this:  on each side downs, very lofty and steep in some places, and sloping miles back in other places, but on each side out of the valley are downs.  From the edge of the downs begin capital arable fields, generally of very great dimensions and in some places running a mile or two back into little cross valleys formed by hills of downs.  After the corn-fields come meadows on each side, down to the brook or river.  The farmhouses, mansions, villages and hamlets are generally situated in that part of the arable land that comes nearest to the meadows.  Great as my expectations had been, they were more than fulfilled.  I delight in this sort of country.....  I sat upon my horse, and I looked over Milton and Easton and Pewsey for half an hour, though I had not breakfasted.”

Pewsey Church has a Transitional nave and Early English chancel; the oblong tower being Perpendicular.  The carved reredos was designed and worked by Canon Pleydell-Bouverie, who also made the communion rails from some timbers of the San Josef, a ship taken by Nelson at the battle of Cape St. Vincent.  The roof of the organ chamber and vestry are of much interest; they are part of the refectory roof of Ivychurch Priory.

The country to the north of the little old town is very beautiful.  The precipitous wall of the Marlborough Downs, with several lovely and little-known villages at its foot, is a remarkable feature of the landscape.  The high road to Marlborough, that climbs the hills for three fatiguing miles, passes through the small village of Oare, where there is a modern red-brick church.  Not far away to the west are the hamlets of West and East Towel, lost in the lonely by ways beneath the hills.  Above them in a fold of the Downs is Huish, dropped down amidst memorials of a long vanished past.  Dewponds, earthworks and “hut circles” cover the hills in all directions.  At Martinsell, the camp-crowned hill to the east of the high road, until recent days a festival was held, the beginnings of which may have been in Neolithic times.  On Palm Sunday young men and maidens would ascend the hill carrying boughs of hazel.  They would, no doubt, have been scandalized if told that the ceremony had anything but a Christian significance.  The prospect of the Vale from this hill-side, or from the high road itself, is not easily forgotten, and the beech-woods and parklands of Rainscombe, that fill the broad but sheltered hollow below, make a lovely foreground to the view.

We must now return to the lower end of the Vale of Wylye which has been noticed at Wilton, where the river, road and rail come down a narrow defile from Heytsbury and Warminster.  This valley has on the north and east the familiar aspect of Salisbury Plain.  On the south and west are those wooded hills that are seen also from the neighbourhood of Fonthill, and though both sides of the valley are made of the same material—­the current chalk of Wiltshire—­they are very unlike in their superficial scenery.  The Wylye is perhaps the most beautiful of Wiltshire rivers, and although it has an important cross-country railway running close to it for the greater part of its length, the villages and hamlets upon the banks are peculiarly calm, secluded and unspoilt.