HEALE HOUSE, MIDDLE WOODFORD.

The Residence of the Honourable Louis Greville; bought by him from Sir E. Loder, 1894.

This house, beautifully built of small red bricks, has stone-coped windows in the Dutch style of architecture introduced into this country by William III., and is quite unlike the usual stone and flint “chequered” houses of the neighbourhood. You enter the grounds through old wrought-iron gates and down an avenue of elm-trees. The river Avon flows through the garden. This property formerly belonged to the Errington and Hyde families. Inside the house little remains of the old decorations but some carved woodwork. A cupboard in a bedroom is shown as the hiding-place of Charles II. after the battle of Worcester. He is said to have visited Stonehenge from Heale, and there met friends who were to conduct him to the coast of Sussex prior to his escape from England. He is supposed to have proved to his own satisfaction the fallacy of the notion of the impossibility of counting the stones composing Stonehenge.

“In 1721 Robert Hyde bequeathed Heale to his sister, Mrs. Levinz, widow of the Bishop of Sodor and Man, and she, by will, devised the estates to her son-in-law, Michael Frampton of Oxford, and he, in his turn, left them to his nephews, Thomas Bull, rector of Porton, and Edward and Simon Polhill and their heirs in succession, in default thereof to William Bowles; in seventeen years after the death of the testator, Canon Bowles was in full possession of the property.” Several members of the Bowles family lie buried in Salisbury Cathedral. Heale Hill is remarkable for a circle on the summit and traces of a British village on the south slope.