Nearby on the other side of the Stour valley are Pen Pits, a series of small circular pits where greensand stone was quarried to make querns for hand grinding corn, in the Iron Age, Roman and medieval periods.

[10] The A303 trunk road, taking traffic from London via Andover to Wincanton and the southwest, passed through the village[11] until 1992, when it was diverted to the south.

Additions were made in the 17th century and the 1860s, resulting in a large L-shaped country house having a tower with battlemented parapet, one-and-a-half storeys above the rest.

[23] In 1876, Julia Chafyn Grove gave money for fittings including the organ, reredos and five of the bells,[22] and for the addition of a spire to the tower.

[28] The Monarch's Way long-distance footpath passes through Zeals and Wolverton, and the Stour Valley Way crosses the far west of the parish.

[21] His sister Julia Chafyn Grove (d. 1897) provided Zeals village hall in 1888; her other philanthropy included paying for the building of a school at Mere.

[32] The station was transferred in August 1943 to the USAAF whose initial plan was to use the airfield to maintain C-47 Skytrain transport aircraft.

However, the damp conditions prevented heavy loads so P-47 Thunderbolt fighter aircraft were flown from Zeals instead.

From March 1944 the airfield reverted to the RAF who posted Mosquito there to intercept incoming German bombers.

A memorial stands at nearby Beech Clump in Stourton to mark the site where an RAF transport plane crashed on 19 February 1945, killing 21 on board.

[33] The plane had taken off from Zeals airfield to return to Leicester after two weeks of glider training and flew into cloud-covered beech trees on the knoll.