Chirton is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England, on the southern edge of the Vale of Pewsey about south-east of Devizes. The parish includes the hamlet of Conock, about half a mile west of Chirton village. Both settlements are just north the A342 Devizes-Andover road and are reached by separate lanes from the main road. The northern boundary of the parish follows approximately the course of the River Avon, and in the south the parish extends onto Salisbury Plain. History Chirton (17 households and one mill) and Conock (18) were recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. Early in the 12th century an estate at Chirton was granted to the recently established Lanthony Priory, Gloucester, who retained it until the Dissolution. The mill recorded in Domesday Book was probably that later known as Church Mill, on the Avon in the north-east corner of the parish. It belonged to Chirton manor and therefore later to Lanthony; by 1572 it was owned by John Eyre of Wedhampton, Chirton and Great Chalfied. A descendant sold it in 1671 to Ralph Brideoake, dean of Salisbury, who presumably made the purchase on behalf of the almshouses at Heytesbury, whose charity owned it until the early 20th century. Their tenants, the Chandler family, used the site for malting; there was also a corn mill in the later 19th century. The buildings fell into disuse in the early 20th century and today those that remain are dwellings. The population of the parish peaked around the middle of the 19th century, with 467 recorded at the 1851 census, around a third of them at Conock. Numbers declined to 261 by 1901. Some of downland in the southernmost part of the parish, south of an ancient east-west track, was purchased by the War Department in 1899–1900 and today forms part of the Salisbury Plain Training Area. When the Stert and Westbury Railway was opened through the Vale in 1900, the nearest station was near Patney, north of Chirton village. Known initially as 'Patney Bridge', this was soon changed to 'Patney and Chirton' to avoid confusion with Putney Bridge station in London. The station closed in 1966. Conock The manor recorded in Domesday Book was held by Robert, Count of Mortain (half-brother of William the Conqueror) and tenanted by Grestain Abbey, Normandy. By at least the 14th century it was administered from Wilmington Priory, the abbey's cell in