Erlestoke - History

History

The current form of the village of Erlestoke is largely due to Joshua Smith, a Member of Parliament for Devizes. Between the 1780s and the 1810s Smith was responsible for replacing the existing Elizabethan house with one higher up the hill east of the village, landscaping the park, and moving the houses of the village to the current High Street, where he added picturesque estate cottages incorporating pieces of sculpture and architectural fragments from the old manor house.

Erlestoke House was seriously damaged by a fire in 1950. It is now part of HM Prison Erlestoke.

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