Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine, vol. 97 (2004), pp. 255-272 
The Wiltshire Wildlife Trust’s Vera Jeans Nature 
Reserve at Jones’s Mill, Pewsey 
by Beverley Heath! with contributions by other authors 
There was a mill until the fourteenth century. Eighteenth-century floated water meadows were abandoned in the 
nineteenth. The vale is greensand over clay. Low-lying land, watered by springs rising from nearby chalk through 
greensand and peat, has scarce fen and carr communities with a mosaic of calcicoles and calcifuges. They are 
maintained by summer grazing. Wet flushes are also valuable habitats. Much less interesting formerly improved fields 
on the northern slopes are recovering under sympathetic management. Grass-heath restoration is planned for the 
southern slopes. Various groups of fauna are described. 
HISTORY 
Very probably our Jones’s Mill was one of the seven 
at Pewsey held by the church and paying £4 5s at 
the time of the Domesday survey (Thorn and 
Thorn, 1979, 10:67c). They would have stood on 
the Salisbury Avon, which flows through the heart 
of the reserve. Details of the site’s history are set out 
in a paper commissioned by the Trust (Chandler, 
1999). The earliest known reference to the mill by 
name is in 1359, when an inquisition post mortem lists 
a water mill named ‘Jonesmulle’ among the 
possessions of one Anastasia de Harden. This is 
almost certainly the one described in her father’s 
inquisition in 1330: a water mill in Pewsey worth ten 
shillings a year held from the Abbot of Hyde. The 
mill was abandoned probably sometime in the 
fourteenth century, but the name Jones persisted, 
attached to various meadows and woods on the site. 
An estate map of c.1811 names the meadow just 
north-east of the main bridge over the Avon as 
Jones’s Mill Mead (see map), a name also 
mentioned in a 1756 property list. 
In one field in the north of the reserve, ridge and 
furrow is still discernible — evidence of a medieval 
open field system (Wiltshire County Council 
Archaeclogy Service, undated). When the mill was 
abandoned it is likely that the land along the river 
reverted to marsh. By the mid-eighteenth century 
these marshes were converted to ‘floated’ water 
meadows. Kerridge (1953) describes the Wiltshire 
water meadows in detail. The usual procedure was 
to build a sluice upstream of the meadow to feed 
water into leats constructed parallel to the river but 
which ran higher up the valley slope. Between these 
and the river, and perpendicular to them, successive 
ridges were constructed about ten metres apart with 
their tops at the same height as the leat. Along these 
ran ducts, ‘carriages’, fed by the leats, and in the 
hollows between them were drainage channels, 
‘drawns’ (sic), running down to the river. The 
elaborate structure of the meadows was expensive 
to create and maintain, but the rewards made it 
worthwhile. Controlled flooding both enriched the 
soil and kept it warmer at night and thus promoted 
vigorous early grass. This in turn allowed more 
sheep to be kept. Sheep were of crucial importance 
to the rural economy: for meat and wool, of course, 
but above all for their dung that was used to fertilise 
the arable fields. 
At Jones’s Mill the water for the leats was 
augmented — possibly even entirely supplied — by 
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