[Illustration:  BOYTON MANOR.]

Upton Lovell, about a mile from Codford St. Peter, has a church, the nave of which was built in the seventeenth century.  The chancel belongs to the original Transitional building.  An altar tomb with an effigy in armour is supposed to be that of a Lovell of Castle Cary.  The manor was held by this family and from them the village takes its name.  An unhappy story is told of one of the family, a participant in the Lambert Simnel rebellion, who managed to find sanctuary here, and, perhaps through his retainers being in ignorance of his whereabouts, was starved to death in the secret chamber in which he had hidden himself.  His skeleton was discovered long afterwards seated at a table with books and papers in front of it.  Knook is the next village, a mile below Heytesbury.  Here is a church that, in spite of ruthless restoration, has retained its Norman chancel and a south door with a fine tympanum.  Also the old manor house has still much of its former dignity in spite of its change of station.  Away to the north, on one of the rounded summits of Salisbury Plain, is Knook Castle, a prehistoric camp that was utilized by the Romans and possibly by the Saxons after their invasion of the west.

Heytesbury or Hegtredesbyri, seventeen miles from Salisbury, has a station half-way between the old town and Tytherington on the south, and is an ancient place that had seen its best days before the dawn of the nineteenth century.  It was another of the “rotten” boroughs and fell into a period of stagnation from which the railway seems to have lately rescued it.  Many new roads and houses have sprung up without, however, spoiling the appearance of this pleasant little place.  The church, dedicated to SS.  Peter and Paul, is chiefly Early English with Transitional work in the chancel and Perpendicular in the nave.  In the north transept is the Hungerford chantry, to whose founder is due the chantry seen in Salisbury Cathedral.  The south transept contains a tablet in memory of William Cunnington (1810), to whose researches the antiquaries of Wiltshire owe a great deal of their information.  This church was made collegiate by Bishop Joscelyn in the twelfth century.  Heytesbury Hospital was founded by Lord Treasurer Hungerford, whose badge, two sickles, may be seen over the entrance.  In the beautiful park are some magnificent beeches and a group of cedars below the fir-clad Copley Hill which is crowned by a prehistoric camp.

At Tytherington there is another church, very small and old and once a prebend of Heytesbury.  In the early days of the last century service was only performed here four times a year, and a legend was once related to the writer of a dog that had been accidentally shut up in this church at one service and found alive and released at the next, ten weeks later!  A mile farther is Sutton Veny, where there are two churches, a fine new one, and an old ruined building of which the chancel is kept in repair as