File:Ox Drove near Teffont Down 1 - geograph.org.uk - 481937.jpg

English: Ox Drove near Teffont Down 1. This concrete road lies on the Ox Drove, a drove road of possibly pre-Roman antiquity along which cattle and sheep were driven to market. The track is predominantly on chalk downland in west Wiltshire and can be traced for 20km from near Wilton in the east to near Hindon in the west.

In the autumn, sheep were driven from Chilmark to local fairs at Westbury Hill to the north-west, at Wylye to the north-east, and to Weyhill, Britford, Wilton, and Salisbury to the east. At the Wilton fair there could be up to one hundred and twenty thousand sheep gathering at dawn on single day and auctioneers walked along planks above the hurdles to sell them.

The Ox Drove here is a restricted byway as well as being part of the Monarch's Way.

This view also shows the line of Grim's Ditch, see 469839. From the left it converges on the byway in the clump of trees in the middle distance, then briefly turns north-east away from the camera towards Wylye Down to another clump of trees, before continuing east along the line of trees in the distance on the right.

During WWII, the byway was concreted between the Chilmark road and Grovely Wood to provide access to ammunition and bomb dumps that were sited there, and to Oakley Farm which was then an air force ordnance base, see http://www.atlantikwall.co.uk/atlantikwall/awall_use/ordnancedepots07/html/page04.htm.

Monarch's Way is a meandering route of 615m which follows the route taken by Charles II after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, and ends in Shoreham in East Sussex, where Charles finally escaped to France.