Fawley

Fawley today

Fawley is a small village in a fold of the Berkshire Downs, just west of the A338 Wantage to Hungerford road. The parish is made up of three places: North or Great Fawley, the village proper, set around its church; South or Little Fawley, a manor house and a few cottages half a mile to the south; and Whatcombe, a racing stable on the downs. It is farming and racehorse country. The parish had 132 residents in 2021, and there are no shops or pubs. Unlike its Vale neighbours, Fawley was never moved to Oxfordshire. It is still in Berkshire and comes under West Berkshire Council.

History

Name and early finds

The name appears in Domesday Book as Farellei or Faleslei. The second part is Old English leah, a woodland clearing. In April 1883 Roman graves were found on the hill between North and South Fawley.

Domesday and the manors

In 1086 North Fawley belonged to the nuns of Amesbury in Wiltshire, with 12 households, and South Fawley was the king’s, with six smallholders. When Henry II refounded Amesbury he gave its lands, Fawley among them, to the French abbey of Fontevrault in 1179, and the nuns kept the manor until the Dissolution. In 1606 Francis Moore, who had already bought South Fawley, acquired North Fawley too. His family, baronets from 1627, held both manors until 1765. In 1687 Sir Henry Moore was granted two three-day fairs at North Fawley. From 1787 the manors were part of the Woolley Park estate of the Tipping and later Wroughton families.

Whatcombe, once a parish of its own with a church, was given soon after 1086 by Geoffrey de Mandeville to his priory at Hurley. By 1924 its manor house had become a training stable. Dick Dawson trained three Derby winners there, Fifinella (1916), Trigo (1929) and Blenheim (1930), and Arthur Budgett trained Blakeney (1969) and Morston (1973). Paul Cole, based at Whatcombe from 1987, won the 1991 Derby with Generous. He retired in 2025, and at the time of writing his son Oliver Cole trains there.

The church

The old church stood further east, where its graveyard remains. It was pulled down in 1866 after G. E. Street built the present St Mary’s for Blanche Wroughton of Woolley Park. Consecrated on 12 April 1866, it is a tall church in 13th-century French Gothic style, with an apsed and vaulted chancel. Its fittings are all of a piece: Morris & Co glass of 1868, a reredos carved by Thomas Earp with a Salviati mosaic, and Godwin floor tiles. Pieces of the medieval church were reused in the new one, including 12th-century stoups. A brass of 1621 to Mary Gunter came from the old chancel.

Thomas Hardy and Marygreen

Hardy’s paternal grandmother, Mary Head, spent a hard, poor childhood in Fawley in the late 18th century. Hardy took his hero’s surname, Jude Fawley, from the village and used it as the model for Marygreen, where Jude the Obscure (1895) opens. In the novel the old church has just been pulled down and replaced by a new Gothic building, as happened here in the 1860s. The cottage linked with Mary Head is now called Jude Cottage.

Things to see

• St Mary’s Church (Grade II*), G. E. Street’s church with Morris & Co glass and a Salviati mosaic
• The old churchyard east of the village, site of the medieval church
• South Fawley Manor House (Grade II*) of about 1614, seen from Dog Kennel Lane (private)
• Downland footpaths and bridleways towards the Lambourn Downs and the Ridgeway