On the high road Swallowcliffe; Sutton Mandeville, with a partly Norman church; Fovant, nearly opposite Chislebury Camp and with another (restored) Norman church; and Compton Chamberlaine are passed, all being a short distance off the road to the left, before it drops for the last time into the valley of the Nadder.  Near the last village is Compton Park, the home of that Colonel Penruddocke who, in 1655, led a small body of horsemen into Salisbury and proclaimed Charles II, at the same time seizing the machinery of law and government.  But the “rising” was not popular; the Colonel got no assistance from the townspeople and the affair led to his death upon the scaffold.

The most profitable way of approaching Salisbury is to continue northwards from Ansty by a lane that eventually descends to Tisbury on the headwaters of the Nadder.  This small town has a station on the South Western main line and a large cruciform church, situated at the foot of the steep hill on which the town is built.  Its present nave is Early English, but an earlier Transitional building once stood on the site.  The tower is more curious than beautiful and the quaint top story may be contemporary with the chancel, an addition of the early seventeenth century.  The latter has an elaborately ornamented ceiling and is the resting place of Lady Blanche Arundell and also of Sir Thomas, first Lord Wardour, who distinguished himself as a late crusader in 1595 at the battle of Gran in Hungary, when he captured a Turkish standard.  His helmet is fixed to the wall above his tomb.  Place House, once a grange of Shaftesbury Abbey, at the end of the village, is an early Tudor manor.  The fine gate-house and the tithe-barn at the side of the entrance court are good specimens of the domestic architecture of the period.  The buildings form a picturesque group and the all too brief glimpse of them from the railway has probably caused many travellers thereon to break their journey.

A short two miles to the north of Tisbury, in a lovely district of wooded hills, is Fonthill Giffard.  The church, erected in the Early English style in 1866, will not detain the visitor, though one might well be disposed to linger in the charming village.  The great “lion” of this district was the famous and extraordinary Fonthill Abbey, an amazing erection in sham Gothic, built by Wyatt, that “infamous dispoiler, misnamed architect” to the order of the eccentric author of Vathek—­William Beckford, heir of a wealthy London merchant who was twice Lord Mayor and died a millionaire.  Contemporary prints are occasionally met with in curiosity shops that bring vividly before us this specimen of the “Gothic madness” of our great grandfathers.  An enormous octagonal tower arises from the centre of the strange pile of buildings, which is in the form of a cross with arms of equal length.  Pinnacle and gargoyles, moulding and ornaments, all clashing and at war with each other, are stuck on anywhere and everywhere; the nightmare dream of a medievalist.  If this was the fruit of Beckford’s brain nothing more need be said.  If that of Wyatt’s, we can but be thankful that he did not live long enough to have the commission for building the present Palace of Westminster.  A pile that as it is, is only too reminiscent of the florid imaginings of the Gothic revival.