These villages, together with Amport, Thruxton, Monxton, and East Cholderton, lie in the triangular district between the branching of the two great routes of the road to Exeter. Just out of Andover, on the rising road, stands the old toll-house that commanded either route, with the mileage to various towns still displayed prominently on its walls. The right-hand road leads to the Weyhill and Amesbury branch of the Exeter Road, while the left-hand fork is the main road to Salisbury. Passing this toll-house, the old road runs through an inhospitable succession of uplands which are for the most part a weariness alike to mind and body, whether you walk, or cycle, or drive a horse, or urge forth your wild career on a motor-car. Going westwards, the gradient is chiefly a rising one for a long distance after leaving Andover behind, and it is not until ‘the Wallops’ are reached, at Little (or Middle) Wallop, lying in a hollow where a little stream trickles across the road, that any relief is experienced. It must be Little Wallop to which Mr. Thomas Hardy refers in the _Mayor of Casterbridge_, where the ruined and broken-hearted Henchard, after taking up his early occupation of hay-trusser, becomes employed at a ‘pastoral farm near the old western highway.... He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.’ The Wallops are interesting places, despite their silly name. There are Over, and Nether, and Middle, or, as they are otherwise styled, Upper, Lower, and Little Wallop. According to one school of antiquaries (who must by no means be suspected of joking), the Wallop district is to be identified with the ‘Gualoppum’ described by an old chronicler, a district, appropriately enough, the scene of a great battle in which Vortigern was defeated by the Saxons. There are, of course, local derivations of the meaning of this place-name, together with a belief that to Sir John Wallop, an ancestor of the Earl of Portsmouth, who ‘walloped the French’ in one or other of our many mediæval battles with that nation, we owe that very active, not to say slangy verb, ‘to wallop.’ But, unhappily for unscientific theories, there is a little stream, called the Wallop, flowing through these villages, to which they owe their generic name; the name of the stream itself deriving from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Weallan,’ to boil or bubble; the root of our English word ‘well.’