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.
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