Bowerchalke is in the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which is part of the Southern England Chalk Formation.

The Grade II* listed church of the Holy Trinity dates from the 13th century, and Nobel Prize winning novelist William Golding is buried in the churchyard.

[6] The Domesday Book in 1086 divided the Chalke Valley into eight manors, Chelke or Chelce or Celce (Bowerchalke and Broad Chalke), Eblesborne (Ebbesbourne Wake), Fifehide (Fifield), Cumbe (Coombe Bissett), Humitone (Homington), Odestoche (Odstock), Stradford (Stratford Tony and Bishopstone) and Trow (approximately Alvediston and Tollard Royal).

This included the parishes of Berwick St John, Ebbesbourne Wake, Fifield Bavant, Semley, Tollard Royal and 'Chalke'.

Henry heaped favours and honours (a knighthood) upon Herbert and granted him the estates of Wilton, Remesbury (north Wiltshire), and Cardiff Castle.

One set is retained by Bodleian Library at Oxford and the second is on loan to the Wiltshire and Swindon Archives by its custodian Paul Lee, where it can be viewed in their offices at Chippenham.

The once renowned village cricket team, thanks in part to the dynasty of 'cricketing Gullivers' (Brian, David, Derek, Richard and Robin), closed c. 1973/74.

[9] A response titled Bowerchalke is not the village of the Damned was written by Will Heaven, Assistant Comment Editor of The Daily Telegraph on 30 August 2009.

In 2011 Bowerchalke's new cricket ground became the main venue for the first annual Chalke Valley History Festival, co-organised by local author James Holland.

Pevsner and Orbach assess the style of the transept arches, and lancet windows in the nave and chancel, as consistent with that date, indicating that the building's cruciform plan was already in place.

The unseen underlying rocks of Bowerchalke started to form in shallow seas surrounding volcanic islands up to 1,000 million years ago (Proterozoic), about 60-70 degrees south of the equator, the latitude of present-day Argentina.

'Proto-Bowerchalke' and the rest of England and Wales are part of Avalonia, a micro-continent that broke away from the southern landmass, and was 50 degrees south of the equator about 500 mya.

The main portion of the village is formed on the unique 'Bowerchalke greensand inlier' (an area of older rock completely surrounded by younger layers), highlighted in green on the adjacent map.

The Greensand inlier is a dome shaped area of hard, coarse, olive-green coloured sandstone rock which has had its covering of softer chalk eroded away by 60 million years of weathering since the region was lifted out of the sea.

The Cretaceous Upper Greensand is about 120 million years old and was deposited in brackish, oxygen depleted, water when Bowerchalke was located at around 35 degrees north of the equator, roughly equivalent to southern Spain and Portugal.

Surrounding the greensand is a ring of younger Lower Cretaceous Chalk which is about 100 million years old (darker blue on the adjacent map).

The whole area is bounded by the 'vast expanse' of Upper Cretaceous chalk (shown white on the adjacent map) that continued to form when Bowerchalke was about 45 degrees north, roughly equivalent to Bordeaux or the Dordogne in France.

Above the exposed Cretaceous chalk slopes of Marleycombe the hilltops are covered with a very young layer of Pleistocene 'clay with flint' that is about 1–10 million years old and formed by alluvial sediments in cold shallow waters (pink on the adjacent map).

This is mainly due to erosion during the sustained permafrost and tundra-like conditions in the periglacial zones of multiple ice ages.

Although the southern limit of the main glaciation is a line across North Wiltshire that corresponds to the M4 corridor, the sun rarely melted the north-facing snow pockets on Marlecombe Down, thus they eroded the soft chalks and clays by eating back into them, leaving the very steep scarp faces.

The southern boundary between the greensand and chalk is concealed beneath a layer of heavy clay that has accumulated at the bottom of Marleycombe Down due to the periglacial solifluction.