County in England
Wiltshire
Wiltshire gave Britain its tallest cathedral spire, its first safari park outside Africa and a nickname built on a story about raking a pond for the moon.
Key information
- County
- Wiltshire
- Nation
- England
- Area
- About 3,485 square kilometres
- Known for
- Stonehenge, Avebury, Salisbury Cathedral, Longleat, white chalk horses and crop circles
- What locals are called
- Wiltshire folk, with Moonrakers as the old nickname
- Famous people
- Sir Christopher Wren, Thomas Hobbes, John Aubrey, Diana Dors
- Football clubs
- Swindon Town, Salisbury, Chippenham Town
About Wiltshire
The county that built the world's most famous stone circle
Wiltshire's chalk downland was crowded with ritual and monument builders thousands of years ago. Stonehenge is the star. Its great sarsen stones were hauled from the Marlborough Downs area, while most of the smaller bluestones came from the Preseli Hills in Wales, roughly 150 miles away. The main stone phase dates to around 2500 BC. The sandstone Altar Stone, also classed as a bluestone, travelled even further. Research published in 2024 showed it originated in northern Scotland. Twenty-odd miles north is Avebury, the largest stone circle in Britain. It is so big that a village sits inside it, and a pub, the Red Lion, stands within the stones. Nearby Silbury Hill, about 30 metres tall, is the largest artificial prehistoric mound in Europe. Nobody has ever found a burial in it. Even the name hints at the past. Wiltshire comes from Wilton, once a major Anglo-Saxon centre, and means the shire of the people of Wilton.
Why Wiltshire people are called Moonrakers
The famous tale goes like this. Smugglers had hidden kegs of brandy in a village pond. When excise men turned up, the locals were caught raking the water. They pointed at the reflected moon and said they were trying to fish out a big round cheese. The officers laughed at the bumpkins and walked off. The smugglers, of course, had the last laugh. The story is told about Devizes and several other Wiltshire villages, and the nickname Moonrakers has stuck to the whole county, as well as to its pubs, clubs and teams. It is a very Wiltshire joke: playing the fool while quietly outwitting the authorities.
A spire, a clock and a Magna Carta
Salisbury Cathedral has the tallest church spire in Britain, at 123 metres. It was added in the 14th century to a cathedral that was otherwise built remarkably fast, between 1220 and 1258. That is why the building looks so unified. Inside is one of the four surviving originals of Magna Carta from 1215, kept in the chapter house. The cathedral also has one of the oldest working mechanical clocks in the world, dating to around 1386. It has no face. Just up the road is Old Sarum, the Iron Age hillfort and Norman cathedral site that the city moved away from in the 13th century, apparently in part because of a feud between clergy and soldiers and a shortage of water.
Photographs, safaris and a bumper crop of oddities
At Lacock Abbey in 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot made the earliest surviving photographic negative. It shows a latticed window in the abbey. The village around it looks so unspoilt that film crews return again and again, and Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice have both used it. In 1966 the Marquess of Bath opened Longleat as the first drive-through safari park outside Africa. Lions roamed the grounds of an Elizabethan country house, and a new kind of British day out was born. Then there are the chalk hill figures. The Westbury White Horse and others like Cherhill and Pewsey are cut into the downs, and the county is also crop-circle country, with mysterious patterns appearing in its wheat fields every summer since the 1980s.
Railways, Roundabouts and Salisbury Plain
Swindon grew because of the Great Western Railway. Its railway works, established in the 1840s, turned a small market town into a major industrial centre. Swindon is also home to the Magic Roundabout, a ring of five mini-roundabouts around a larger one, opened in 1972 and loved and feared by drivers ever since. Swindon Town famously beat Arsenal to win the 1969 League Cup at Wembley. To the south lies Salisbury Plain, the largest area of unimproved chalk grassland in north-western Europe. It is also a major Army training area, which has helped to protect the wildlife. Great bustards, among the heaviest flying birds in the world, were reintroduced here from 2004, about 170 years after they became extinct as a breeding species in Britain in 1832. Across the north of the county the Kennet and Avon Canal runs through Devizes, where the 29 locks of Caen Hill climb the hillside like a staircase.
Ham, bacon and lardy cake
Wiltshire's pigs gave the world a famous curing method. Wiltshire cure, a mild brine-based process developed in the 19th century, was made famous by Harris of Calne, and Wiltshire ham and bacon are still in butchers' shops across the country. The county's other classic is lardy cake, a sticky, sugary loaf made with lard, dried fruit and spices. It is not a diet food. The county's well-known sons include Sir Christopher Wren, born at East Knoyle in 1632, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, born at Malmesbury in 1588. The antiquary John Aubrey, who wrote about Avebury and recorded much of the county's lore, was Wiltshire-born too, and Swindon gave the world the actress Diana Dors.