The Downlands (region)

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The Downlands, consisting of the settlements of Somerford Mally, Somerford Canons or Canonicorum, Somerford Tout Saints, Lamsford, Cliff Ambries, Shifford Ombres, Combe Woddley (Waddlycombe), Chalford Mallet (and the Shrunken Mediaeval Village of Hawksbourne), Harstbourne Fitzwarren, Harstbourne Sallis, and Harstbourne Fratrum or Friars, is a collective term for these settlements and the adjacent countryside, in South West Wiltshire: near to the County border with Dorset, South and West of The Woolfonts and North of The Vale. It stretches over two civil parishes: The Somerfords and The Harstbournes: which have been since the 1930s incessantly merged, split, renamed, and meddled with, owing to their small population and extensive area.

The land is part of the estates of HG the Duke of Taunton, and has always been in the possession of the Dukes of Taunton, their Malet predecessors, and the Cynricing cadets of the House of Wessex into whom the ancestral Malets married upon the Conquest.

It is largely sheep country, bordering, to its South and West, upon The Vale: at which margin are the ancient sites of Freeford; Rethebury Rings; Wadpool; Wades Barrow; Grimmelsmere; and, most significantly, Wodewough Wood.

The Downlands are a current focus of considerable scholarly attention. An SSSI applies to much of the land; there is a dispute, as of 2017, regarding its strictures as against archaeological excavations proposed by a minority of archaeologists on the Great Vale Dig team.

Geography
The Woolfonts, to the North- and Eastwards of the Downlands, occupy a dissected plateau of downs, incised by the River Wolfbourne and its tributaries and encompassing land by the river in which arable farming is localised. The Vale of Sennell, to the Southwards of the Downlands, is a riparian floodplain and valley, beneath the deep scarps which segregate it from the Downs – a literal illustration of the saying, ‘chalk and cheese’ – and which contain the spring line of various small tributaries of the River Sennell. There are many dairies and rich cornlands in the alluvial plain of the Vale.

The Downlands, by contrast, are very largely open chalk downland of an entirely pastoral character. The settlements upon it are situate on the few bournes and the infant River Wolfdown, and its tributary the Harstbourne, where there is just sufficient arable for kitchen gardens; all remain wholly tied to the sheepwalks to which they are adjacent, and which supplied the fleeces and the mutton which might be exchanged for ale and vegetables and milk and cheese. (Beyond the Harstbourne, the Tenter Downs are not dissimilar, between Coytmoor Wood and Honey Coombe to the Southwards and the River Wolfbourne below its confluence with the Harstbourne, to the Northwards; but that portion of the Champion Country is bounded by the Harstbourne to its Westwards and the Wolfbourne to its Northwards and Eastwards, and its settlements are not Tenter Down itself, bar the village of Tenterdown, but, rather, upon these waters. Accordingly, although itself sheep country, the Tenter Downs are economically the creation of the mills upon these streams and the river, from Thanesmill, Woolmill, Tuckmill, and Fullen Mulliner upon the Westward side to Wolbourne Mallet, Wolbourne Gravell, Wolbourne Harfleet, Wolbourne Chalke, and Wolbourne Chantreys upon the Eastward side, all these above the River Nadder’s confluence with the Wolfbourne, and, somewhat upriver, the Sennell, at Wolminster, Wolchester, and Staple Woolton.)

With the exception of the areas of settlement and their bournes, and the River Wolfbourne and the Harstbourne, and with the further exception of the Freeford-Wadpool-Wodewough-Grimmelsmere complex at the edge of the Downlands above the Vale, the Downlands are otherwise generally waterless save for dewponds.

The great sweep of the Downlands is atypically typical, archetypal, for the county. It is what it has ever been since it became downs: a wooded downland of the most Platonic type, chalk lightly capped with a pastoral soil. The elevated upland of the Upper Chalk, with a crowning glory of flinted clay, supports a vast chalk grassland, spangled with the flowers of the field, and bejewelled with ancient broadleaved woods, with oak, ash, and yew, where the over-soil was deepest and most loamy. The great, rolling plateau is sharply incised and dissected by the dry valleys of the seasonal bournes; steeply scarped and scalloped, these eroding into deep combes and rounded spurs; all breaking and falling away through their escarpments of Upper, Middle, and Lower Chalk to Greensand terraces, their slopes clad in well-draining rendzinas, calcareous, flourishing for grazing. Hanging woods trace and follow the slopes in their contours, and in the chalkstream valleys as in the greater vales, villages and hamlets cluster at the spring line in the Greensand terraces or stand on banded limestone amidst rich, arable valley clays. Where it differs from the other wooded downlands of the county is in this, that it has remained pastoral always. The successive Inclosure Acts have never touched it; no more was there any private and contractual enclosure, well before Parliamentary enclosure, to change its character.

The Downlands have, uniquely, never been enclosed, hedgerowed, and ploughed; no cereal crops have displaced the grazing sheep, no axe has felled the ancient woodland to put the deep rich loam in crops, within recorded time.

The Downlands, being, outwith the small and concentrated settlements, untouched, unsullied, and unspotted from the world of plough and settlement, are notably rich with butterfly and herb, bird and flower, in acres of rich pasturage upon the undisturbed chalk. Chalk milkwort and betony, gentians and sedges, adorn a wide sweep of sheep’s-fescue and meadow oat-grass, cowslip, scabious, and salad-burnet, wild carrot and kidney vetch, saw-wort, red fescue, and orchid. Lapwing and partridge, corn bunting, skylark, and nightingale, are numerous, as are, in copse and wood, yaffle and greater-spotted woodpecker. Predator species such as kestrel and hobby, tawny owl, little owl, and buzzard, flourish, feeding upon these birds and upon such field mice, shrews, dormice, and voles as escape the woods’ stoats and weasels.

Wolfdown House and its purlieus and policies, and Wolf Down itself as a geographical object, mark the Northernmost bounds of the Downlands as a geographical and geological entity, although they are not within either of the civil parishes which together make that region. Beyond Wolf Down, the downs differ somewhat in character and in use and settlement patterns, stretching away Northwards past Chickmarsh to Pebdown.

At the Southern and South Western margins of the Downlands, where the Downs break away and down into the Sennell Vale, and Southwards of the Harstbourne, are, from West to East, Freeford, Rethebury Rings, Wadpool, Wades Barrow, Wodewough Wood, and, between the Sennell and the Harstbourne, Grimmelsmere, beyond which at the verge of the Tenter Downs is the great wood and forest of Coytmoor, to the Northwards of Pencotmore and Tisbury. Wodewough Wood, like the truncated and sadly diminished remnant of Senwood in the Vale, is an outlier of the ancient forest of which Coytmoor Wood is the principal relict, as its name attests: for ‘Coytmoor’ is simply ‘the Great Wood’, coed mawr.

