HAMPSHIRE

4 miles south of Newbury

Hazel, Fiver and the rest of the rabbits who made their home on Watership Down in Richard Adams’s famous novel might well have looked down from their warren on to Burghclere: for the real Watership Down stands just south-east of the village, on the great scarp of the north Hampshire Downs. Close by is a very different yet equally evocative stronghold Ladle Hill, a former Iron Age camp raised on a high point of the Downs.

Burghclere was once an important wool village, producing fleeces for the cloth and blanket mills of Highclere and Newbury. Later, lime became its source of income. Although the lime kilns are now disused, and have been for about the last 40

years, traces of them are still visible at Old Burghclere, ivy-hung and half buried in vegetation. The cottages where the kiln workers used to live still stand near by, and the fields around the village are pitted with shallow depressions - the marl pits from which chalk was dug to spread over the arable land.

Watercress beds are another of Burghclere’s obsolete industries. Vestiges of the old beds still line some of the streams which flow down to the little River Enborne.

The artist Stanley Spencer spent six years painting the murals in the Sandhani Memorial Chapel, now a National Trust property. The paintings depict scenes from his experiences as a Royal Army Medical Corps orderly, and also as an infantryman in Macedonia in the First World War. The subject matter is at once macabre and moving, illuminated by flashes of bitter humour

- the reactions of an exceptionally gifted man to the cataclysm of war. Admission to the chapel is free, and the key can be obtained from the almshouses next door.

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