Nether Wallop in Hampshire

All references were added by CP.

As he dips into the hidden valley, bridges the chalk stream and climbs back onto the rich downs to Salisbury, the motorist from Andover passes between the villages of Wallop and may be forgiven for thinking that the garage, the pub, and the crossroads are the only members of this oddly named community. Were the same motorist to enter by the road from Tidworth to Romsey (B3084) he would see two villages divided by the crossroads, each different in character, winding along a chalk stream for some three miles, a picturesque collection of thatched dwellings at peace with a pleasant countryside. He could scarcely realise that this small village has rubbed shoulders with the centres of civilisation for some 4000 years.

It was Neolithic man who first liked the chalklands and found Salisbury Plain which rises gently westward from the chalk downs of Wallop. Later it was to provide great sheep pastures which gave mediaeval England her wealth, and importance to Wallop and the nearby wool towns of Winchester, Andover and Salisbury. The New Forest, Buckholt Forest in Wallop, and the Hampshire Basin provided woods close at hand for the building of timber-framed houses filled in with walls of wattle and daub, puddled chalk, or the flints which abound in the chalk. Today these rural villages, The Wallops, support light industry as well as farming. But the story we are to tell is that of the area which for centuries has made up the ancient parish of Nether Wallop.

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