Grimmelsmere – named not for Grim Wotan, but for, or for a,  Grendel – owes its existence to the breaking down and away of the Downlands into the Harstbourne – Sennell Greensand and alluvium. Wadpool is what and where it is because, unlike mere dewponds on the chalk of the Downlands, it drains Wodewough Wood. Small nameless rivulets and the tiniest of bournes feed it; and carry into it such matter as causes it to support about it an acidified soil and the species proper thereunto. It supports, consequently, one of the most richly diverse biotic communities in the region.

Almost the whole of the Downlands, for these reasons and because of its immemorial pastoral and unploughed character, is designated an SSSI.

Wodewough Wood
The ancient forest of Wodewough Wood is not, in fact, one wood, but is, rather, a complex of forest ecologies. Withdrawn though it may be into its smaller compass, its newer borders, and sundered from Coytmoor and Senwood, it remains all the same, adapted to its ground, ancient woodland in an ancient landscape.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Upon its fringes, where clay overlays the gently sloping chalk, it is broadleaved ancient woodland: ash and hazel, hornbeam and hawthorn, sallow, field-maple, and privet, downy birch and aspen; there is flourishing pedunculate oak, hornbeam, and ash, and, in Springtide, notable ‘bluebell woods’ fenced with bramble and bracken. Elsewhere, on steeper slopes and chalkier soils and grit, the trees run increasingly to ancient ash and hornbeam, which, on the margins of the wood, have long been coppiced. Even at these margins, there are the indicative species of ancient woodland: thin-spiked hedge and moschatel, Forster’s wood-rush, broad-leaved hellebore, and orchid, in a context matrix of primrose, bugle, and dog violet, Guelder rose and dog’s-mercury, with the tree series varying with the wetness of the soil and the drainage influence of Wade’s Pool: ash and maple in parts, oak and ash in others, all with their proper understory and just, proportionate ground-flora.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Nearest Wadpool and the wetter ground, on gentle slopes slowly draining and almost plashy in places, wet ash–maple series flourished, with small-leaved lime, field-maple, and wild service tree, above woodruff, sanicle, orpine, and spurge. Sweet chestnut and honeysuckle mark areas in which the soil is slightly more acidified by the slow percolation of waters creeping towards the pool from the chalklands, slowly bearing the organic decay of small life to do what peat did elsewhere. Deeper into the wood, on the true high chalk downland, oak predominates, with ash and whitebeam in support, uplifted over holly and spindle, blackthorn and hawthorn, bellflower, orchid and fern.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">In the heart of the wood, set upon gentler slopes and billows of the Downs than is common for its particular trees, is a great grove of ancient yew.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Wodewough Wood, boasting finch and fieldfare, dormouse and deer slept at ease, guarded for centuries by baron and duke as a wild park and a larder, and an ornament, is in consequence the jewel of the Downlands, the Platonic ideal of a South-Western forest upon the chalk, with a great yew wood hidden at its heart.

History
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Downlands were part of a Saxon royal estate which passed to a cadet line of the House of Wessex who were king’s thegns. The estate, as an economic and military entity, likewise included the Woolfonts, the Northern downs to Pebbury, Tenter Down, parts of the Vale, and the remainder of what passed from the Cynricings to the Malets, upon the Conquest, as the Malets’ feudal Honour of Wolfbourne.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">From the Malets, the entirety of the old Honour and all its manors passed to their descendants the Fitzjames Dukes of Taunton, in whose possession it remains.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Its prehistory is uncertain: there was at least one Roman or sub-Roman / Romano-British villa in the area of its clustered villages and hamlets, and the proximity of another villa rustica  now being excavated in the Vale, which appears to have been built over a considerable pre-Roman, Iron Age settlement rivalling if not surpassing Duropolis, suggests that the Downlands as a whole might have supported further such settlements, Celtic and Roman alike. However, almost all of the Downlands is scheduled as an SSSI precisely because it has always been unsettled pastoral land, never put to the plough and without any indication of settlement outwith the Downlands villages since at least the Iron Age.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal"> No amount of drowned votive offerings in the infant river and no quantity or quality or antiquity of knapped flint and aurochs’ bones and Mesolithic tools and weapons should likely allow any of the settlements of the Downlands, unless it were the Shrunken Mediaeval Village of Hawksbourne, clinging to life with three cottages, to pass Amesbury at the last fence and claim the crown of Britain’s oldest place of continual habitation. Transhumance and seasonal occupation had been the logical response to the land and the climate and the lack of arable, as Summer Fords and Harvest Bournes attested; the topography had dictated the pattern of hunting and herding from the first. Nevertheless, the prehistoric Downlands seem to have been much of a muchness to what they are today, reflecting a notable continuity of use and habitation.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Certainly the Downlands remained from at least the time of the Malets similarly preserved from arable exploitation or any further settlement, as sheepwalks; and what time the wool trade abandoned Wiltshire for other counties, its lords were not in want of income, having ample wealth from other sources; and they preserved the area unchanged as a sort of wild park.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Such subinfeudated retainers of the Malets as the Trulocks, Parhams, and, in time, the Doutys, equally left holdings in the Downlands ‘all at wool’: the only alienation, with the permission of the Malets as overlords, being a small grant on the fringes of the Downlands, by the Trulocks, to the Knights Hospitallers.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">In consequence, wars and revolutions (including the economic) passed the Downlands by: between the Conquest and the present day, the only particularly notable event – and the only major disaster – to befall the Downlands was the Black Death, which may have contributed to the decline of the SMV of Hawksbourne, but which touched the villages and the Downlands as a whole comparatively lightly, owing, no doubt, to the generally linear rather than nucleated character of the villages, the low population density, the lack of arable, and the consequent paucity of habitat for the rat as vector.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The first, brief iteration of the Woolfonts & Chickmarsh Railway hardly affected the then-somnolent and static villages, the bolder or more restless souls in which had already departed thence to seek their fortunes elsewhere. It has only been since the day of the tenth Duke, and the current Duke of Taunton, the eleventh, that (strictly managed) growth has resumed.

