West Tisbury, Wiltshire

Pythouse, sometimes spelled Pyt House and pronounced pit-house, is a country house in southwest Wiltshire, in the west of England. It is about 2+1⁄2 miles (4.0 km) west of the village of Tisbury. Described as a "fine classical house", Pythouse is set in parkland with a ha-ha separating the formal house lawn from surrounding parkland on which livestock may graze. It has an Ionic portico, and the front elevation may have inspired the design of Philipps House at nearby Dinton, which was begun in 1813 and designed by Sir Jeffry Wyatville. Leigh Court in Somerset was later built to the plans used for Pythouse.

Fonthill Abbey—also known as Beckford's Folly—was a large Gothic Revival country house built between 1796 and 1813 at Fonthill Gifford in Wiltshire, England, at the direction of William Thomas Beckford and architect James Wyatt. It was built near the site of the Palladian house, later known as Fonthill Splendens, which had been constructed by 1770 by his father William Beckford. This, in turn, had replaced the Elizabethan house that Beckford the Elder had purchased in 1744 and which had been destroyed by fire in 1755. The abbey's main tower collapsed several times, lastly in 1825 damaging the western wing. The entire abbey was later almost completely demolished.

Wardour is a settlement in Wiltshire, England, about 13 miles (21 km) west of Salisbury and 4 miles (6 km) south of Hindon. Formerly a parish in its own right, it is now part of the civil parish of Tisbury.

Fonthill Gifford is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England, to the north of the Nadder valley, 14 miles (23 km) west of Salisbury.

Cranborne Chase School was an independent boarding school for girls, originally opened in 1946 at Crichel House in the village of Moor Crichel in Dorset. In 1961, the school moved to New Wardour Castle near Tisbury in Wiltshire, and extensively renovated the building, which had fallen into a severe state of disrepair.In 1985 there were 130 girls, aged between 11 and 18 years, and 26 teachers at the school. The school eventually closed in July 1990.

New Wardour Castle is a Grade I listed English country house at Wardour, near Tisbury in Wiltshire, built for the Arundell family. The house is of Palladian style, designed by the architect James Paine, with additions by Giacomo Quarenghi, who was a principal architect of the Imperial Russian capital city, Saint Petersburg. The building of the house was begun in 1769 and completed in 1776, with additional buildings being added in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1961 to 1990, it was the home of Cranborne Chase School, an independent boarding school for girls. New Wardour Castle is approximately 0.75 miles (1.2 km) from Old Wardour Castle, which was left as a landscape feature of the parkland of the new house. This was formerly the home of the Arundell family before it was besieged, damaged and slighted in the Civil War.

Hindon is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England, about 16 miles (26 km) west of Salisbury and 9.6 miles (15.4 km) south of Warminster. It is in the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Hindon was a market town but is now a village.

Fonthill Lake (grid reference ST933319) is a lake in southwest Wiltshire, England. It lies just to the south of the village of Fonthill Bishop, east of the village of Fonthill Gifford, and northeast of Fonthill Abbey. The lake is 1.6 km (1 mi) long and approximately 100 m (328 ft) wide at its maximum breadth. The Fonthill Brook flows out of the southern end of the lake and joins the River Nadder at Tisbury, 2 km (1 mi) to the southeast.The lake was created in the mid-18th century by building a weir below fish-ponds fed by the brook, for Alderman William Beckford, the builder of the house later known as Fonthill Splendens. In 1987 the extensive landscaped park, including the lake, was recorded as Grade II* on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.A sizeable population of the introduced Mandarin duck is resident at Fonthill Lake (and on surrounding rivers) together with a number of wild swans. The lake was used as the location for the filming of the river scenes in the 2000 film Chocolat, which starred Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. It is also where the ashes of pioneering Everest mountaineer Eric Shipton were scattered.

Donhead St Andrew is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England, on the River Nadder. It lies 4 miles (6.4 km) east of the Dorset market town of Shaftesbury. The parish includes the hamlets of West End, Milkwell and (on the A30) Brook Waters. Ferne House, on the site of a former manor house, is within the parish.

St Leonard's Church in Berwick St Leonard, Wiltshire, England, was built in the 12th century. It is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II* listed building, and is now a redundant church in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. It was declared redundant on 22 June 1973, and was vested in the Trust on 9 June 1976.The manor was held in the 12th century by Shaftesbury Abbey's manor of Tisbury. At that time there was no right of burial at Berwick, and bodies were taken to Tisbury. The right of advowson was later held by a variety of individuals, and there was a dispute over the right between John Benett and John Maclntyre, an East India Company general during the early 19th century.The small church was built of flint and limestone, in the 12th century. The three bay nave is 33 feet 6 inches (10.21 m) by 16 feet 4 inches (4.98 m), while the chancel is just 18 feet 9 inches (5.72 m) long and 13 feet 3 inches (4.04 m) wide. The entrance is beneath the small two-stage south tower which was added in the 14th century, and is supported by diagonal buttresses. The tower holds two bells dating from 1725 and 1766. The church roof is tiled in a fish-scale pattern. Monuments inside the church include those to George Howe, who died in 1647, and his six children. The cylindrical stone font with a brass cover, the lintel over the blocked north doorway, and a sculptured relief of the Lamb of God over the inside of the south doorway date from the Norman era.By the 19th century the fabric of the building was decaying, and it was rebuilt in 1860 with little change to its external appearance, at the expense of Alfred Morrison of Fonthill Gifford. The church was closed in 1966.

Wardour Castle in Wiltshire was besieged twice during the First English Civil War; once in May 1643, and then again between November 1643 and March 1644. During the first siege, a Parliamentarian force of around 1,300 men led by Sir Edward Hungerford attacked the castle, which was the home of Thomas Arundell, 2nd Baron Arundell of Wardour, a prominent Catholic and Royalist. Arundell was absent, fighting for King Charles at the time of the attack, and the defence was led by his wife, Lady Blanche Arundell, in command of 25 soldiers. The siege was started on 2 May, and lasted for a week before the Parliamentarians forced Lady Arundell to surrender on 8 May. The Parliamentarians garrisoned the castle with 75 men, led by Colonel Edmund Ludlow. Henry Arundell, 3rd Baron Arundell of Wardour, the son of Thomas and Blanche, brought a Royalist force to reclaim the castle, and by November 1643 a tight blockade had been established. The castle was well-provisioned, and it was only when the Royalists exploded mines under the walls, creating large holes in the defences, that they forced the castle's surrender. The damage to the castle left it uninhabitable, and over 100 years later, the Arundell family commissioned New Wardour Castle to be built nearby.

Wardour Castle is a ruined 14th-century castle at Wardour, on the boundaries of the civil parishes of Tisbury and Donhead St Andrew in the English county of Wiltshire, about 15 miles (24 km) west of Salisbury. The castle was built in the 1390s, came into the ownership of the Arundells in the 16th century and was rendered uninhabitable in 1643 and 1644 during the English Civil War. A Grade I listed building, it is managed by English Heritage and open to the public.