands of years these river valleys had been used as routes into England’s interior, through primeval forest with its wild boar, bear and wolves, and into the uplands; Bronze Age axes and tumuli have been found in Sholing’s heathland. When the Romans came, they set up their military base and strategic port of Clausentum on a bend in the River Itchen, building a tall lighthouse to make plain their dominion. Half a millennium later it would crumble with the rest of their empire in the Dark Ages. When in turn the Saxons built their settlements, Hamwih and Hamtun, on the opposite bank, they would merge to become Suthhamtun, and give their name to the county, Hamtunscire.

      In the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries, the inhabitants would retreat behind the remaining Roman walls; those that did not were slain, enslaved, or, in the coy words of one nineteenth-century historian, used by the invaders ‘to satisfy their insatiable cupidity’. Medieval Southampton learned from such lessons, building defences to the north and east, yet leaving the waterside disastrously open to attack. One Sunday morning in 1338, while most of Southampton was at Mass, a fleet of fifty galleys ‘crowded with Normans, Picards, Genoese, and Spaniards’ sailed up the water to launch an ungodly assault. Many died as they came out of St Michael’s Church, clubbed or stabbed on the threshold of their place of worship; others were hanged in their own houses. The invaders took arrogant leisure in their destruction and stayed overnight to burn, rape, pillage and plunder – a fatal mistake, as by that time the King’s men had arrived to drive them back to their ships, killing 300 in the process. Their leader, Carlo Grimaldi, however, escaped to the Mediterranean, where he used the spoils to establish his Monte Carlo principality.

      Netley, meanwhile, remained on the sidelines of these events, looking on as its neighbour suffered successive invasions. Set in its woods, the place kept to itself. This uncanny sense of timelessness was marked by the Seaweed Hut which once stood on Weston Shore. A weird dome of worm-eaten wood, draped with turf and seaweed like a maritime haystack of flotsam heaped up on the beach, it was described by the Victoria History of Hampshire in 1903 ‘to be of considerable antiquity’ and celebrated on Edwardian postcards as a local curiosity. Some claimed it was a fishermen’s lookout, shelter and store, or perhaps an old ferry shelter, but to me it resembled nothing so much as a tribal hut.