Exploring Wiltshire History

Long Stone off the A420

As I’m beginning to edit our work on the outlying parts of Chippenham, I spent a couple of days between Christmas and New Year exploring on foot some of the places I had not visited before, or not for many years. Along the western edge of the ancient parish are several noteworthy structures, which will earn a mention somewhere in the VCH. The Long Stone, for instance, where the B-road for Yatton Keynell turns off the A420, is a strange elongated milestone of venerable antiquity. But how many motorists notice it? Nearby, in a field just off the Bristol road below Lan Hill, is a chambered long barrow, of a class found mostly further north in the Cotswolds, which still has one megalithic entrance visible and open. And along the winding lane to Allington is Bolehyde Manor, a most impressive 17th-century house on a medieval site, famous (among royal watchers) as the marital home of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles during the 1970s and 80s.

Lan Hill Barrow off Bristol Road

Another house nearby with a story to tell is Starveall Farm on the road to Biddestone. Here, around 1930, settled Helen, widow of the war poet Edward Thomas. She changed its name slightly, to the much more romantic ‘Starwell’, which is a reference to the Holy Well two fields to the south, and still marked on modern maps. Why Starwell? John Aubrey had the answer – he was told by ‘a great naturalist’ that east of Biddestone is a spring – they call it a holy well – where five-pointed stones do bubble up. Aubrey called these tiny marine fossils ‘Astreites’ but the modern name is crinoids, and they are still to be found there occasionally, I believe.

               Aubrey will turn up frequently in our red book, as he was born at Easton Piercy in Kington St Michael. Another, more recent, famous local resident was the composer Sir Michael Tippett, and I went to see his house while out walking. Many people will have noticed the blue plaque on the house in Corsham High Street, where he lived in the 1960s, but from about 1970 until shortly before his death in January 1998, 25 years ago, his home was at Nocketts Hill. It’s a stiff climb up from Derry Hill, but you are then rewarded with a virtual panorama, across the fields that were once Pewsham forest to Chippenham and beyond. I remember listening to the radio broadcast of the first performance, at a prom in 1980, of his triple concerto, and the applause that followed. Maybe this view was the inspiration?

~John Chandler - 24 Jan 2023