Martians or Triffids?

I stopped at Horsell Common in Woking on the way home to Mum's this afternoon.  It bought to mind one of H.G. Wells best known books, War of the Worlds which opens with the lines


No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own;

Horsell Common was the place where the Martian invaders landed - in a sandpit at its centre.

I didn't see any little green men or spaceships today, but this tree root on the edge of the pit was more reminisent of another, later, Sci-Fi book read in my youth, The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham - it is surely about to uproot and walk away!