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Netheravon Concise History

Introduction

History

Exploration of Netheravon should begin at the church. That is a sound rule for most villages, but at Netheravon the church makes an especially good starting point. No need to go inside, even (it is usually kept locked anyway) – most of what is important can be seen from the churchyard.

Netheravon church stands in parkland, and is approached along a fenced carriage drive, which is clearly a southward extension of the village street. A map of 1773 depicts this drive as a through route which looped around the church to cross the river by a bridge, and then doubled back to Choulston on the opposite bank. By 1790 it had been truncated to serve only the church and adjacent Netheravon House, in whose park it sits. And by 1817 a new road is shown skirting the northern edge of the park to a river crossing upstream from its predecessor. This is the line of the modern road to Airfield Camp, and it offers the best view of the church in its setting. Apart from Netheravon House, with its stables and appurtenances, there are no buildings within 200 metres of the church – an observation to which we shall return.

In 1907 part of a Roman villa, including evidence of a bath house, was discovered and excavated a short distance to the south of Netheravon House. Further evidence of a mosaic pavement was accidentally revealed nearby in 1936, and walls and Roman pottery were found in 1996 during a televised excavation. A second Roman villa, situated within an iron-age enclosure, was encountered in 1991, prior to laying a gas pipeline, about 1km south of the Netheravon House site, straddling the boundary with Figheldean. The juxtaposition of a Roman villa and a Christian church is by no means unusual, in Wiltshire or elsewhere, and may in some instances suggest a continuity of a central place within a territory from the Roman to the Saxon period. Three pieces of evidence suggest that Netheravon was important as a Saxon estate centre.

First, in common with many early central places, it takes its name directly from its river. Northward up the valley the next high status settlement was probably also called ‘Avon’, and by the middle ages they were distinguished as ‘Upper’ (Upavon) and ‘Lower’ (Netheravon). Second, Netheravon’s church is listed in Domesday as having possessed three estates, including the large holding of Stratton St Margaret near Swindon. Churches with substantial landholdings prior to the Norman conquest had usually functioned as Saxon minsters, or headquarters of missionary priests, and as such were generally established at important centres of population or local government. In the case of Netheravon the jurisdiction (known as its parochia) of the minster church probably coincided with the secular territory and hundred known as Elstub, which included the later parishes of Enford and Fittleton, as well as Netheravon itself. One tithing of Elstub, West Chisenbury, remained subordinate to Netheravon and its church until 1885. Third, as if to corroborate the documentary record, Netheravon church retains impressive late-Saxon features.

Several problems surround the church tower which cannot be entirely resolved. The narrow-arched openings to north and south are Saxon in character, and appear to have led into small chambers, known as porticus. If it was always a west tower, then the more elaborate arch, with carved capitals, on the western face may have emerged into a vestibule or narthex, perhaps housing the font. But it may have been originally a central tower, in which case this arch divided nave from crossing, and the porticus were rudimentary transepts. Whether or not the upper stages of the tower are contemporary with its base is uncertain. Indeed the dating of the earliest work is controversial. If it is Saxon, then stylistically it is very late, and perhaps just post-conquest. But Domesday Book in 1086 describes the church as ruined, unroofed, and on the point of collapse. All that can be said with any confidence is that its poor state in 1086 suggests that by then its period of high status as a minster church had passed, and that the Domesday description either did not apply to the tower, or that it was rebuilt in old-fashioned Saxon style very soon after 1086.

Whether still in ruins or newly rebuilt, Netheravon church quickly passed by royal grant to the chapter of the new cathedral at Old Sarum, where the income from it (somewhat depleted since the conquest) was used to create a prebend. The prebendaries and the dean of Salisbury, therefore, exercised jurisdiction over the church as a peculiar, including the appointment of vicars, throughout the middle ages and until peculiars were abolished in 1846. The present church retains medieval work of various periods, but it was substantially restored after 1839. Until then it had two porches, one of which at least existed in 1405 (the vicar at that time was reprimanded by the dean for using it as a stable and keeping his horse in the churchyard). The porches were removed during the Victorian restoration, which was executed with great zeal by a colourful vicar, Francis Jackson Blandy. He is said to have embarrassed himself by forgetting to invite the dean to the rededication service. Blandy died in 1866 when the village blacksmith performed an unsuccessful operation to remove a chicken bone from his throat.

Domesday Book describes Netheravon as a twenty-hide estate, and records an unusually large population of more than seventy families, as well as fifty-four staff on the demesne farm. This might represent a total population of 400–500, the same as in 1900. Ownership fragmented during the middle ages into at least five manors, as well as other estates, which were gradually reunited during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the dukes of Beaufort, and later the Hicks Beach family. Netheravon House, the church’s companion, is believed to stand on the site of one of the manor houses. It was begun in 1734 as a large villa or hunting box by the Beauforts, whose interest in Netheravon lay less in its potential as a typical sheep-and-corn chalkland parish than as a sporting estate for coursing and hawking on the downs. Stables were built at the same time, and the grounds had been laid out by 1755. But the Beauforts were not here for very long; by 1780 the house and principal manor had been acquired by William Beach, and it descended in his family for more than a century.

