Nether Wallop in Hampshire

It certainly has, some 4000 years of it, so let me introduce you to this lovely village and tell you a little of its story as we go on a walk through its tranquility. See maps for location and setting.

Let us start at Middle Wallop where the Over to Nether Wallop road crosses the A343 Andover to Salisbury. The parish boundaries intertwine here and a large area of the Parish of Nether Wallop is north of the A343 and continues west to the Wiltshire County Boundary, but the Crossroads is the obvious and postal division between the two parishes.

The two villages had always been at loggerheads, and old people can remember when no one dared cross into the other Wallop for fear of a beating-up! The Wallop Brook, now channelled under the road, flowed across the road and seasonally became 'the lake', crossed by planks laid on stepping stones.

View of Wallop Brook by NZ artist Stan Woods

In coaching days when the London to Exeter Coach came through Middle Wallop there was a turnpike on the Salisbury Road, built 1766, and the 'Old George', now an antique shop, was the last stop before Salisbury where horses were changed and travellers fed and tested, while the villagers sat under an old tree by the inn to hear the latest gossip. On the opposite corner the 'Lower George' jutted into the road with its horse boxes and a saddler's nearby. Sixty horses could be stabled at Middle Wallop, where all the farmlands, cottages, brewery, barns and other properties were once part of Fifehead Manor, from which the hamlet of Middle Wallop grew. Today all are independently owned.

The beer was brewed at Brewery Farm from locally grown barley stored in its malthouse (Turnpike Cottage), and the labourers lived in Brewery House Farm Cottages opposite.

In Saxon times Fifehead was crown land - a Saxon warrior's body with spear and knife was found near Brewery Farm in 1939 - and local tradition says it was the home of Lady Godiva, wife of Leofric, who rode naked through the streets of Coventry. In mediaeval times it was the largest of Nether Wallop's manors, 'Walhop Fifhide', meaning five hides (a hide was about 120 acres) which was the amount of land leased to a knight by the King in return for which the knight provided men to fight for the King. The present Manor house, probably sixteenth-century built on the site of an older building, has been much altered and added to by succeeding generations. It has an Elizabethan fireplace, a yew some 750 years old in the garden, and is now a restaurant.

Last century when the London and South Western Railway came to Grateley and the coaching days were gone, the 'Old George' became a beerhouse, where in the 1860s John Sherwood sold beer for one shilling a gallon. The 'Lower George' became the George Inn with a hall much in demand for parties of all kinds.

Then came the motor-car, and as early as 1901 a Parish Council Meeting discussed 'the desirability of calling attention to the danger caused by furious driving of motors and riding bicycles over the Crossroads at Middle Wallop, and beg that steps be taken as far as possible to minimise the danger'! In 1927 the present George Inn, resited well back from the road, replaced the 'Lower George'.

Our walk to the village of Nether Wallop is through the Valley of the Wallop Brook along the old Saxon route which follows the stream into the village. Brook and road continue to keep company on to neighbouring Broughton and thence to Bossington where the Wallop Brook joins the River Test. For a century one family had owned and tended fine watercress beds (said to be Wallop's noisiest industry!) which lay between the road and the stream for the first quarter mile of our walk; sadly they were sold and filled with rubble in 1973, but the watercress still grows wild along the stream.

On our left behind the typical Hampshire flint-and-brick wall is Ringwold House, once a large farm whose lands today form part of Middle Wallop Airfield, 'the Camp'. On a bedroom floor a bloodstain long bore witness to the murder of a Madame Leoni whose ghost is said to ride her phantom horse to Haydown Splash. On our right a big sweep of former watercress beds 'The Wides', narrows where the brook flows between a steep bank in Mile Mead (i.e., mill meadow) and a roadside plot. Here was the mill wheel of Fifehead Manor's Mill, probably one of the three mentioned in Domesday Book.

The channelled brook gushing past the next watercress bed was Fifehead's centuries-old sheep-wash. Within living memory several thousand sheep a day were washed there before shearing time, or before the big sheep fairs at Weyhill, Stockbridge, Wilton and elsewhere, at so much per hundred. As many as 3000 sheep stopped the night in nearby yards at the Crossroads, their drovers staying at the 'Old George' and the large flocks of sheep driven along the lanes raised clouds of chalky dust everywhere.

There were Baptists in Nether Wallop as early as 1670 and the Baptist Chapel we have reached was built in 1841 replacing a smaller meeting place in Bent Street. It always had a flourishing Sunday School, and is in Over Wallop Parish but its graveyard is in Nether Wallop. King House, traditionally the seventeenth-century Plague House, or isolation hospital, was owned by the Parish until World War II. It was let as two thatched tenements at one shilling a week in the 1890s. Next door the large tiled barn of old Haydown Farm gained local fame when an African hoopoe built its nest there in 1959. The turning opposite leads to Wallop County Primary School and a small Council Estate.

