| Heytesbury Wood | Salisbury Plain | Wiltshire | England |

The Perfect Supplementary Filming Location for Movies Called 1917 Concerning WW1

We no longer run wedding or party events at the venue but we are always receptive to enquiries regarding film and TV locations especially Sam Mendes needing additional locations and/or facilities for the forthcoming movie 1917 being filmed on Salisbury Plain.

We have 35 acres of privately owned woodland and enclosed parkland plus a small hill available adjacent to West Hill. I’m also interested in buying any used MkV WW1 tanks that might become available. Or, in fact, most WW1 items that may need a new home vis-à-vis Siegfried Sassoon CBE, MC having lived here for much of his life. Thank you.

In Heytesbury Wood
by Siegfried Sassoon

Not less nor more than five and forty years ago

The old lord went along the ornamental ride;

For the last time he walked there, tired and very slow;

Saw the laburnum’s golden chains, the glooming green

Of bowery box-trees; stood and looked farewell, and sighed

For roots that held his heart and summers that he’d seen.

And then, maybe, he came again there, year by year,

To watch, as dead men do, and see — who knows how clear? —

That vista’d paradise which in his time had thriven;

Those trees to which in cogitating strolls he’d given

Perennial forethought, — branches that he’d lopped and cherished:

Came, and saw sad neglect; dense nettles; favourites felled

Or fallen in gales and left to rot; came and beheld

How with succeeding seasons his laburnums perished.

” Return”, I think, ” next summer, and you’ll find such change, —

Walking, some low-lit evening, in the whispering wood, —

As will refresh your eyes and do them ghostly good;

See redolence befriend, neglect no more estrange;

See plumed acacia and the nobly tranquil bay;

Laburnums too, now small as in the prosperous prime

Of your well-ordered distant mid-Victorian time . . .”

Thus I evoke him; thus he looks and goes his way

Along that path we call the ornamental ride —

The old slow lord, the ghost whose trees were once his pride.