Etymology and Toponymy
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The name ‘Somerford’ is of obvious derivation: these are the places where the small bournes and streams, and the upper reaches of the river, are fordable – dry-shod, historically, in those instances where the ford is upon a seasonal bourne – in Summertide. The Malet lordship is equally obviously the source of the ‘Mally’ element in ‘Somerford Mally’ and ‘Chalford Mallet’, and the Malet connexion to the Fitzwarrens is reflected in the name, ‘Harstbourne Fitzwarren’.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Similarly, Lamsford is situate precisely where its name should suggest, upon a ford unthreatening even to new lambs; and the ‘Shifford’ in the name of Shifford Ombres is of course ‘sheep ford’.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Downlands have always been sheep country, ‘champion country’, since, it appears, before Roman times. This is reflected in the toponomastics of the area. Somerford Canons, previously more commonly ‘Somerford Canonicorum’, and Harstbourne Fratrum, anciently ‘Harstbourne Friars’, testify to the lengthy period in which the Malets granted to the Abbey at Woolfont Abbas the farm of the sheepwalks. That the former is now ‘Canons’ and the latter, ‘Fratrum’, is most likely attributable to the Reformation and the Dissolution, the Church of England continuing to have canons and dispensing with friars.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Harstbournes are so named for the seasonal character of their adjacent water: ‘Harstbourne’ is an abraded form of ‘Harvest[-tide] Bourne’. Chalford Mallet’s ‘Chalford’ element, which older antiquarians believed derived from ‘chaud’ ford, is in fact simply the designation of the chalk ford, the ford there running over openly exposed chalk with little deposition of the usual chalk-stream stream-surface of flint gravels.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in">Less obvious, perhaps, is the name of the SMV of Hawksbourne; that of Combe Woddley, or Waddlycombe; and the second elements in the placenames of Cliff Ambries and Shifford Ombres. However, it is hardly surprising that there should be, at Hawksbourne, a counterpart to Lamsford and Shifford: for all its connotations of falconry in its present form, ‘Hawksbourne’ is in origin the much humbler ‘hoggets’ bourne’. Both the sheep-ford at Shifford Ombres and the scarp area which named Cliff Ambries preserve a folk memory, perhaps with some substratum of historical, Sub-Roman truth, of the figure conventionally called, as, ‘Ambrosius Aurelianus’, or, by the Welsh, Emrys Wledig. A similar tradition, with similar possibilities of historicity, exists at Amesbury to the Eastwards and, less certainly, at Ambrose Hill to the Westwards, outside Sherborne, in Dorset. Cliff Ambries boasts Ducksbill Mill and Pindrake Farm, now the property of Mr and Mrs Alam Mirza; significantly, in light of these place-names, Arthur was the dux bellorum, the war leader; and the pendragon like Uther before him.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The combe settlement of Combe Woddley, or Waddlycombe, returns the topic to sheep, wool, and fleece once more: as the dyeing agent, woad, grows plentifully there and gives its name to the settlement.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The antiquities of Freeford; Rethebury Rings; Wadpool; Wades Barrow; Grimmelsmere; and Wodewough Wood are pre-Roman, and quit likely have always been considered, until the Christian period, as sacred; their present names reflect the pagan Anglo-Saxons’ syncretic appropriation of them as sacred landscapes under new names. Freeford is named for Frige, the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of the Norse goddesses Freyja and/or Frigg; ‘Rethebury’ preserves an attribution to the obscure Springtide goddess Hrethe (Hrēþe) or Rheda, who gave her name to the Anglo-Saxon month of March.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Both Wadpool and Wades Barrow were clearly dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon psychopomp and ‘ferryman’, Wade, the Norse Vaði, the father of Wayland the Smith (Völundr, the Teutonic Ἥφαιστος, Ilmarinen, or Vulcan). As Keeper of the Fords and divine ferryman, Wade had marked affinities both to Charon (and similar psychopomps such as Manannán mac Lir, Vergil’s and Dante’s Phlegyas, and Urshanabi) and to S Christopher.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Grimmelsmere is a clear allusion to Grendel; and Wodewough Wood is – interestingly, in light of current archaeology and palaeontology – named for woodwose, the European equivalent to the mythical North American Sasquatch.

