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Chiseldon / United Kingdom

Chiseldon is a village and civil parish in the borough of Swindon, Wiltshire, England. It takes its name from the Old English cisel dene, or gravel valley, being noted in the Domesday Book as Chiseldene. The village lies on the edge of the Marlborough Downs, a mile south of junction 15 of the M4 motorway, on the A346 between Swindon and Marlborough. The large village of Wroughton is 2.5 miles to the east. The parish includes the hamlets of Badbury. Badbury Wick, Draycot Foliat, Hodson, and Ridgeway View; the ancient manor of Burderop is also within the parish. The village houses a school, the Chiseldon Primary School, which currently has some 158 pupils enrolled, most of them from the village itself. The Holy Cross Church is also located in Chiseldon. The church was built in the thirteenth century along with other local churches in Ogbourne St. George and Ogbourne St. Andrew. The village has a surgery, as well as two hotels one of which is Chiseldon House Hotel, an attractive historic property. It also has an Esso petrol station, two shops and various other businesses. The engineering consultancy firm Halcrow Group Limited, soon to be CH2MHill, operates from Burderop Park, located in the parish. There are two pubs in the village, The Patriots Arms and the Plough Inn. There is also the Social Club. The Elm Tree Pub has now closed down; this was originally a thatched beer house and was constructed in 1845 . The pub was named after the elm tree which was located on the village green until the 1970s. Chiseldon telephone exchange serves 1048 residential and 39 non-residential properties.

Richard Jefferies

Chiseldon / United Kingdom

John Richard Jefferies was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction. Jefferies's corpus of writings covers a range of genres and topics, including Bevis , a classic children's book, and After London , a work of science fiction. For much of his adult life he suffered from tuberculosis, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart . This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings about the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time, but it is his success in conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher and Round About a Great Estate , that has drawn most admirers. Walter Besant wrote of his reaction on first reading Jefferies: "Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not."