It is in the French château style on a small scale, and has lovely old-fashioned gardens, quite unspoiled, with some rare trees growing in them. At the end of the last garden flows the Avon, and picturesque Durnford Church stands close by. In 1869 Mr. Pinckney bought the house and some of the estate from the Earl of Malmesbury.
OGBURY CAMP.
On the eastern side of the Avon is a very ancient earthen work called Ogbury Camp. Sir Richard Colt Hoare thus describes it:—“On this hill we recognize the very early and simple handiwork of the Britons, unaltered by their successors and conquerors, the Romans and Saxons. Here we see a large tract of sixty-two acres enclosed within a single rampart, and without any fosse to strengthen it against the attacks of an enemy, and we perceive within the area the evident marks of enclosures, and only one entrance to the east. On the northern side the ramparts followed the windings of the hill, and are interrupted by the plantations of Lord Malmesbury’s demesne. The area contains sixty-two acres and a quarter. The circuit of the outer ditch is one mile, one furlong and fifty-five yards, and the depth of the vallum is thirty-three feet. On the south-east and west sides the ramparts are very much mutilated. I cannot consider Ogbury as a camp or work of defence against an invading enemy, but rather as an asylum or place of refuge, whither the Britons, in times of danger, retired with their families and herds of cattle. On digging within this area we could not find any marks of ancient residence, but on some high ground adjoining the extraordinary verdure of the turf induced us to dig into the soil, where we immediately found numerous bones of animals with fragments of the rudest British pottery.”
HEALE HOUSE, MIDDLE WOODFORD.
The Residence of the Honourable Louis Greville; bought by him from Sir E. Loder, 1894.
This house, beautifully built of small red bricks, has stone-coped windows in the Dutch style of architecture introduced into this country by William III., and is quite unlike the usual stone and flint “chequered” houses of the neighbourhood. You enter the grounds through old wrought-iron gates and down an avenue of elm-trees. The river Avon flows through the garden. This property formerly belonged to the Errington and Hyde families. Inside the house little remains of the old decorations but some carved woodwork. A cupboard in a bedroom is shown as the hiding-place of Charles II. after the battle of Worcester. He is said to have visited Stonehenge from Heale, and there met friends who were to conduct him to the coast of Sussex prior to his escape from England. He is supposed to have proved to his own satisfaction the fallacy of the notion of the impossibility of counting the stones composing Stonehenge.
“In 1721 Robert Hyde bequeathed Heale to his sister, Mrs. Levinz, widow of the Bishop of Sodor and Man, and she, by will, devised the estates to her son-in-law, Michael Frampton of Oxford, and he, in his turn, left them to his nephews, Thomas Bull, rector of Porton, and Edward and Simon Polhill and their heirs in succession, in default thereof to William Bowles; in seventeen years after the death of the testator, Canon Bowles was in full possession of the property.” Several members of the Bowles family lie buried in Salisbury Cathedral. Heale Hill is remarkable for a circle on the summit and traces of a British village on the south slope.