Economic and social history
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">As ‘champion country’ – sheepwalks – from very early times, possibly since pre-Roman times, the Downlands have not much marched in the vanguard of ‘progress’ or development: a fact duly celebrated by Betjeman, by Ptolemy Dean, by Alec Clifton-Taylor, and by Dame Penelope Keith. For much of its history between the Conquest and the Dissolution, the sheepwalks were farmed out to the Abbey of Our Lady and S Leonard Wolfdown Abbas: but the Malets generally managed to have a second son, a nephew, or a cousin as Abbot, and – as was always their habit, here and everywhere – they never alienated a square foot of any lands they acquired at any time. The names of Somerford Canons and Harstbourne Fratrum reflect this, the latter particularly being associated with the lay brethren who managed the shepherding upon the Downlands for the Abbey.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">After the Dissolution, the Malets directly and immediately managed wool production on the Downlands, until the wool trade concentrated away from the West Country; upon which, they kept it, as did the Dukes of Taunton, as sheep country, raising mutton and lamb as well as wool flocks. Pope, in his Upon the R. [Wolfbourne] above Hawksbourne, written about 1720 (some editions had it as the ‘River Wolfdown’), praised, or seemed to praise, its timeless peace, apostrophising the River (as ‘Voliba’) thusly: "Sheep safely graze where once the Wolf did prowl;""And, in the quiet night, none save the Owl""Now hunts the Groves that border on thy Brooks,""And no alarums fright th’ nesting Rooks.""Thy Verdure and thy Bowers now do lie""All placid ’neath the Stars that Heav’n pie,""Thou Nymph, Voliba!"<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.5in;font-weight:normal">On the other hand, there is possibly a sting in his final stanza: "… thy Ways to keep""Amidst the fleecy pasturage of Sheep,""And far from Town, sweet Peace attend thy Crown,""And as a breachless Wall keep thou thy Down."<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The brief boom in the villages of the Downlands which resulted from the end of the Abby’s farm of the sheepwalks, and the retention of salaried shepherding labour, did not, naturally, persist after the local decline in the wool trade – it was of this period that Pope, having as usual quarrelled with his ducal patron, wrote, of the incumbent Duke (and his suspected Jacobitism) as being one "… Who nourishes the Poor with fatten’d Mutton""From P-bb-ry to S-mm-r F-rd to S-tt-n, Yet London starves of Loyal, Publick Duty. He finds his Grace in other modes of Beauty:""A Whore, a Bottle, Crown’d and Exil’d Scots,""His Cousins and his Kindred – and all Sots"<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">– yet the mutton trade, and the mere effort of keeping the Downlands as they were, free of encroachment by woods and weeds, maintained local employment in the agricultural sector, for shepherds, foresters, and hay-makers.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">All the same, between the Georgian and the Edwardian periods, the Downlands were, if not economically moribund, very much somnolent. It was only under the tenth Duke, and is now under his son the eleventh and present Duke, that this has begun to be changed. In the intervening period, such trade as the Downlands carried on has tended to drain, no longer to the Woolfonts, but rather to Shaftesbury and Gillingham, as a function of changes in product and of transportation links: a situation currently being reversed.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">During the mediaeval period, the primary retainers of the Malet lords were the knightly family of the Trulocks, who long held and resided in the Downlands; it was they who granted, with the Malets’ assent, a small property to the Hospitallers, somewhere near the site now called Spitler’s Coppice. A cadet branch of the knightly Parhams removed to the Downlands during the Anarchy, and remain there yet, as yeoman and gentleman farmers in their several branches; and, although (it appears) first arising in the Vale, near to Senwood, the Doutys, in their rise, at one time held in the Downlands.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The more questing spirits, deprived of the excitements of progress, development, internecine warfare, industrial revolution, dislocation, and Luddism, tended over this period to seek those excitements afield.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">One branch of the Calleys of Mally removed, first to London, and thence to Birmingham, where they founded a dynasty. Abraham Calley was apprenticed, in London, into the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers; he and his brother Job, who had followed in his footsteps, thereafter removed, with several patents between them, to the West Midlands, Abraham to Birmingham and Job to Wolverhampton, where they created Calley Brothers, a major manufacturer of machine tools in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. Abraham Calley’s sons went into private banking in Birmingham, and thence into politics. Job’s took on the management of Calley Brothers (a grandson removed to Sheffield, joined the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, and established a lucrative business in the manufacture of bayonets, rising to become a Searcher of the Company and then Warden); and it was one of Job’s nephews, his sister’s son, entering the House as a Radical MP (Abraham’s lot were Liberals, then Liberal Unionists, then Conservatives), who was briefly a Minister of State in the Home Department, in Gladstone’s final ministry.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Calley Arms Sheffield subsequently diversified, as Calley Metals Sheffield, into the trade in precious metals, and is one of the leading gold- and silversmithing firms in the UK, having, over the centuries, furnished several Guardians of the Standard of Wrought Plate to the Sheffield Assay Office.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The nearby Burtts, by contrast, if fed to the back teeth of rural life, generally took the King’s Shilling; or, if they remained at home, got themselves transported for poaching. Sergeant Tom Burtt, 2nd Bn, 40th (2nd Somersetshire) Regt of Foot, was at Waterloo, where he was wounded, and his diary is a major source for historians of the Waterloo Campaign; Sergeant-Major Charles Burtt VC was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions at the Alma, in the Crimean War. A more reckless spirit yet was that possessed of Thomas Burtt, afterward Thomas Burtt MLA, who was transported to Australia in 1848 for having damaged a railway bridge in some drunken youthful folly. (His uncle George had been transported as a Chartist some years prior.) In Western Australia, he became, rather to his own amusement, an early advocate of railways, and a self-taught surveyor for roadways; he was soon pardoned in recompense, and was in time elected a Member of the Western Australia Legislative Assembly. The engineering firm he founded in Perth still flourishes, and remains in the control of his descendants by his Australian-born cousin Molly, daughter of George the Chartist, whom he married in 1862.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">During the two World Wars, the Downlands were able to keep their character by being set aside as reserve training grounds for the Army – which were in the end fortunately never wanted –, as producers of wool for uniforms, and, in the Great War, as a source of cavalry remounts.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The post-2016 revitalisation of the Downlands has seen the ducal reassertion – for the good of the community – of certain ancient rights. His Grace is Hereditary Keeper and Constable of S Aldhelm’s Castle and Hereditary Ranger of Yarncombe Forest (which was never largely wooded: it was a Royal legal dodge), and is feudally Lord of the Downs (compare the Lordship of Bowland, in Lancs); he has appointed Alec Parham, whose family held these offices in Plantagent times, Chief Steward and Master Forester, with an environmental protection remit. In this remit and these tasks he joins the Environmental Officers on the River, the Duke’s water bailiff Geoff Blandford, Dr Molly Hillier, Charlie Jay, and Fred Beckett the chief River Bailiff.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Downlands are also the headquarters of the archaeological project under the direction of Her Grace the Duchess of Taunton (formerly Professor Lady Lacy, The Baroness Lacy) and Professor Den Farnaby; and are becoming, in the villages and their immediate surroundings, something of a dormitory district. Mr Alam Mirza, his wife Emily, and his family, and Mr and Mrs Grahame Gates, who are respectively the parents of Sher Mirza and of Teddy Gates, now reside there.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Grahame Gates is the civil engineer for the Duke’s canal restoration project, which will adjoin the Downlands; Jeremy Trulock, Headmaster of the Beechbourne Free School, is planning with His Grace the creation of an independent school in the Downlands villages to complement the Beechbourne Free School. The Hon. Mrs Maguire is planning a satellite operation of the Woolbury Stud in the Downlands, as well. Change, carefully managed, is coming to the Downlands.

Ecclesiastical history
<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">Anomalously, the advowson of the Downland parishes was for a considerable period of time not in the Malet lords of the Honour in which they were situate, or vested in their Fitzjames successors, the Dukes of Taunton.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">For none of their primary holdings, post-Conquest or after-acquired by descent or otherwise, did the feudal barons Malet, or the Malet barons by writ, have a feudal superior: they held directly of the King. However, a few manors and other unconsidered trifles picked up by the acquisitive Malets over the years, or inherited from mothers and grandmothers, were subinfeudated; and in the course of one such dealing in property, the Malets transferred the rights of presentment in these parishes within their own Honour and manors to some of their Fitzwarren / FitzWarin kin (wherefore Harstbourne Fitzwarren) in exchange for some Marcher manors and a dower settlement.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">In consequence of this arrangement, the advowsons passed from a panicky FitzWarin – contemplating the Plague and his own mortality – to the Abbey at Wolfdown; and thence to the Bishop, who successfully staved off the Malets in the Court of Augmentation even as the Malets otherwise acquired the rest of the abbatial wealth upon the Dissolution.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">The See of Sarum came soon enough to repine of this cunning: the Malets, and yet more the Fitzjames Dukes sprung of them, were, as lay rectors and patrons, well able to support, preserve, and make glorious the churches within their presentation, in the Woolfonts and elsewhere; succeeding Bishops, possessed of much more limited wealth, could not do similarly for the Downland parishes, which were in themselves not particularly rich ones.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">Prior to the Reformation, as evidenced by the physical fabric of the churches, which are ‘wool churches’ of great beauty and sophistication (and specially so for small villages in the countryside), the parishes were wealthy and secure, prospering, with their parishioners, in the wool trade. Subsequent poverty when the wool trade declined had the happy, if unexpected, effect of preserving the churches against following subsequent fads in ecclesiastical architecture; and the Wiltshire and Dorset Clubmen at least succeeded, with an assist from the Malets (with their usual foot in both camps), in preventing Cromwellian destruction to the fabric. One intruding incumbent, at Somerford Tout Saints, was ejected even before the end of the Commonwealth period: for reasons of personal enmity, at the behest of the Parliamentary Malet then in possession of the family estates.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">The parishes had not welcomed the Reformation, let alone the Great Rebellion, but they survived these, and in a notably High Church spirit which was vindicated in after years. Their comparative unimportance and inaccessibility, even the decline in population in what were always lightly populated villages, shielded them from many storms: they were simply not worth the candle for much of this period, and the Malets and the Fitzjames Dukes, who, if they had not the advowsons, owned the ground, were vigilant in fending off challenges.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">By Addison’s and Dr Johnson’s time, and Pope’s, the parishes were already decayed, and good incumbents difficult to find; and the Romantic poets in their turn made a meal of it. Wordsworth managed only a couplet:

