This page will be re-written since I’ve been sent some great information and two wonderful images by Local Salisbury artist David Stooke
There have been two paths known as ‘Green Lane’ in the Salisbury area.
One links Bishopdown to to the Portway, running through Ford. The Bishopdown Green Lane is covered in the previous post.
The other Green Lane is a track that on the hill between Odstock and Salisbury. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure of the location – I thought it ran along the top of the hill, but that path seems to be called ‘The Avon Valley Path’.
Also, a webpage featuring a walk that starts from the hospital intructs walkers to:
Turn left to run parallel with the hospital before entering a tree lined path that curves downhill to join Green Lane and Drovers Road at the bottom of the hill. [1]
To add further confusion, I’m not entirely sure that the Odstock track is actually called ‘Green Lane’.
I first heard it referred to as Green Lane when it was occupied by about 70 ‘New Age Travellers’ in the early 1980s. I’m not sure whether ‘Green Lane’ was a name bestowed by the travellers or whether it was always called Green Lane[2]
has very kindly given me permission to use this wonderful picture of the ‘Odstock’ Green Lane.
David has a nice page about the Travellers’ community with some really good photos at:
Footnotes
- Door Step Walk 6 [↩]
- It’s not an easy thing to google, because of the use of ‘green lane’ as a verb to describe driving 4x4s along country tracks [↩]
Green Lane – Odstock
Green Lane is nowadays no more than a very narrow footpath, between the Odstock Road and the Coombe Bissett road. The path runs through a strip of woodland but before 1990 (approx) it was a wide grassy bridleway, edged with hedgerows either side. Between 1972 and 1983 it was home to a group of people living in caravans known as the “Green Laners” or the “Laners” for short. This was not a gypsy encampment, but a hippy community (althougth I’m sure some of the Laners would be cheesed off to be called hippies!). It lasted 11 glorious years, for the majority of the time “off the radar”, causing no trouble, and ignored by the local house-owning population (Britain was much more tolerant in those days). I first got to know the Lane in 1981, when a student at Salisbury College of Art.
It was evicted in 1983, a sad occasion and an early example of the crackdown by the government that was to be waged against anyone not “toeing the line”. Despite the original community broken up and dispersed, it was regularly “parked” on by other new age travellers, cheekily staying until a new eviction notice was served. This went on sporadically until around 1990, when the council, fed up with the game of cat and mouse that was being played, blocked off the ends with piles of earth. The hedgerows gradually spread and grew until they became the trees and bushes that now obliterate the wide expanse, leaving just the footpath.