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.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
