Grovely Wood

It stands on a chalk ridge above the River Wylye in Barford St Martin parish, to the south-west of the village of Great Wishford, within the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Adjacent to Grovely, to the north, lies the grassland Site of Special Scientific Interest Ebsbury Down.

[2] At a Grovely swainmote held in March 1603, a jury drawn from Great Wishford and Barford St Martin declared that the forest then consisted of fourteen coppices.

[6] According to a mediaeval custom, villagers of Great Wishford have a right to gather firewood in Grovely Wood on 29 May, Oak Apple Day.

The trees are located approximately 50 meters away from the Roman road some ten minutes walk from the Wilton end of the wood.

[9] The Burcombe Woodsman is thought to be a poacher who was hanged from a tree for his 'crimes', or possibly an artist who painted in watercolour and was accidentally shot in the woods during a deer cull.

The antiquary John Britton reports in a volume of his The Beauties of England and Wales (1814) that ...the Great Ridge Wood... was anciently conjoined with Grovely-Wood, but is now separated from it by an extent of nearly four miles of open down.

The whole was then designated by the appellation of Grovely-Forest, and such it appears to have been so late as the thirty-third year of Queen Elizabeth, when a law-suit occurred between Edward, Earl of Hertford, and the Queen's Majesty, in behalf of Henry, Earl of Pembroke, concerning the bounds of the forest of Grovely in the county of Wilts, in which it was decided that the last perambulation of 28 Edward I, and no other, stood good in law.