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.98in">A gentle prospect ’neath a stormy sky! A scene of peace unpeopled and desert!:

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.5in">which was more than Coleridge ever managed before giving the thing up as a bad job; but Gray had, in 1773, stood amidst the grassed-over lanes of the Shrunken Mediaeval Village of Hawksbourne and been moved; and, although his Ode on the Ruins of Hawksbourne Village is mostly forgotten now, it was thought extravagantly well of as late as the early Twentieth Century, and not least by Quiller-Couch, who insisted upon its figuring in the Anthology.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.98in">A score of children and a village school, A parish church to serve the souls of men: All muffled o’er in cerements of wool, And banished now from any mortal ken.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">A series of vigorous incumbents in the 19th and 20th Centuries, culminating in the Very Revd Simon Blanchard, now Dean of Wolfdown and formerly Dean of the Cathedral, salvaged the position sufficiently to prevent further loss (although the period also saw two dubious Victorian ‘restorations’); but it is only recently that their situation has been retrieved sufficiently to begin a period of restoration and recrescence.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">The ecclesisatical parishes are now once more within the Archdeaconry of Beechbourne and the Deanery of Wolfdown, after a period in which they had been attached to the Deanery of Blackmore Vale, in the Archdeaconry of Sherborne, in the hopes that they should be better served if they looked, ecclesiastically, to Shaftesbury and Gillingham, as they did economically.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">This remedy proved unsuccessful; and during 2014 and 2015, the Downlands parishes were, after years of lobbying by Dean Blanchard, transferred again and were joined in the Combined Benefice of The Woolfonts, Somerfords, & Harstbournes: that is to say, in their long form, the Benefice of The Woolfonts (Woolfont Magna, Woolfont Crucis with Woolfont Parva, & Woolfont Abbas with Wolfdown) with The Somerfords (Somerford Mally with Somerford Canons alias Canonicorum, Somerford Tout Saints with Lamsford, Cliff Ambries with Shifford Ombres and Combe Woddley als Waddlycombe) and Harstbournes (Chalford Mallet with Hawksbourne, Harstbourne Fitzwarren with Harstbourne Sallis and Harstbourne Fratrum als Friars).

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in">In this joining of the parishes to the benefice, the advowsons to the Downland parishes were vested jointly in – ex officio  – the Dukes of Taunton; their heirs, whether Marquesses Templecombe or Masters of Dilton; and the Bishops of Sarum. The combination of the benefices has also of course resulted in their becoming the cure of Canon Paddick and his curates, Frs Campion, Bohun, and Gascelyn Levett, of whom the last two named have special responsibility for the Downlands. Fr Gascelyn Levett, of course, as a retired Fellow of Clare College Cantab and the foremost living expert on ecclesiastical architecture, is charged with the restorations and repairs to the fabric of the Downland parish churches.

<p class="eflushl-western" style="margin-left:0.49in;font-style:normal">The website of the Combined Benefice notes that the parishes thereof, including those of the Downlands,

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in">are Anglo-Catholic, Prayer-Book parishes in the Diocese of Salisbury, and under the continuing Alternative Episcopal Oversight of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, as Provincial Episcopal Visitor.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in">The [...] parishes welcome all who come, responding to a call they may not consciously have heard: for the Church is a house of prayer for all people. Our parishes are Anglo-Catholic, giving equal weight to both halves of that designation: uncompromisingly Anglican; and Anglican specifically in the Catholic tradition of the Church of England. Our worship is rooted in the tradition of Laud and the Caroline divines, and of the Tractarians ; our services are those which were known and loved by Hooker , Andrewes , Ken , and Taylor , the Wesleys , Keble , Pusey , TS Eliot, Betjeman, and CS Lewis. The traditional teaching of the Church is the foundation upon which we build; the challenges of the XXIst Century make up the horizon towards which we lift up the Cross from that foundation. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is used at all services.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in">We have a significant, rich, and historic choral tradition in all [...] parishes. Timothy Campion DMus (Oxon) FRCO DipCHD LTRCO serves as choirmaster and director of Church music.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The churchwardens acting for the united benefice JPCC are HG the duke of Taunton (also a churchwarden at and for SS Mary and Leonard Abbas and patron of the livings) and Mr Paul Viney (also a churchwarden at and for SS Mary and Leonard Abbas), succeeding Mr Simon Kellow (also a churchwarden at and for S Margaret Magna). For terms beginning in 2018, the JPCC churchwardens elect are HG the duke of Taunton and Mr Alec Parham (also a churchwarden at and for S Peter ad Vincula Chalford Mallet).

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The bells of the Downland parishes, with their mottoes, are notable. Each is a ring of six (eight being for such larger churches as the Woolfonts parishes, in emulation of the old abbatial foundation at Abbas): All Saints & S Mary Somerford Tout Saints boasts a ring of six in G, its tenor dedicated to the holiness of the Lord God of Sabaoth and bearing the motto, Benedicite, spiritus et animae iustorum, Domino :: benedicite, sancti et humiles corde, Domino; its the treble responding in antiphon, ''Ave Maria gratia plena Dominus tecum.  The ring of SS Thomas of Canterbury & George Somerford Mally is of six in A-flat, the tenor having as her motto, Te Deum laudamus. S John ante Portam Latinam Cliff Ambries has its ring of six in B-flat, its tenor being mottoed with Venite exultemus Deo.''

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">S Peter ad Vincula Chalford Mallet has a ring of six in A; S Saviour Harstbourne Fitzwarren is possessed of a particularly sweet ring of six in F. The Harstbourne Fitzwarren tenor bears the motto and dedication, Tu Rex Gloriae Christi;  the present bell was cast by John Wallis of Salisbury in 1590, and recast by the Lotts of Warminster in 1663 after the Restoration.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Chalford Mallet’s tenor announced that alms of old had ‘granted me / Vnto the Church all frank and free / That by my voice God praisèd be’; it, with the treble, has been recast by Taylor’s of Loughborough. The newly recast tenor acknowledges the merging of the benefices and the change in the rights of presentation, and now bears the inscription, ‘The Master of Dilton granted me / Unto the Church all frank and free / That by my voice God praisèd be :: MMXVI’. The recast treble recites its prior inscription, with an addition: ‘ Gilbertus Malet baro & dominus hc campanum fieri fecit  MDXXIII  ad laudem Dei Omnipotens & Petri Sancti :: Restituit sumptibus Caroli d: Tanod  MMXVI ’.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The other bells, generally, although retuned, are typical of the area and the Combined Benefice, being, as the Combined Benefice’ website says, variously

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">… cast by Purdue of Bristol in the reign of the first Charles [and in some instances] recast in the days of the third George by the younger Wells of Aldbourne. … [O]ther bells have been recast at various times, but trace back to castings by the mediaeval bell-founders of Salisbury, to Peter de Weston of London in the XIVth Century, to the Elizabethan-Jacobean master-founder John Wallis of Salisbury, and to the Georgian bell-founder William Cockey, of Bristol and Frome.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The ongoing Yew Census in the Downlands has necessarily spent a good deal of time in the parish churchyards, which are notable for veteran and ancient yews.

