This podcast’s main feature is the stunning landscape and history of Hippenscombe Bottom. I wrote a blog which was an amalgam of some five visits to the area which I posted on the Hidden Wiltshire website on 21 January 2022. This walk was put together at the request of David Dawson at Wiltshire Museum and we’ll be doing a guided walk with the museum there later in the year.

We then moved onto this episode’s main subject, a previous Hidden Wiltshire/Wiltshire Museum walk to Erlestoke Wood and the 1917 Field. You can follow the walk using the link on the Hidden Wiltshire website. The walk starts in the village of Erlestoke itself. The village has connections with the Special Operations Executive, the secret British organisation that was active during the Second World War. In the graveyard next to the car park where the walk began is the gravestone of Marie Louise Huntley Walker who died in 1980 and who was a member of the French Resistance. Surely a nod to Erlestoke’s SOE activities?