Who it remembers
Robert Loyd-Lindsay (1832–1901) won one of the first Victoria Crosses as a young officer in the Scots Fusilier Guards at the Alma and Inkerman in the Crimean War. In 1858 he married Harriet Loyd, daughter of the banker Lord Overstone, and the couple were given the Lockinge estate. He became MP for Berkshire, a founder of the British Red Cross, and in 1885 Baron Wantage. At Lockinge he rebuilt villages and ran a large home farm, and in Wantage he gave the town King Alfred’s statue and turned the Corn Exchange into a gallery of Victoria Cross paintings. He died in 1901.
The monument
Lady Wantage put up the memorial on the Ridgeway, on the edge of their estate above Lockinge, looking north over the land he had improved. Historic England dates it to 1903. It is modelled on the column of St Zanobius in the Piazza San Giovanni in Florence. An octagonal pedestal of Portland stone carries a double-stepped base of grey marble, from which a tall marble column and a short red marble shaft rise to a carved cross of white marble. From the base of the platform to the top of the cross it is 10.2 metres high. The cross was carved in Italy, and the platform, pedestal and relief carving were made by Farmer and Brindley of London, one of the leading firms of architectural sculptors of the period. It has recently been added to the National Heritage List at Grade II as a distinctive example of an early 20th-century public memorial.
Visiting
The monument stands beside the Ridgeway National Trail and can be visited at any time, free. The nearest parking is at the Ridgeway car park where the B4494 Wantage to Newbury road crosses the trail, a walk of roughly a mile east along the Ridgeway. The circular walks from Ardington and from Letcombe Regis in our walks section both pass it.
Nearby
Below the monument lie the estate villages of East Lockinge and Ardington, where Lord Wantage’s rebuilding can still be seen. Scutchamer Knob is about two miles further east along the Ridgeway, and Segsbury Camp about three miles west.