Pre-Roman
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The pre- and proto-historic archaeology of the Downlands is under intense scrutiny as of 2017, and considerable reassessment. The finding of a hand-axe, tentatively dated to the Lower or early Middle Palaeolithic, in Wodewough Wood, and of a bone lissoir previously recovered upon the Downlands where it had worked its way to the surface, has sparked a considerable reassessment, including of adjacent areas of open downland which are now conjectured possibly  to represent a butchery, or kill, site.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal"> It is generally accepted that Freeford, Rethebury Rings, Wadpool, Wades Barrow, and Grimmelsmere are Celtic, and possibly pre-Celtic, religious or sacral sites, later taken over by Roman and any sub-Roman pagans (pursuant to interpretatio ) and the pre-conversion Anglo-Saxons.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">With the exception of the Wolf Down White Horse, long gone to grass, there are few obvious pre-Roman remains other than those noted above, and no hill-forts. The discovery of the Yarncombe Mitton Villa Complex in the Vale (and a Saxon burial there amidst signs of battle), as overlying an Iron Age pre-Roman settlement rivalling that at Duropolis, coupled with the long-known Shifford Ombres Villa, has inspired renewed investigations into the possibilities of underlying British, pre-Roman settlement upon the Downlands; this is perforce being done by such indirect and nonintrusive geophysical archaeological methods as the use of Ground-Penetrating Radar, as the Downlands are an SSSI on a basis which precludes disturbance of the soil.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal"> Ancient trackways, including the Port Way and its predecessors, run through the Downlands, the Portway being named the Portolan Way near to the Harstbournes. The archaeological team is engaged in attempting to determine, Did Trotton Lane – or, to the rather prissy OS mappers of old, over-correcting local speech, ‘Triton’ Lane –, running off Swinetrough Lane and Portolan Way in the shrunken mediæval village of Hawksbourne in the direction of Harstbourne Fratrum, in fact mark the way which had once led to a ‘Troy town’ or mizmaze. Should it be found, establishing a date for the turf maze shall be of considerable interest, whether it be pre-Roman, or mediaeval.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">See also  the discussion of the Old Bridge at Shifford Ombres, below.

Roman and Romano-British
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">There was at least one Roman villa rustica,  at Shifford Ombres, which was excavated by Pitt Rivers; its celebrated Orpheus ‘pavement’ (floor mosaic) is displayed at Wolfdown House. It is probable that the villa remained in Romano-British occupation until the Adventus Saxonum,  as at Yarncombe Mitton. The Downlands were certainly a sheepwalk and source of wool for Roman Britain.

Anglo-Saxon
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Anglo-Saxons having built largely in wood save for ecclesiastical buildings, few if any traces of their secular buildings survive; their churches were rebuilt by the Normans and these in turn as ‘wool churches’. It is however almost certain that the churches, and attendant and appurtenant buildings, are sited upon the original Anglo-Saxon sites, where these were not themselves appropriated Celtic foundations. The plan of the ‘parsonage house’ in Somerford suggests very strongly that it has been rebuilt many times upon a Saxon site. It is described in a Church Terrier of 1638 as follows:

<p align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;page-break-before:auto">A True Survey or Terroir of all the landes & possessions & tythes & emolumentes belongen to the Rectory of Sommerforde in the County of Wiltshieer and in the deanrie of Beechburne made and tacken by the veiw and Esteimat of the Churchwardes and other inhabitans their whose names are subscribed as followeth :

<p align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;page-break-before:auto">Imprimis the Homstall or scite of the parsonage house scituate and lyeing betweene the kinges highway on both sides and butting theron on the West and the closes of Henry Trvelokke & of Pavl Blancharde on the east and conteinth by estimacion 2 Acres.

<p align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;page-break-before:auto">Item with in the said bounde is conteinad on garden hedged in containg 4 poles and on orchyaird plott by estimacion an acre.

<p align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;page-break-before:auto">Item in the parsonage house consisting of v baies built wth stoune wherof 2 baies are coverd wth slaihgt chamber over and borded the rest bee thatch and are dispoz’d into 8 roomes viz. the hall pls the butterie the hay house and 3 chambres.

<p align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;page-break-before:auto">Item one barne consisting of 4 baies buildt wth stoune rubbele and thached wth on little stabule and a carthouse of Three little baies.

<p align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;page-break-before:auto">Itē in gleblande xij ackers....

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal"> … Item all proffits arising fro Chauncel or Church-Yarde ground & all tythes soever, of Lambe & Woll, Corne & Heye, &c., to y e Rectour, & all oblaciouns & Mortuaryes.

Norman and Mediaeval
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">There are traces of Norman work in the secular buildings and walling in Somerford Tout Saints. The better part of such Norman work survives in churches: the tympanum at S Peter ad Vincula Chalford Mallet has clearly been recarved, but the doorway beneath retains the dog-tooth or shark-tooth pattern of Norman work; and the undercrofts of all the Downland churches, and the chamfered plinth at S Saviour Harstbourne Fitzwarren, are purely Norman, establishing that the wool churches of today were erected upon at least Norman, if not also Anglo-Saxon, foundations. The fonts at SS Thomas of Canterbury & George Somerford Mally and S John ante Portam Latinam Cliff Ambries are Norman also. The chapel of ease at Somerford Canons is almost entirely Norman in nave and transept; there are traces of a later mural Doom there.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Secular mediaeval remains of note include armorial milestones, and the Old Bridge – the actual bridge, not the public house of that name, at Shifford Ombres. The latter is a late iteration: it is located at what has always been a crossing-place. The River has been forded here since at least Neolithic times. There are signs of a few ancient pilings thought to represent earlier bridgings, or perhaps staking a stone ford; there was, much later, a wooden bridge, or so it is recorded (no traces, naturally, remain), in the 8th Century. The River was spanned by a stone bridge at the time of Domesday Book; a newer one was erected early in the 12th Century. This, in turn, was rebuilt in the 14th Century, adorned with a small chapel and a stone cross – qui meat hac oret, signumque salutis adoret –, and restored and modified in the 15th; and neither Reformation nor Commonwealth had reached thus deeply into the countryside to alter this. Only water, wind, and weather have done that: these, and the want of rebuilding as the nascent River shifted in its course from century to century.

