Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  As far as possible the farms in the valleys were laid out on a uniform plan. They were placed crossways upon the streams. Each man had his strip of fertile water meadow and his two strips of downland varying in quality. Upon the summits the sheep grazed and wandered at will, and in the valleys the cows chewed the cud; leaving the arable land in the foothills between the two. The farm buildings were naturally placed in the middle of the farms on the river banks; and here and there a mill straddled across the stream. The mill-wheel is now too often silent, although there may sometimes be heard the easeful whirr of a fisherman’s wheel as he draws in his line.

  The churches, the abbeys and the manor-houses were the natural centres of these quiet riverside villages, so that until this day, nearly all the great Wiltshire houses, as well as the small towns, are low-lying. This is why, for many centuries, the green contours of the downs were undisturbed, and, almost until the twentieth century, Salisbury Plain might have been an uninhabited country. Those wide, cool horizons created an air of quiet spaciousness. Their calm impassable outlines leave an impression as still and lofty as does a pencil drawing of the head of the poet Wordsworth.

  Down sites have seldom appealed to Wiltshire builders. Old Sarum was indeed a city set upon a hill, but then it was an almost impregnable military position; and when its inhabitants were free to settle to the arts of peace, they left their stronghold and built Salisbury Cathedral in the marsh.

  The royal Palace of Clarendon stood high above the Avon, but it was an exotic creation and it disappeared unaccountably. Like the stones of Old Sarum, many of the Palace stones can still be seen incorporated in the walls of homely buildings on the river level.

  Beckford’s fantastic abbey at Fonthill was nothing but a freak. Its ground level was five hundred feet above the top of Salisbury spire, and from this the tower of the abbey defied the sky for another three hundred feet. For twenty-seven miles it was the first object to be seen in a radius of over sixty miles. Then it suddenly collapsed, too high ever to make a permanent dwelling in this county of traditionally valley people.

  Pertwood in the south-west of the county and Snap in the north-east were two down villages; and in their prime they were prosperous little places, but they too have gone. It is tragic to come upon their deserted little homesteads. In the middle of the nineteenth century there was a fever to make of Wiltshire a second Australia and much capital was put into vast sheep runs spreading over the downs without boundary or limit, and requiring very little labour. It was thought that a shepherd or two could watch over all these flocks, and no one wanted the cottages where the labourers used to live. The labourers went: so did their cottages: and now the sheep have gone too.

  The humblest village in Wiltshire need expect no permanency if it places itself far from the river banks which seem to be its natural home.

  So any portrait of this county must appreciate the way in which, long ago, the population drifted from the downs to the valleys. The early inhabitants lived high up, away from the wolves and the miasmas. And the Romans when they came chose the high ground too because it could best carry their roads; and they used, as far as possible, the sites which were ancient even in those days. Also it was their policy to dominate miles of the country round, and accordingly they left the valleys almost empty. But the Saxons came later and built the river villages, leaving the chalk downs to the barrows and the bustards.

  Now the scene is changing once more. The agricultural population is dwindling, and up on the downs there are now growing towns composed of military “quarters”. We are returning to the Roman conception of Wiltshire as a county to fight from rather than to farm in. The new migration began in 1899, when the Government of the day bought vast tracks of the Plain for military training. The two German wars immensely increased this tendency. Bulford, Larkhill, Netheravon, Ludgershall and the rest are villages no more. They are permanent camps. And now the aerodromes have come. Upavon, Boscombe, Old Sarum and Yatesbury fall on the ear with quite a new intonation. It is hard for a native of Wiltshire to believe that this reorientation of ideals, as well as of situations, can be a permanent thing; but should this be the case, the portrait of a county which has carved its own beauty so deliberately from the life of every passing age will have to be drawn afresh.

  Copyright

  First published in 1951 by Robert Hale

  This edition published 2014 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-6358-6 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-7197-0 HB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-6357-9 PB

  Copyright © Edith Olivier, 1951

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