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Cley Hill

English Site of Special Scientific Interest stubsHill forts in WiltshireHills of WiltshireNational Trust properties in WiltshireScheduled monuments in Wiltshire
Sites of Special Scientific Interest in WiltshireSites of Special Scientific Interest notified in 1975
Cley Hill
Cley Hill

Cley Hill (grid reference ST838449) is a prominent hill to the west of Warminster in Wiltshire, England. Its summit has a commanding view of the Wiltshire / Somerset county boundary, at 244 metres (801 ft) elevation. The land is in Corsley parish and is owned by the National Trust. A 26.6-hectare (66-acre) area of chalk grassland at Cley Hill was notified as a biological Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1975. The land is managed by the National Trust, having been donated to the charity in 1954 by the 6th Marquess of Bath.Archaeological features include a large univallate Iron Age hill fort, two bowl barrows and medieval strip lynchets. There is a legend that the hill was formed by the devil, when he dropped a sack of earth with which he had planned to bury the town of Devizes. He had retrieved the earth from Somerset and was travelling to Devizes when he stopped to ask an old man the distance to the town. The man replied that he had been walking for years to reach Devizes, so the devil abandoned his plan.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Cley Hill (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 51.20308 ° E -2.23326 °
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Address

Cley Hill

A362
BA12 7RE , Corsley
England, United Kingdom
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Cley Hill
Cley Hill
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Nearby Places

St Margaret's, Corsley
St Margaret's, Corsley

St Margaret's, Corsley, is the Church of England parish church of Corsley in Wiltshire, England. In 1968 the church was designated as Grade II listed.The church was built in 1833 by John Leachman on the site of an earlier church. The previous church had been dedicated to St James from the 16th to 18th century. The new building has a simple plan: a wide nave without aisles, a chancel under the same roof of Welsh slate, and a west tower. Its design and layout are similar to another of Leachman's churches in Wiltshire, Christ Church, Warminster; while Christ Church has been repeatedly extended and altered throughout its history, St Margaret's is substantially unaltered and thus remains close to Leachman's original plans. There is a west gallery on four cast iron pillars and the Royal Arms of George III. The tower has six bells, of which three are 18th-century. A clock was added to the four-stage tower around 1885.There was a parson at Corsley in the mid-13th century. At first the church was subordinate to the parish church of St Denys at Warminster, some 2+1⁄2 miles (4.0 km) to the southeast, but by 1415 Corsley was an independent parish. The church was dedicated to St James in or before the 16th century, and the first record of dedication to St Margaret of Antioch is from 1786. Furnishings which survive from the earlier church are the pulpit (c. 1700), painted benefaction boards and several monuments.Since 2007, Corsley parish (including a 1903 chapel of ease, St Mary's Church at Temple) has formed part of the Cley Hill benefice.

St Boniface College, Warminster
St Boniface College, Warminster

St Boniface College, Warminster, formerly St Boniface Missionary College, was an Anglican educational institution in the Wiltshire town of Warminster, England during the last third of the 19th century and the first two-thirds of the 20th.It was founded in 1860 by Sir James Erasmus Philipps, 12th Baronet, vicar of Warminster from 1859 to 1897, in a house on Church Road about 250m south of the parish church, St Denys'. At first it provided a place for young men without formal education to be trained for suitable employment, but soon narrowed its scope to train them specifically for missionary work. It gradually grew in size and by 1897 the foundation stone was laid for a permanent college, this being completed in 1901. Two former students of the college were martyred in China during the Boxer Rising: Harry Vine Norman and Charles Robinson, who were murdered in 1900. Another, Frederick Day of Stratton St Margaret near Swindon was murdered in North China on 4 March 1912.The college closed during both the First and Second World Wars, and was a postgraduate facility for King's College, London from 1948 until its eventual closure in 1969. The nearby Lord Weymouth's Grammar School then leased the buildings, and today they form part of Warminster School. The buildings are in three phases, beginning in 1796 with the central three-storey structure, described by Pevsner as a "handsome house". To the right is the 1897–1901 extension, neo-Jacobean in dressed stone, decorated with ornate features such as gabled dormers bearing finials. In 1927 a further large L-shaped extension was built to the left, to designs of Sir Charles Nicholson. This part, which includes a chapel and library, is described by Historic England as "quite impressive Gothic".