Preceptory
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">What is commonly miscalled as a preceptory of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of S John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitallers, was more likely a hostel operated by them, attached to the commandery or preceptory near to Wolminster. It seems to have been located on the very edges of the Downlands, near to the bowl barrow known simply as The Bowl; archaeological investigations are ongoing.

Hawksbourne SMV
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Shrunken – but not, quite, deserted – Mediaeval Village of Hawksbourne, ‘Hoggets’ Bourne’, is reduced to three houses now; but it seems once to have been an important as well as a flourishing place, where the Portway crossed. Attempts are being made to discover, if possible, the site of an early preaching cross which an ambiguous entry in the Chronicle  may suggest was there at a very early date.

Religious Sites
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Religious sites other than the antiquities above consist only of Church of England parish churches. A Methodist chapel in Somerford Mally, projected in the 1840s, was never, in the end, built; no other Dissenting chapel is located in the Downlands; the Society of Friends never established a presence there; and the Downlands are within the extensive bounds of the Roman Catholic parish of Our Lady & S Edith of Wilton (Beechbourne), to which the Roman Catholic population repairs for worship.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">In their present forms, All Saints & S Mary Somerford Tout Saints is in the main a late 14th Century construction with 15th Century additions and modifications. S Thomas of Canterbury & S George Somerford Mally was completed in 1413 but suffered Victorian restoration (so-called); S John ante Portam Latinam Cliff Ambries, likewise, was a 15th Century wool church with late 15th and 17th Century additions, ‘restored’ in 1852; whilst Holy Cross Shifford Ombres was a 13th Century foundation redone as a 15th Century wool church with 16th Century extensions. S Peter ad Vincula Chalford Mallet is late 14th Century with 15th and 16th Century additions; S Saviour Harstbourne Fitzwarren was in origin a late 14th – early 15th Century church, rebuilt in the middle part of the 15th Century, with 16th Century additions.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">They are all, essentially, in their present form (beneath the restorations where applicable), wool churches.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The ancient chapel of ease at Somerford Canons has been so long disused that even its dedication is now a matter of dispute. (The Duke inclines towards the party of scholars who placed it under the patronage rather of S Martin than S Nicholas of Myra, based upon his own knowledge of the preferences of the canons who had given their name, and that chapel, to Somerford Canonicorum.) It is now being restored, as a parish church, to be dedicated to SS Martin and Nicholas.

Notable buildings
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">In addition to the churches and antiquities above, the James Gibb ‘Coursing Lodge’ of 1731, outside ‘STS’, described by Pevsner as ‘neat, trim, [and] rather smug’, and ‘more an adolescent country house, devoted in its origins to the lesser chase’, is scheduled Grade I. It was designed by Gibbs in his best crypto-Romanist and crypto-Jacobite style, all Italian Mannerism, and has not since been altered. It is now given over, as headquarters, to by Mr Ford, the Duke’s agent; to Mr Alec Parham as Steward; and to the archæological survey, all as offices.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Bank Cottage, a vernacular building in Shifford Ombres, and the nearby Old Bridge public house, are both under consideration for listing. Bank Cottage is the residence of the River Bailiff Fred Beckett, and his dog and chief assistant Toby.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Much of the architecture in the Downlands, domestic and mercantile or commercial, is rustic Georgian; one of the most attractive examples is ‘The Woolery’ in Cliff Ambries, a small Georgian house with a large barn, now attached by an arcade, which latter was converted into a small spinning mill in the early 19th Century. It continues to serve that function today for its owners and the inhabitants of the house adjoining, ‘the Spinsters of Ambries’, who are artisanal weavers: Miss Antonia Herridge, cousin to the Cathedral Dean, and Miss Clare Martin, her partner.

Amenities
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">As a rural area of low population density, the Downlands do not run to cinemas and bright lights. Since the restoration of the W&CR, the small village shop and off-licence in the Lamsford area of Tout Saints has expanded its stock, and is to expand its space; and other shops, including a sweet shop, are expected to follow in the train of development, particularly when the new school arrives.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Old Bridge public house in Shifford Ombres (‘A Free House :: Real Ales & Cider :: Pub Grub :: Quiz Nights Tuesday’), is a cosy, quiet country pub, of which Mr John Burridge, second cousin to Mr Simon Kellow of the Boar in Magna, is the landlord.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">In 2016, the survey team determined which old building in Harstbourne Sallis had been the old inn, ‘at ye sign of ye Whyte Horse’: which had closed and been forgotten generations before the first Ordnance Survey map. His Grace intends that it be restored and reopened, probably under the designation of ‘The Chalk Horse’.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">As of 2016 – 2017, the Downlands are being increasingly drawn in to the range of District-wide organisations and societies which provide the majority of rural amenities.

Governance & politics
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Downlands’ two civil parishes, owing to the small population, do not have parish councils: they are governed by parish meetings. Substantially all governmental functions are in any case carried out by the Unitary Authority; the local councillor for the ward of Chickmarsh & The Woolfonts, in which the Downlands are situate, is Teddy Gates (LD). The area is in fact overwhelmingly Conservative in its sympathies; but Cllr Gates is a local favourite, and a friend of Their Graces’, such that his rosette is overlooked by his constituency.

Demographics
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">With the exception of the Mirzas at Pindrake, outside Cliff Ambries, when they are in residence, and (if one includes the Agincourt Estate within the Downlands) the retired Gurkha families, the Downlands are by ethnicity entirely White British: at any rate, for census purposes and as a matter of self-identification. (The incidence of LHON, Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, in the Downlands has palaegeneticists, and historians of the Legio II Augusta, on the qui vive .)

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">As with the Woolfonts villages, the Downlands are, by District standards, average in religious affiliation and attendance; however, that District average is very much higher than the national or even County average. Reported religious non-affiliation, non-preference, or non-adherence was reported in the 2011 Census as being at 11.0 per cent.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">There are no reported Jews in the Downlands; the only reported Muslims resident are the Mirzas; of the remainder of those expressing a religious preference, there are some twelve Dissenters; a score of Roman Catholics, mostly from old recusant families; and eight persons self-reporting as non-denominational Christians. The remainder are Church of England, and most of them actively so.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">If those resident upon the Agincourt Estate were counted as residents of the Downlands, there should then be also some sixty Nepali and British Nepali residents, all of them followers of Nepali Hinduism (syncretic in the main with Nepali Buddhism).

