Land of dreams

Three large farming estates in some of the prettiest corners of England come to market

- Penny Churchill

NAMED 'The Best Place to Live in the Southwest 2022' in a recent survey by The Times, Wiltshire's Chalke Valley is described as 'picturesque countryside at its spring-scented best, with Saxon churches, thatched cottages, rolling downs and a series of villages radiating from Salisbury, and strung out through the 13-mile chalk escarpment from Salisbury west towards Shaftesbury'.

Historically, villages such as Bowerchalke, Broad Chalke and Ebbesbourne Wake were part of the Chalke estate granted to Wilton Abbey in 955. At the Dissolution, the Chalke Manor estate, together with the bulk of the vast Abbey estates, was granted to Sir William Herbert, later Earl of Pembroke, and thereafter passed with the Pembroke title to Reginald, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, who succeeded to the family estates in 1913.

Having served with distinction in the First World War, Lord Pembroke retired as a Lt Col in the Royal Horse Guards and took over the running of his Wilton estates. From 1919 onwards, he sold a 2,000-acre chunk of land as half a dozen individual farms on the northern edge of what is now the Cranborne Chase AONB. Farming had been the main source of employment in the prosperous Chalke Valley since Saxon times and there were plenty of willing takers for the land.

In about 1920, West Chase farm, a mixed half-livestock, a half-arable farm in the parish of Bowerchalke on the Wiltshire/Dorset border to the south of Broad Chalke and Ebbesbourne, was acquired by Charles Coward. It later passed to his son, another Charles, and grandsons John and Davidtraditional farmers who were still grazing sheep on the downs and rearing beef cattle on their 550-acre holding in the 1980s.