Alvediston, Wiltshire

Church House sits beside the churchyard of St Mary’s at the quiet heart of Alvediston, the last village before the Ebble rises out of the chalk, and one of the loveliest and least disturbed in the Chalke Valley.

Why We Love Church House - Church House sits beside the churchyard of St Mary’s at the quiet heart of Alvediston, the last village before the Ebble rises out of the chalk, and one of the loveliest and least disturbed in the Chalke Valley. It is a house of mellow limestone and generous proportion, early seventeenth century in origin and Grade II listed, which has been completely restored by its owners and now offers close to 4,000 sq ft of comfortable, light-filled accommodation, with a further 1,900 sq ft across the annexe, studio and triple garage.

This is a village house in the best sense: a house that belongs to its place. Its walls and the church beside it are of the same stone, its garden runs to a paddock with the downs beyond, and from its windows there is nothing to see that would have surprised a resident three centuries ago. Yet it is, in every practical respect, a house for now - the plumbing, wiring, roof and joinery all attended to, so that a purchaser may simply arrive.

The land on which it stands was given to the nuns of Wilton Abbey by King Eadwig in 955, passed to the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, at the Dissolution, and remained with them until 1918: nearly a thousand years in two ownerships. Few houses can claim so settled a pedigree, and fewer still sit within a landscape - the Cranborne Chase National Landscape - protected so that it will look in fifty years much as it does today.

Accommodation

The house is entered through a hallway to the side of the house, (the nineteenth-century hipped porch to the front is now used as a way from the drawing room to the front garden). The house is full of character and elegant charm: deep, chamfered beams, flagged or boarded floors and the calm, even light of nine-pane sash windows. The principal rooms open from it with an ease that belies the age of the house.

The Drawing Room is the largest of the reception rooms, with an ingenious fireplace, which has been created with two openings. This is a room that works as well for a winter evening by the fire, as for a summer party spilling out onto the terrace. The sitting room, beside it, is the room for a wet Sunday — smaller, warmer, with the television and the dog’s bed. The Dining Room lies in the older wing (and where the kitchen was previously) where the chamfered ceiling beams, with their bar stops, are among the earliest surviving fabric in the house, and seats ten with comfort.

The Kitchen is the working heart of the house and opens into a family breakfast/dining room where the family eats. Created with bi-folding doors, high ceilings and a working fireplace this space has a powerful impact. A Boot Room with a WC and Shower Room beyond it has its own door to the garden, so that dogs, boots and gardeners need never pass through the front of the house. Below stairs, the Cellar - lit by a two-light stone-mullioned window, the oldest window in the house - keeps a steady temperature the year round and makes an admirable wine store.

The staircase rises to a first floor of four bedrooms and four bathrooms, a ratio few houses of this age can match. The Principal Bedroom is a room of real character, with its own bathroom The second bedroom is also ensuite; the two further bedrooms are served by two further bathrooms and a separate WC, so that a full house of guests need never queue. Throughout, four-panelled doors and sash windows of the late Georgian pattern give the upper floor a pleasing consistency.

The Annexe, Studio & Outbuildings

Away from the house, the outbuildings add a further 1,900 sq ft and a great deal of flexibility. The Annexe, of some 580 sq ft, is fully self-contained with a Kitchen, Bedroom and Shower Room; it would suit a dependent relative, a live-in couple, paying guests or a grown-up child not quite ready to leave. A separate Studio stands with a Store, Plant Room and a further Shower Room, convenient for the pool and a Greenhouse serves the garden. The Triple Garage, at nearly 900 sq ft, has room for cars, bicycles and everything a country household accumulates.

Gardens & Grounds

The gardens at Church House extend to approximately 1.2 acres and fall naturally into three parts. Closest to the house, a pergola looks over the formal garden which is laid to lawn with herbaceous borders, espalier fruit trees, terracing, and further seating areas to follow the sun. Beyond the formal garden, the planting loosens into an informal garden, with orchard, wild-flower meadow and mown paths, with the swimming pool sited discreetly behind the annex, where it catches the afternoon sun. A small paddock runs to the boundary with views across the valley to the downs, and would suit a pony, a flock of hens or simply the pleasure of owning the view.

Chapters Past - Alvediston appears in the record in 955, when King Eadwig granted the estate to the nuns of Wilton Abbey. The abbey held it for almost six hundred years, until Henry VIII dissolved the house in 1536 and gave its lands to Sir William Herbert, created first Earl of Pembroke in 1551. The Pembrokes kept Alvediston until 1918, when the estate was broken up and sold as farms. By the middle of the nineteenth century four of them - Norrington, Samways, Elcombe and Church Farm - accounted for most of the parish, worked in the old chalkland way, with sheep folded on the arable by night to manure it for corn.

Church House itself dates from the early seventeenth century. Historic England’s list entry - made in 1985 under the house’s former name of Church Cottage - describes a detached house of uncoursed dressed limestone with a tiled roof, coped verges and brick stacks, on a T-plan with a nineteenth-century rear extension, two storeys and a cellar, and inside, deeply chamfered beams with bar stops and four-panelled doors. The nine-pane sashes and hipped porch belong to a late Victorian refitting, when the house took on the settled, slightly Georgian air it has today.

Next door, St Mary’s church (Grade II*) has stood since the twelfth century; its Norman font survives, as do the fourteenth-century transepts, a seventeenth-century tower and a recumbent knight in armour, probably one of the Gawens, who held Norrington for four hundred years before the Wyndhams. T. H. Wyatt restored the church in 1865. In the churchyard lies Sir Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon, Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957, who lived at Alvediston Manor from 1966 until his death in 1977 — so that a resident of Church House has, quite literally, a Prime Minister for a neighbour.

Norrington Manor, a mile to the west, is one of Wiltshire’s great medieval houses, built about 1377 and listed Grade I. The Crown, the village’s thatched inn, is listed too.

Living In The Chalke Valley - Salisbury 11 miles | Tisbury 6 miles | Shaftesbury 7 miles | Blandford Forum 14 miles
Tisbury Station 6 miles (direct services to London Waterloo from 1 hour 44 minutes) | Salisbury Station 11 miles (direct services to London Waterloo from 1 hour 20 minutes)
(Distances and times approximate)

Alvediston lies at the head of the Chalke Valley, the valley of the River Ebble, which rises close to the village and runs east through Ebbesbourne Wake, Bowerchalke and Broad Chalke to join the Avon below Salisbury. This is quintessential chalk country - dry coombes, big skies, ancient droves along the ridges and clear streams in the bottoms —- and all of it lies within the Cranborne Chase National Landscape, formerly the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, so that the countryside is protected by law from inappropriate development.

The valley villages are small, unspoilt and sociable.; the Horseshoe at Ebbesbourne Wake and the Queen’s Head at Broad Chalke are within a few minutes’ drive, and Broad Chalke has a village shop and post office run by the community. Tisbury, to the north, offers the day-to-day conveniences of a small town - doctor, dentist, delicatessen, fishmonger, the Beckford Bottle Shop and Messums’ gallery in the great tithe barn - and the Beckford Arms at Fonthill Gifford and the Royal Oak at Swallowcliffe are two of the best country pubs in the south of England.

Salisbury, with its cathedral, twice-weekly market, theatre and mainline station, is a comfortable twenty-five minutes; Shaftesbury and the Dorset border villages are closer still. The Dorset coast at Studland and Kimmeridge is within an hour. Schools within reach include Sandroyd, Port Regis, Clayesmore, Bryanston, Godolphin, Chafyn Grove, Salisbury Cathedral School and the Salisbury grammar schools.