os 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.

The high road from Salisbury to Warminster turns northwards at
Fugglestone past the two Wilton stations, without entering that t