More CHRIS YATES legendary carp angler

A couple of years ago I became fascinated with a local story. It concerns a fraudster, the National Trust and Chris Yates who has twice lived just down the road from me, though we have never met, unless it was as children. The story centres around a house formerley known as Lea Park, but later called Witley Park. That house is now gone, in very suspicious circunstances and a popular match fishing venue with it. Indeed I learned form a fellow PPer that some of the fish, sold off quickly as they were mysteriously disappearing went to a Godalming water, the remainder going to Old Bury Hill. This is a paste of a letter I wrote to a local interest magazine this week, in the hope they might publish the whole story. I have yet to recieve a reply: "Dear Sirs, now that Hindhead Common and the Devil’s Punchbowl are to be ‘re-united’ with one another, as the A3 is buried away, it occurred to me that now is the time for you to publish the story of how and why the National Trust came into being and its relevance here to us all in South West Surrey. It’s a far more extraordinary tale that you might at first imagine as my title might have hinted at. The tale starts with an Englishman who made a fortune in the Americas selling shares in railway companies, a sort of South Sea Bubble that broke the finances of many. It continues with his return to Britain and purchase of Lea Park a house in what is now known as Witley Park where he began an extraordinary enterprise of building, landscaping and art collecting. After he had diverted two rivers to make a lake with underground buildings the locals heard he was trying to purchase Hindhead Common. They hurriedly created the National Trust to stop him. Amongst the founders was Octavia Hill , to whom a granite seat is dedicated on the hill known as Hydon’s Ball. Is it a coincidence that the seat looks in the direction of Witley? Our villainous entrepreneur re-started some of his businesses and our tale ends in the cells of the Old Bailey. It ends with a smuggled gun and a gunshot. In truth the tale carries on a little. His now world-famous home was bought and the art collection sold-off around the World, before a mysterious fire swept through the now empty building. Years later our foremost angling author, Chris Yates, a Surrey man until recently, published his memoirs and told of fishing there illegally as a lad. No one believed his tale of a lake with a glass ballroom protruding above the waterline...but it was true! This is but a taster of the story. I don’t want to spoil the fun one of you will have researching it! If you use your browser to search on the following, I feel sure you will as gripped as I was......... Witley Park J. Whitaker Wright A look here is a start, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witley_Park and here....the Guildhall was until recently know in modern times as Middlesex Crown Court and is opposite the Houses of Parliament http://www.cultrans.com/...mp;page=0&Itemid=65 This Urban Explorer site has much info and links to Flickr photos, but I imagine using them might create legal issues....nevertheless it’s a start. http://www.28dayslater.c...s/showthread.php?t=1092 And this images search is good too... http://www.google.co.uk/...=og&sa=N&tab=wi Yet more on the man... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitaker_Wright and lastly...a caricature of our villain....