Sandy Lane is a small village in Wiltshire, England, about south-east of Chippenham and south-west of

Calne Calne () is a town and civil parish in Wiltshire, southwestern England,OS Explorer Map 156, Chippenham and Bradford-on-Avon Scale: 1:25 000.Publisher: Ordnance Survey A2 edition (2007). at the northwestern extremity of the North Wessex Downs ...

.OS Explorer Map 156, Chippenham and Bradford-on-Avon Scale: 1:25 000.Publisher: Ordnance Survey A2 edition (2007). It lies on the A342 Chippenham-

Devizes Devizes is a market town and civil parish in Wiltshire, England. It developed around Devizes Castle, an 11th-century Norman castle, and received a charter in 1141. The castle was besieged during the Anarchy, a 12th-century civil war between ...

road, just north of its junction with the A3102 to Calne.

Description

At the 2011 census, its main postcode had a population of 32 people in 17 households. Sandy Lane is on the southwestern edge of the parkland around

Bowood House Bowood is a Grade I listed Georgian country house in Wiltshire, England, that has been owned for more than 250 years by the Fitzmaurice family. The house, with interiors by Robert Adam, stands in extensive grounds which include a garden designe ...

, a country mansion which is operated as a hotel and golf resort. Nearby villages are

Derry Hill Derry Hill is a village in the English county of Wiltshire, in the civil parish of Calne Without. It has an elevated position at the northern edge of the Bowood House estate, about south-east of the centre of the town of Chippenham. Geography ...

(north) and Bromham (south). The village lies to the north of the Roman road from Bath to London. The small Roman town of Verlucio was to the south-east, and the site of a

Roman villa A Roman villa was typically a farmhouse or country house built in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, sometimes reaching extravagant proportions. Typology and distribution Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) distinguished two kinds of villas n ...

was discovered at Nuthills Farm in 1924. For some time the village was on a route from London (via Beckhampton) to Bath (via

Lacock Lacock is a village and civil parish in the county of Wiltshire, England, about 3 miles (5 km) south of the town of Chippenham, and about outside the Cotswolds area. The village is owned almost in its entirety by the National Trust ...

). The name 'Sandy Lane' is first recorded in 1675; in the next century there were around 20 houses and cottages. The village is largely in the

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authorit ...

of Calne Without; the boundary with Bromham parish runs immediately to its west.

Wiltshire Council Wiltshire Council is a council for the unitary authority of Wiltshire (excluding the separate unitary authority of Swindon) in South West England, created in 2009. It is the successor authority to Wiltshire County Council (1889–2009) and the ...

is the

unitary authority A unitary authority is a local authority responsible for all local government functions within its area or performing additional functions that elsewhere are usually performed by a higher level of sub-national government or the national governmen ...

which is responsible for all significant

local government Local government is a generic term for the lowest tiers of public administration within a particular sovereign state. This particular usage of the word government refers specifically to a level of administration that is both geographically-l ...

functions. In 1975 the whole village was made a Conservation Area, which was slightly enlarged in 1994.

Notable buildings

Sandy Lane has several well-preserved

thatched Thatching is the craft of building a roof with dry vegetation such as straw, water reed, sedge (''Cladium mariscus''), rushes, heather, or palm branches, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away from the inner roof. Since the bulk of ...

cottages. The church of St Mary & St Nicholas is also thatched. Julian Orbach, updating

Pevsner Pevsner or Pevzner is a Jewish surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Aihud Pevsner (1925–2018), American physicist * Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962), Russian sculptor, brother of Naum Gabo * David Pevsner, American actor, singer, da ...

's work, describes Sandy Lane as "a most picturesque Bowood estate village, of thatched cottages in the distinctive local

ironstone Ironstone is a sedimentary rock, either deposited directly as a ferruginous sediment or created by chemical replacement, that contains a substantial proportion of an iron ore compound from which iron (Fe) can be smelted commercially. Not to be con ...

". Wans House, in its own grounds in the angle between Back Lane and the Devizes road, is an 1820 remodelling of an earlier house. It has a two-storey 19th-century verandah with iron balconies. The public house, the ''George Inn'', is a two-storey 18th-century building re-fronted in the 19th century. For a time in the 18th century there were two other roadside inns, the White Hart and the Black Horse.

Church and chapel

Sandy Lane was anciently within the large parish of St Mary, Calne. When a chapelry district was created in 1841 for the newly built Christ Church at Derry Hill, Sandy Lane was included there. Then in 1864, the area of Chittoe parish (where St Mary's church had been built in 1845) was enlarged to include Sandy Lane. A small wooden chapel of ease dedicated to St Nicholas was erected at Back Lane in 1892. Described by

as "endearing", it is a standard design from a Worcester company. When Chittoe church was declared redundant in 1980, its parish and benefice were combined with Bromham, and in the next year Sandy Lane church was rededicated to St Mary and St Nicholas. Today Bromham parish is part of the Bromham, Chittoe and Sandy Lane benefice, which also covers St Matthew's Church at

Rowde Rowde () is a village and civil parish in the English county of Wiltshire, on the A342 about northwest of Devizes. The parish includes the hamlet of Tanis. History The village now mainly consists of modern brick-built houses, but a number of 1 ...

. Baptists built Providence Chapel on the village street in 1817, in ironstone with ashlar dressings. Orbach describes its arched mullion-and-transom windows as "oddly Elizabethan". Regular services continued until c.1956 but by 1986 the building had become a private house.

Gallery

File:The George Inn, Sandy Lane - geograph.org.uk - 191599.jpg, The George Inn File:North on the A342 at Sandy Lane - geograph.org.uk - 1185443.jpg, Looking north on the A342 File:South on the A342 ... - geograph.org.uk - 1185436.jpg, Looking south on the A342

References

{{authority control Calne Without Villages in Wiltshire