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.

[5] Apart from an interruption during the Civil War the estate continued with the Cottingtons until sold to William Beckford, future Lord Mayor of London, in 1745.

[5] From the 16th century until the 20th, most of the population were employed by the parish's wealthy households; 493 were recorded at the 1801 census, and numbers declined since then, reaching a new low of 102 in 2011.

The stud has produced winners of several major races: the Nassau Stakes (Spree, 1963); the Oaks (Juliette Marny, 1975 and Scintillate, 1979); and the St Leger (Julio Mariner, 1978).

[5] This in turn was a replacement for an older church, said in 1566 to have been dedicated to St Nicholas,[5] that stood near the stream in the north-east quarter of the parish, close to the now-demolished Fonthill House.

An early house was damaged by fire in 1624 or 1625 and was bought by Lord Cottington in 1632, who by 1637 had finished restoring it,[5] and may have used the services of Inigo Jones.

He added a five-arched bridge over the lake, placed a folly on the high ground to the west of the house and demolished the old parish church.

The west portion of the house survived, becoming known as The Pavilion, and was bought around 1829 by James Morrison, the millionaire draper and railway investor.

Built by William Beckford between 1796 and 1813, the rest of the building was damaged by the collapse of the main tower in 1825, and almost wholly demolished by 1845; a habitable fragment remains.