We keep to the winding road by the stream with its ducks, moorhens, occasionally a heron or swans, and other wild life, to Marsh House whose owner in 1970 created the trout-stocked lake from an ancient marsh fed by springs, in past times grazing land for commoners. There is a local legend that during the Civil War the Vicar of St Andrew's hid the church plate from Cromwell's men in Knockwood, the old farmhouse overlooking the marsh. Many have searched house, field and copse for it in vain.

From Batt's Bridge by the old ford notice the picturesque group of eighteenth-century buildings along Bent Street as we walk by the stream past fields, now scrub, that once were neat water-meadows, cleverly controlled to give two crops of hay a year, while on our left is tidy Farley's Farm of five acres next to Hatchetts Farm. In 1634 Nicolas Hatchett married Maria Gore but only the farmhouse name remains of the family that farmed it for nearly 300 years. Woods have grown in the old kitchen garden and meadows opposite and we walk on past a group of modern houses ending with the village constable's.

Behind the roadside woods is Winton Nursing Home, previously Wallop House, a neo-Gothic house built in 1838 by the Rev. Blunt, then parson impropriate, to replace an Elizabethan Parsonage. The lease of the Parsonage to lay impropriators was a profitable one and saved the Vicars Choral of York the trouble and expense of collecting their tithes from Nether Wallop. The Blunt family's importance and their connections with York and Church is conspicuous; their crest is over the door; the Rose of York honours the Vicars Choral of York Minster who held the avowdson of St Andrew's Church for centuries; and among other features are an oriel window with motto, and a delightful stained glass plaque of a Bishop. Old men repeat hearsay that the rich, tough, influential Rev. Blunt even counted the peaches which grew in his garden, and when a village boy stole one Blunt was responsible for the boy's deportation to Botany Bay.

The boundary hedges of its parkland appear to be some 900 years old, so there may be truth in the tradition that a religious house stood in its grounds in mediaeval times. Was the lovely spring carpet of snowdrops on the banks of the stream planted for medicinal purposes by its nuns ?

In the field opposite, called Firleaze, and under its spreading chestnut tree, is Wallop's last smithy. The old chalk pits nearby were probably used for making lime to fertilise the land in times past. The Georgian farmhouse, Gerrards, and its neighbour Heathmanstreet Manor Farm, once an ancient manor of Nether Wallop are now private houses divorced from farmlands and out-buildings, facing that part of Heathmanstreet once known as 'Frog Lane' because of the frogs that abounded by that part of the stream, where today not one is found. But follow the stream along the road past new bungalows and we reach the hub of the village and The Square.

As recently as 1960 this was a busy village centre with five shops; a general and newsagent's kept by cheery Mrs. Boulton; two grocers, one with a Post Office where Councillor Oliver Hinwood, with his saucy twinkle, served and chatted with his customers, and at one time baked bread for the day's round, and smoked sides of bacon in the shed behind his shop. Then the Trout off-licence, an ancient ale-house, 'the pot-shop', which Mrs. Fennell's family had kept for half a century, now beautifully renovated. In a shed in its front garden Thomas Marshall made his cricket bats from Wallop willows which the famous W. G. Grace used, who had played for 'Day's Eleven', Danebury's cricket team. The beer was brewed from local barley stored in the malthouse next to the Maltings, opposite, where a monk is said to haunt the garden. A little further on we see the old Village Endowed School, built in 1838 where three teachers taught up to 120 children. The Infant's Room had a gallery where children without desks stood back to back in pairs, writing on their slates.

But back to the Butcher's shop opposite the Trout where in less hygienic times animals were slaughtered in the slaughterhouse behind it, and bacon was cured over oak chips in the curing shed. Jovial Ted Vigor was a skilled butcher who really 'knew a good bit of meat'.

Mrs. Gould who lived to be nearly a hundred sold bicycle tyres at the old smithy across the bridge, called King Play Bridge in the eighteenth century. The chestnut tree still stands but the smithy once sheltered by it has gone, and the Elizabethan cottage which flooded when the brook was high is now the immaculate 'Old Forge'. The other sixteenth-century cottages remember when the Square was the village green where the stocks stood for the punishment of wrongdoers. Today it provides a car park for the Village Hall which was built in 1912 next to the Vicarage to annoy the vicar! P. Darnell celebrated the opening of his 'Town Hall, Nether Wallop' with a dinner party there.

