'It lies far away from the coming and going of the great busy world,' wrote an inhabitant in 1875. Today, and for many decades, the great busy world speeds along the A360 from Salisbury to Devizes and threads its way precipitously through the chicane formed by the churchyard and the almshouses. In fact the main road spends about 8km in West Lavington parish, from the high downland south of Gore, the 'buried village of Salisbury Plain', past Gore Cross, where it is intersected by an important ridgeway, down a long descent beside landscaped woodland (known as The Warren) and into the pleasant valley where the village sits, then along some 2km of ribbon development associated with the linear village of Littleton Pannell, before leaving the parish north of the railway bridge. This journey is familiar to most Wiltshire travellers, and even without realising that chalk is giving way to Greensand and clay, many must feel as they pass along that here south Wiltshire ends and west Wiltshire begins"