No map is known to exist before the creation of Netheravon House and park, so it is not possible to reconstruct the village topography and setting of the church prior to the eighteenth-century changes. However, the extent of new building elsewhere in the village during this century suggests that the park may have displaced earlier settlement around the church, thus leaving it in isolation. That isolation was accentuated in the nineteenth century. Maps of 1773 and 1790 show a built-up road, Netheravon Green Road, running across the park parallel to Kennel Row, as well as buildings along the lower end of what is now the drive to the church, and around an area of village green, with a pond, which is now crossed by the main road near the Dog and Gun Inn. Village earthworks west of the main road as it begins to climb the hill suggest earlier settlement in this area too. In fact we have the eye-witness testimony of William Cobbett, riding down the valley in 1826, that Netheravon had altered a good deal, and for the worse, since his previous visit eighteen years earlier. Buildings were in decay, the population was declining, the sites of large houses had become orchards, and even the roof of the dog kennel was falling in. Clearly the early nineteenth century was a time of upheaval, partly no doubt as a result of the enclosure of the arable land and meadows in 1790, and one effect was to move the village focus northwards, creating the present linear settlement along High Street and Mill Road.

But that is not the end of the Netheravon House story. In 1898 the Hicks Beach estate was compulsorily purchased by the government as part of the War Office acquisitions of land for military training on Salisbury Plain. The purchase was controversial at the time, and created a storm in a political teacup, because to his opponents it appeared that Sir Michael Hicks Beach (who happened to be Chancellor of the Exchequer) had received a very favourable price for his land, by comparison with other Wiltshire landowners and the depressed state of agricultural land generally.

The army’s interest in Netheravon, of course, was less in the house than in the extensive chalk downland, which became part of the artillery ranges. But the house, geared as it had been to sporting pursuits, was well suited to a new career as the Cavalry School, which it became in 1904. Additional stabling and other accommodation was built in the grounds, and it was this work which uncovered the Roman villa in 1907. During the first world war the house was put to other uses, including temporary quarters for a flying squadron, but the cavalry returned between 1919 and 1922. From 1922, under various names, it was used as a gunnery school, and was from 1948 until its closure in the mid-1990s as the Support Weapons Wing of the School of Infantry. In the grounds, encircled by barbed wire, were houses, barracks and other buildings, and the house itself was used as the officers’ mess. It is still in closely guarded military use, and is currently designated Avon Camp East and West.

Before we leave Netheravon church one other feature of its setting needs to be mentioned. That is the River Avon, which winds around the eastern edge of the park. The right to fish on ‘Netheravon Water’ has been controlled from the sixteenth century, and since this right was acquired by the army in 1898 the river ecology has been carefully stewarded and nurtured. Frank Sawyer, river keeper from 1928, became a legend among fishermen, not only for his innovative approach to keepering, but also for evolving the ‘Netheravon’ style of nymph fishing, which he expounded in his 1958 book, Nymphs and the Trout. He developed a method of cleansing the river using powdered chalk, and invented a humane vermin trap; he was also responsible for the construction of the lakes for rearing trout and grayling at Corfe End, opposite Haxton. It was said of him: ‘The Avon was his river. He knew it as no other human being has ever done, or ever will!’ And it was here, on the river at Choulston Shallows by Netheravon church, that he died in 1980.

Travelling northward on the A345 one does not receive a particularly favourable impression of Netheravon. After the barbed wire and armed checkpoints guarding the army camp at Netheravon House the road descends to cross the area of the former green, with barely a glimpse of the church. It then skirts the village, behind twentieth-century military, council and private housing, to leave the parish above Corfe End Lakes. The present alignment of the road, by-passing the village, is not shown on maps of 1817 and 1826, so may be attributed to the Kennet and Amesbury Turnpike Trust. This body (one of the latest in England) turnpiked the road in 1840, and this determined its future as the principal route up the Avon valley. It became more important after the military acquisitions, as downland routes of high antiquity were closed to traffic. Two of these led from Netheravon to Warminster and Devizes, and a third, the Wiltway, crossed the parish obliquely from Breaking Cross (the Mill Road junction) past Wexland Farm to Wilton, via Stonehenge.

The population of Netheravon rose significantly before the first world war (from 440 in 1901 to 741 in 1911), and again between 1931 and 1951, when for the first time it exceeded 1,000. It is thus one of those Salisbury Plain villages which has become suburbanized by the army. New housing has sprung up in the area defined by High Street, Mill Road and the A345, and the older cottages along the High Street have been infilled by modern houses and a variety of commercial premises. Survivors from pre-1898 village days include the Fox and Hounds pub, with former malthouse and brewery behind; the old post office, which displays a clock on the wall outside; and the village school of 1846, now closed and replaced by a modern building nearby. It was by no means the first attempt to establish a school in the village. A quick-witted young clergyman who was later to make his name in literary society, one Sydney Smith, was curate of Netheravon from 1794-7, and persuaded the squire to subsidize a Sunday school where village children could learn to read and write. The project seems to have helped alleviate the tedium he experienced here. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘can equal the profound, the unmeasurable, the awful dulness of this place, in the which I lye dead and buried.’

At the north end of the High Street the Primitive Methodist chapel of 1847 is hidden up an alleyway beside the village fish and chip shop (a sure sign of suburbanization), which also leads to a Baptist graveyard. The Particular Baptist chapel of 1820, which formerly stood there, was destroyed by fire in 1946. Beyond the Haxton turning, in Mill Road, the striking premises of a small independent brewer, Stonehenge Ales (formerly Bunce’s), began life as a generator house to provide direct current electricity to the military camp at Netheravon House. It was built in 1914 on a former mill site, and operated until about 1925 employing water power from the river to drive a large turbine.

NOTES (location: SU1448; area: 1,429ha; population (1991): 1,146)
General: VCH 11, 165-81; Finch, R, Netheravon with Fittleton: a short historical survey. . . rev. ed. 1960.
Roman villa: WANHM 94, 148-53; Church: Taylor, H M and J, Anglo-Saxon architecture, 1, 1965, 456-9; Sawyer: Vines, F, Frank Sawyer, man of the riverside, 1984.