At Rushall the narrow valley of the Avon, guarded by the opposing camps of Casterley and Chisenbury, is left for the transverse vale of Pewsey, on the farther side of which are the Marlborough Downs.  A number of chalk streams drain the vale and go to make up the head-waters of the Avon; in fact two streams, both bearing the old British name for river, meet hereabouts; the one rising about two miles from Savernake station and the other about the same distance from Devizes.  Along the northern slope of this vale the canal made to join the Kennet and Thames with yet another, the Bristol Avon, runs its lonely course.  Five miles west of Rushall is the divide between the waters of the English Channel and the Severn Sea, and the Bristol Avon receives the stream that rises but a mile from its namesake of Christchurch Bay.  High in one of the combes at this end of the valley is the small village of All Cannings, said to have been of much importance in the dark ages as a Saxon centre.  All it has to show the visitor now is a cruciform church with Norman and Early English fragments and a good Perpendicular tower.

The villages of Pewsey Vale are many and charming.  All are well served by the “short-cut” line of the Great Western, over which the Devon and Cornwall expresses now run.  Across the vale, in an opposite direction to the iron way, runs the Ridgeway, a road probably in use when Stonehenge was not, and Silbury Hill, that mystery of the Marlborough Downs, was yet to be.  On the western side of this old road are the villages of Patney and Chirton.  At the latter is a very beautiful Transitional church.  Near Beechingstoke, close to the Ridgeway, is a famous British village, the entrenchment containing about thirty acres.  The old road comes down from the northern highlands between Milk Hill (964 feet) and Knap Hill, the two bluffs that rear their great bulk across the vale.  Here beneath the “White Horse,” a modern one cut at the beginning of the nineteenth century, are the old churches of Alton Priors and Alton Berners, the latter partly Saxon.

The road north-east from Rushall runs through Manningford Bruce.  The church here is possibly Saxon; it has a semi-circular apse.  On the north wall of the chancel is a tablet to Mary Nicholas with arms bearing the royal canton.  This was her reward for helping Charles in his flight after the battle of Worcester.  Manningford Abbots once belonged to the Abbot of Hyde.  The rebuilt church is only of interest in possessing a very fine pre-Reformation chalice.  Two miles farther is Pewsey, a pleasant town surrounded by the chalk hills.  From those to the eastward Cobbett, when he beheld the vale stretched out before him, broke into one of those simple but graphic descriptive touches that help to make the Rural Rides immortal, “A most beautiful sight it was!  Villages, hamlets, large farms, towers, steeples, fields, meadows, orchards and very fine timber trees.  The shape of the thing was