On the vast chalk lands of Salisbury Plain lies a strange anomaly: an East German village built in the Cold War for army training. An easy 6 mile walk past ancient monuments and over unspoilt grassland will take you there.
Before war, there is training for war. Since 1897, the British Army have used Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, which today is the largest expanse of preserved chalk downland in northern Europe. Some 38,000 hectares are given over to military training and ironically as men practice for death and destruction, nature flourishes in the otherwise undisturbed environment.
Copehill Down village was built during the Cold War to imitate an East German village and combined with the lovely views, big skies and open spaces of the Plain, this easy 6 mile walk makes for an interesting day out.
An easy start
Tilshead village lies on the A360 about 10 miles south of Devizes and the walk starts at the garage there, which has a little mini shop if you want to stock up on snacks before you leave head out.
There is parking just across the road at the Chitterne road junction and it is this road that one follows initially, heading gently uphill on the bitumen.
After 500 m, a water tower is seen to the left and you turn south east here, following a track down a gentle hill and up to trees on the hill above. Here you turn right down an avenue of trees and the embankment you appear to be following is actually a huge prehistoric long barrow. There are some 2,300 ancient sites on the training area, dating as far back as 4000 B.C.
It is a pleasant stroll amongst the trees and towards the end, these are marked by graffiti – or ‘arborglyphs’ to use the correct term – from the World War 2 troops who trained here. A researcher tracked one American family down whose father Frank had carved his and his sweetheart’s name, Helen, into a tree whilst waiting to join the D Day invasion. He had married Helen on the eve of departure to Europe and promised to carve her name everywhere. He survived and died in 2001.
A left hand turn onto a gravel track leads you gently downhill and the plain really starts to open up around you. Virtually unploughed since Roman times, the poor chalk grasslands don‘t allow any one species to dominate so there is a great variety of flora, including cowslips and orchids. This in turn leads to an abundance of bees, insects and butterflies who benefit from the lack of pesticides – and so on up the food chain to the birds.
One interesting conservation effort involves the 2003 reintroduction of the Great Bustard, which became extinct in Britain in 1840. Individuals were bought from the Russian steppes and have successfully established a breeding colony. They are a large brown bird with a grey head, somewhat similar to a goose. Weighing up to 18 kg, they are the world’s heaviest flying bird, though they prefer to run if disturbed. They are shy so are difficult to spot, but if all else fails, you can console yourself over a glass of Great Bustard beer from Stonehenge Ale. There was once a Bustard Inn at Shrewton but it has unfortunately gone the way of many pubs and is now owned by God Unlimited (sic)!
The Village
Another short hill leads up towards the Cope Hill Down village which is also of known as an FIBUA – Fighting in Built Up Area – village in military parlance. Though built as an East German village, it has been adapted over the years to fit our various theatres of war, from Northern Ireland to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The village is hemmed in by a wall and one is not allowed to enter but just off the path it is possible to visit a ruined helicopter and just beyond, a collection of railway engines and old goods carriages. Nearby, there is an assortment of shipping containers linked into ‘rooms’. The area is quite eerie in its isolation and abandonment and you find yourself tiptoeing around expecting to be ambushed at any point.
The walk initially swings right in front of the village then continues to do almost a complete loop of the town, until finally another entrance on the eastern side is reached. These empty streets were especially built for training purposes but just to the north is Imber, a genuine village whose inhabitants were evacuated in 1943 to allow for army exercises and never allowed to return. A walk there is an interesting juxtaposition to this one.
Heading Home
Taking the track opposite, the trail then swings NNE over Copehill Down with expansive views over the big open plains. En route, it is possible to find sprinklings of empty bullet cases or spent flares with their limp parachutes still attached.
Another interesting inhabitant of the plain is the fairy shrimp which was once found in the watery divots left by cattle. They can endure long periods of drought and temperature extremes by undertaking a long hibernation until water and ideal conditions return.
However, these days they make use of the flooded tracks left by tanks and can sometimes be spotted looking rather like blades of grass in the water. Nature is more adaptive than we give it credit for and its micro – management is tailored solely to meet our needs: in reality it would cope much better without us.
The grassy mound of White Barrow appears on the right, after which a left turn leads back to our starting point at Tilshead, the track now threading through farming land. The cluster of buildings on the skyline belong to Westdown Camp, an army base. Today as much as ever the armed forces are in a state of readiness but it is easy to feel far removed from war under the wide skies and skylark song of the Plain.