Transport
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Transport in and across the Downlands proper is extremely limited, the thoroughfares mostly skirting the downs (particularly those within the SSSI designation).

Road
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">There is a C road, the Harst Bourne Road, which connects the cluster of villages to the B road, the Woolfont-Pencotmore road, which runs between the Downlands and Tenter Down. The farmhouses, both for coombe-valley arable and for pastoral farms, are all sited near the villages, and accessed from the Harst Bourne Road or such smaller lanes tributary to it as Portolan Way, Swinetrough Lane, and Bridge Lane.

Bus
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The Downland villages are served by the community-owned Woollybus.

Railways
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The W&CR, now relaid and reopened, runs along the edge of the downs as such, in its section running between the Woolfonts and its junction and terminus at Gillingham Peacemarsh. The Downland villages are served by All Somerfords Station, that dignified, curiously ecclesiastical stone station which looks as if Yatton Station and Bradford-on-Avon Station had had a son who’d gone into the Church. There is a signal box at Cliff Ambries.

Canal
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The ducal project of canal reconstruction is carefully planned, both for preservation reasons and for topographic considerations, to skirt the Downlands altogether.

Commerce
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The village shop is also a sub-post-office. The administrative work of the Taunton Estates carried on in part from the Coursing Lodge is a source of income for the community, which remains almost wholly agricultural, although some heritage tourism and tourism attracted by the ongoing archaeological discoveries is present and increasing.

Media and communication
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">The Duke of Taunton secured high-speed rural broadband for the area some years ago. The telephone exchange is located just outside Somerford Canons; the sub-post-office is situate in the Lamsford / Tout Saints village shop.

Media
<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">BBC Wiltshire is the BBC Local Radio public service station for the whole county. Regional television services are provided by BBC South and ITV Meridian. A licence for local television is being sought, which shall include the Downlands as well as the Woolfonts, and an Independent Local Radio station, likewise serving the whole of the District, is under consideration.

<p class="western" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The local newspaper serving the District is the ''Beechbourne Herald & Courier. ''

Education
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Currently, primary education is provided by the C of E Voluntary Aided school in Magna, to which Downlands pupils are transported by rail at the Duke’s charges, by Woollybus, or, if necessary, by vehicles owned and operated by Wolfdown. Pupils currently go on from there to Beechbourne Free School, as a rule, or to State secondary education in Stoke Yarncombe, in the Vale; Headmaster Trulock, Sir Thomas Douty, and Their Graces intend that this cease with the creation of an independent school, from Reception to Sixth Form, in the Downlands.

Notable people

 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Fred Beckett (and Toby), water bailiff and environmental officer
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Fr Ambrose Blanchard SJ, Roman Catholic martyr under Elizabeth I (younger brother of the Revd James Blanchard)
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Lt-Gen Sir Andrew Blanchard KB, k. 1951, Malaya
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Capt Charles Blanchard, Royalist officer, k. Worcester 3 September 1651
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Revd James Blanchard, Protestant martyr under Mary I (elder brother of Fr Ambrose Blanchard SJ)
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Sir John Blanchard, killed at Bosworth
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Sir Martin Blanchard, fought at Agincourt
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Very Revd Simon Blanchard, Dean
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Revd Gilbert Bohun SSC, curate
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Sergeant-Major Charles Burtt VC
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Sergeant Tom Burtt, 2nd Bn, 40th (2nd Somersetshire) Regt of Foot, Waterloo soldier and memoirist
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Thomas Burtt MLA (Western Australia)
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Abraham Calley, Victorian industrialist
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Job Calley, Victorian industrialist, brother of the preceding)
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Lawrence Cundick, Victorian MP (Tidnock & Dane Valley (Liberal Unionist))
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Lawrence Cundick, son of preceding, removed to London, solicitor, hanged 1907 for the murder by poison of his pregnant mistress
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">John Douty (Dutie, Dutty, Dowty, &c), fl.  1350, reeve
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal"> John Douty, b.  Lamsdown, apprenticed London, serjeant, New Model Army, k.  Langport, 10 July 1645
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Assistant Section Officer Margaret Douty WAAF
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Piers Douty (1946 – 1987), removed to London aged 7 years, journalist, essayist, print-maker, gay rights activist
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal"> Richard Douty (Dutie, Dutty, Dowty, &c), fl.  1290, prior, Wolfdown Abbey
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Rodger Douty, fl. 1413 – 1420, Lancastrian judge
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal"> Bert Ford and Gerry Bracher, raisers of Rare Bree d sheep, Waddlycombe
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">F/O George Ford RAF, Battle of Britain, k.  25 August 1940
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Revd Prof. Harry Gascelyn Levett, curate, Fellow of Clare College Cantab
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Antonia Herridge and Clare Martin, artisanal weavers
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Dr Molly Hillier, riparian ecologist
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">George Jay, Edwardian cricketer (Somerset CCC; Hants CCC)
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">William Jay, photojournalist, k.  1945
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in"> Dr Charles Macey, English Jacobite, k.  Preston, 11 August 1715
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Elizabeth Macey, suffragist
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Sir Gilbert Macey, fl.  1215
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-style:normal">Sir Henry Macey MP (Conservative, Quantock & Goathurst, 1911(by-election) – 1929), 1868 – 1947
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">M Alam Mirza OBE, charity executive
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Alec Parham, Chief Steward and Master Forester of the Lordship of the Downs and of the Honour and Feudal Barony of Wolfbourne
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">George Parham Esq., Civil War Royalist agent, 1608 - 1671
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Sir Stephen Parham, fl. 1157
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Gabriel Spackman, Master Thatcher
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Sir Edward Trulock, fl.  1300
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Sir Giles Trulock (crusader), d. of wounds 1191, Arsuf
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Henry Trulock, Acting-Surgeon-Lieutenant RN, HMS Admetus, k.  at the Nile, 2 August 1798
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in"> Eleanor Trulock, Lady Malet, fl.  1480
 * <p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">Sir Robert Trulock, Under-Sheriff in 1231

Sport
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">There is no organised sport in the Downlands; its cricketers are snapped up by the Woolfonts Combined CC.

In popular culture
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in">The Downlands have attracted literary recognition in the works of Pope, Gray, and Wordsworth. Their architecture was referenced by Alec Clifton-Taylor in passages in Buildings of Delight and English Stone Building. WG Hoskins wrote a monograph on their manorial economics. John Betjeman made an early television program about them, and the Woolfonts, now lost, the BBC having foolishly wiped the recordings in 1968; they also appear in an early colour British Pathé newsreel, which the BFI are working to restore.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">In addition to those earlier artists in the Wolfdown House collections who painted the Downlands, they have notably been painted by Sir Alfred Munnings, by Harold Knight, by Paul Nash, by Sir Hugh Casson, and, of course, by Sir Bennett Salmon.