In the south, Swallowcliffe Down rises to a height of 221 metres at a spur of White Sheet Hill, and the parish boundary is an ancient ridgeway.

From 1742, with the new Earl of Pembroke as the owner of Swallowclift manor, the estate maps show the developing settlement pattern with the Norman church at the hub.

[citation needed] The ridgeway on Swallowcliffe Down was part of a London to Exeter road in the 17th century, which in the later 18th was superseded by the lower route which is now the A30.

[1] The modern development of Swallowcliffe stemmed from the rapid social change of the 20th century, accelerated by improvements in transport and two world wars.

The exodus from the land continued, while the demand by incomers for the accessible country abode, to "improve" for full or weekend use, expanded.

By the Millennium, the transformation of the old village was clear, with only a few of its inhabitants "born and bred" in Swallowcliffe or working in its ancient tradition of agriculture.

[citation needed] An Anglo-Saxon bed burial dating to the seventh century AD was discovered within a reused Bronze Age barrow on Swallowcliffe Down in 1966.

The burial was that of a young female aged between 18 and 25, laid on an ash-wood bed with elaborate iron-work fittings, and surrounded by a collection of grave-goods of high quality.

A report of the 1966 work was published by English Heritage in 1989,[7] and the monument is a topic in Howard Williams' Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain (2006).

[11] A recess in the porch houses a recumbent stone effigy of Sir Thomas West (d.1343) which was brought from the earlier church.