Salisbury Club Site, Wiltshire

    

Today dawned sunny and promising dry weather all day, but The Chauffeur was anxious to hang about long enough to catch up with his sister to wish her a happy seventy-fifth birthday. Truth be told, he was put off by the cold wind whipping about the campsite and no promise of the temperatures rising, and was still feeling under the weather.  I was happy to go along with his sentiments and made the most of the down time by washing all the bed linen which dried on the line in no time at all, and to vacuum the caravan out, a task not undertaken often enough. But over lunch I threw a few ideas across the table, the least to walk solo down Castle Road to buy a newspaper from the Co-op and the most intrepid, a drive westward to a National Trust administered park for a gentle walk about the countryside. To my delight it was this latter Chris settled upon.

I was keen to pick up a few preferred dairy products from Sainsbury’s, so we first headed down into the city, parking in the car park near The Maltings. I fed the machine the obligatory £1.50 before learning that the Council was offering free parking in a bid to encourage shoppers into the centre following the fairly recent nerve agent poisoning of a retired intelligence agent and his daughter, allegedly by the Russian agents seeking revenge. 

I was very cross to discover this council generosity too late to rescue our precious parking coins, and while you, the reader, may think I am a little mean about parking costs, you need only see the accumulating totals of parking costs, which in the interest of retaining some element of privacy, shall remain so. It did however make my Greek yoghurt and cottage cheese far more expensive than that I could have purchased at Lidl the previous day, or Tesco the day or two before.

But on a positive note, we resumed our drive westward beyond Wilton, finding our way to the village of Dinton and so to the park of the same name. A small sign directed us to a suitable car park, free of charge, and we set off for a walk up and around the estate for just less than an hour.

The National Park directory advertises this attraction as “Dinton Park & Philipps House” however the house is not open to the public but does feature as decoration to this already lovely landscape within the Nadder Valley. We walked across grassland grazed by a small herd of beef cattle, below the church and rectory, and on past the grand neo-Classical house, before entering the wood, and climbing to the top of the hill from where we enjoyed views down the valley with a glimpse of Salisbury Cathedral’s spire in the distance.

Dinton House, was built in 1816 by William Wyndham, who, together with his family and descendants, lies in the nearby churchyard; the Jeffry Wyatville design replaced a 17^th century house.

One hundred years later the estate was bought by Bertram Philipps, who renamed the house after himself, then in 1943 gave the house and 250 acres of parkland to the National Trust. The Philipps had actually moved out in 1936, leasing it to the YWCA and moved into nearby Hyde’s House, a former rectory which he had bought in 1924, where Bertram lived until his death. 

During World War II, the park in front of the house was requisitioned for use by the US Army Air Force, who erected a number of Nissan huts there.

We called into the parish church, St Mary’s, parts of which are older than Salisbury Cathedral. The list of rectors begins with Galfred in 1227 which proves it’s been in business a very long time.

By the time we returned to the car, school was out and we were anxious to avoid the build-up of traffic. During our brief stay here, we have come to realise that Salisbury has a dreadful traffic problem and is desperately in need of a new ring road, far beyond the current one that becomes gnarled up on every roundabout late in the afternoon. As a result, our routes are planned to escape the camp via minor lanes and country roads beyond the city boundaries. 

Our alternative route brought us south through the village of Fovant, which was chosen in 1915 as the site of an army training camp which housed 20,000  soldiers at any one time. The soldiers came here for their final training before being sent on to the battlefields in France.

Turning eastward back toward Wilton we pulled off the road to see the chalk hill carvings, not of White Horses of which there are several here in Wiltshire but of Regimental Badges. On the hill to the south are several outlines cut into the grass-covered hillsides, filled with chalk brought from a nearby slope, up to fifty tons per badge. The badges apparently took an average fifty men six months to complete and were created by those soldiers garrisoned nearby.

As we pulled into the camp, we noted that a whole new shift of campers have arrived and we now have neighbours nearer than previously. Hopefully they will enjoy their stay here as much as we have so far.