Turning left along Church Lane we see Bolton Row Cottages, the only reminder of Nether Wallop's former overlords, the Lords Bolton. They replaced old thatched cottages which were struck by a thunderbolt in 1928 and burnt out. Up the hill we go to St Andrew's Church which overlooks the graveyard (enlarged in 1863 by Lord Bolton's generosity); we also see Place Farm, once part of the ancient manor of Nether Wallop Buckland; and the Mill, which is the end of the village.

This ancient mill was in use until 1949, but 80 years ago it not only ground corn but baked bread for sale - one of its bakers was ten-year-old Len Woodford who had to stand on a stool to enable him to knead the dough! Today (1973) it houses a fishing tackle business, and breeds fine trout.

A church stood on this hill in Saxon times. The oldest part of the building is the crossing, now the choir stalls, which was the chancel of a Saxon church with a nave ending at the pillar of the second bay on which is the fifteenth-century mural of Christ with the mill-rind (the iron centre-piece of a mill wheel). Mill-rinds also appear on crests and tombstones and indicate the importance of the village's mills. The twelfth-century mural of the four angels over the central arch is by an unknown artist of the Winchester School, and was partially restored in 1971. Another fifteenth-century mural depicts St George and the Dragon. A unique brass of Maria Gore, Prioress of Amesbury, d. 1436 is in the floor of the nave.

The church had a steeple until winter 1704 when it is recorded 'the Tower of Wallop Church fell down, the walls being quite rotten and decayed. And in the summer following the Parish rebuilt it omitting the steeple which was to the former deeming it quite needless, and the walls not carried so high by 9 or 10 feet'. It also had an unusual singing gallery until 1845 when it was given a 'thorough restoration' by Victorian Rev. Walter Blunt. Succeeding generations have made additions and alterations to this embodiment of a thousand years of Wallop's history.

In its churchyard the ghost of Dr. Francis Douce wearing yellow pantaloons and a cutaway blue coat, swinging a cane, has been seen walking round his unusual pyramid memorial. From the churchyard we stop to admire the beautiful views of the surrounding countryside before turning down Church Hill past the old vicarage garden, the Methodist Chapel nearby, to enter the High Street with its sixteenth century and early seventeenth-century timber-framed thatched cottages, originally farmsteads, in summer covered with roses and clematis. An everlasting pea on one has been growing there for over a century. 'Mallows' was once a Post Office and Bakery, and in the Builder's yard the Mouland Brothers work as carpenters, builders, and undertakers as did their father and grandfather before them.

The Five Bells Inn facing us is an old hostelry, and still does a flourishing trade. The first inn of that name was somewhere above the Splash in Five Bells Lane, and old bottles and clay pipes were found when the foundations for a house were dug in 1973. Local legend says that its innkeeper, crippled with arthritis, became bedridden, so his friends fixed a pulley to his half-tester bed by which to pull himself up. But he put his head through the rope and hanged himself. Suicides were not allowed burial in hallowed ground and a stake had to be driven through the heart to stay the spirit; so his friends buried him on the parish boundary at the spot now known as 'Leonard's Grave', but their courage failed them and they drove the stake between his legs!

The Lywood family has lived and farmed in Wallop for centuries and there is still a Lywood living at Broadgate Farm next to the Five Bells. The Georgian front of the farmhouse was added to an older building in the eighteenth century. More reconditioned farmhouses are up the hill, and farmers Sarah and Mary Aylward are remembered in the name of the Council Estate behind Rag's Corner, one of the oldest houses in the village. Much altered in the 1920s it was associated with smuggling in days when spirits were carried by packhorse many miles inland. It is described in 1757 as 'one thatched tenement in good repair situated by the Pound and a small close of pasture opposite' where once was a rag-market and now a modern house. An under-ground passage runs from Rags Corner, but to where? Berry Court?

In the Pound (now West End Cottage) at the top of Ducks Lane, strayed animals were enclosed and released on payment of a fine. We will go down the lane to a stream and past a marshy field, once Berry Court Meadow with its silted-up pond, up to York Lodge which replaced Manor Farm destroyed by fire in 1930s. Hoskins Lane, a corruption of Osgood's Lane, keeps alive the name of two brothers who emigrated to America from Nether Wallop in 1636 and doubtless helped to found Andover, Massachusetts, U.S.A., where there are still Osgoods living.

Turn right down Five Bells Lane by the wall of Wallop House, and cross the Splash by Dancing Green Cottage where within living memory villagers danced round the maypole, bear left along the Causeway past the field in which a huge bonfire was lit to celebrate our victory in World War II and retrace our steps along Farley Street to the Crossroads where we began.

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