Most people waiting for the 14 bus at Putney Heath don’t notice the small wooden enclosure half-hidden beneath two enormous plane trees. It looks like something a local allotment society might have knocked together. In fact, it’s a Grade II listed building, one of the last physical links to a time when Putney Heath was London’s wild frontier.
The cattle pound opposite the Green Man pub has stood here since the 19th century, originally built to hold stray livestock found wandering the heath. Today it sits empty, a curiosity from an era when cattle and sheep still grazed common land within sight of London, and a parish official called a “pinder” would round them up and charge owners for their return.
The system stretched back to the Statute of Marlborough in 1267, which established that lords of the manor could impound straying animals and demand payment before releasing them. For nearly 600 years, this was how England managed the eternal problem of wandering livestock. The Putney Heath pound is one of the few to survive, listed by Historic England in 1983 as a rare example of a once-common rural structure.
When the heath was dangerous
Putney Heath history involves far more colourful characters than stray cattle. For much of the 18th century, the heath was notorious as highwayman territory, the last stretch of open ground before the Portsmouth Road reached the safety of London’s streets.
The Green Man pub, which has occupied its spot on the edge of the heath since around 1700, was where gentlemen retreated after duelling on the common ground nearby. Local legend holds that Dick Turpin once stashed his guns in an upstairs room, and that robbers would watch wealthy travellers taking refreshment before following them onto the heath.
The most notorious was Jerry Abershaw (Jeremiah Abershaw, to give him his proper name), who terrorised the Portsmouth Road in the 1790s. In 1795, he was finally caught at the Green Man itself, where Putney Hill meets Tibbet’s Ride. After his execution at Kennington Common, his body was brought back to the heath and hung in chains as a warning to others. The spot became known as “Jerry’s Hill.”
The cattle pound would have been there throughout Abershaw’s reign, a mundane agricultural fixture amid the drama of highway robbery. While travellers feared for their purses, the pinder was still collecting stray sheep.
Prime ministers at dawn
The heath’s reputation for violence extended to more respectable circles. Duelling was illegal, but that didn’t stop gentlemen, including serving Prime Ministers, from settling their differences here.
In May 1798, William Pitt the Younger, then Prime Minister, faced William Tierney MP on Putney Heath after a dispute in the House of Commons. Pitt lived nearby at Bowling-Green House, named for the famous bowling green that had made the area fashionable since the 1690s. Both men fired and missed (possibly deliberately) and honour was satisfied without bloodshed. Pitt died in the same house eight years later.
The heath saw more cabinet-level gunfire in September 1809, when Foreign Secretary George Canning fought Lord Castlereagh, the Secretary of State for War. This time there was blood: Canning was wounded in the thigh. Both men had to resign from government.
A monument to not burning down
Near the cattle pound stands another curiosity of Putney Heath history: a stone and brick obelisk erected in the 1770s to commemorate a fireproof house.
David Hartley the Younger had patented a system of iron and copper plates that he claimed could prevent fires spreading between floors. To prove it worked, he built a demonstration house on the heath and repeatedly set fire to the lower floors while distinguished visitors watched from above. King George III and Queen Charlotte attended one demonstration, breakfasting upstairs while flames crackled below. The fact that the monarch was not accidentally incinerated was apparently considered a triumph.
The obelisk, with its ornately detailed foundation stone, still stands near the car park by the Telegraph pub on Wildcroft Road. It has been Grade II listed since 1955.
Still standing
The cattle pound, the obelisk, the Green Man: these fragments of Putney Heath history have survived while almost everything around them changed. The highwaymen are long gone, replaced by the A3. The bowling greens gave way to Victorian villas. The heath itself shrank from open common to a green island surrounded by suburbs.
But the pound remains, empty now of cattle but full of stories. The wooden fencing has been repaired and replaced over the years, yet the structure persists in its original location, opposite the pub where Jerry Abershaw was caught, near the spot where Prime Ministers shot at each other, within sight of the obelisk that once saved a king from fire.
Local historians like Dorian Gerhold, whose meticulous research has rewritten our understanding of London’s past, have helped preserve these connections. Gerhold’s books on Putney include detailed studies of the area in 1636 and 1665, showing how much can be recovered when someone takes the time to look.
The cattle pound asks for nothing more than a glance from the bus queue. It’s worth giving it one.
