Houghton, Hampshire

Houghtonis a small village and civil parish in the Test Valley district of Hampshire, England. The village is situated alongside the River Test. Its nearest town is Stockbridge, which lies approximately 1.8 miles (3 km) to the north-east. The village is a dispersed linear settlement, mostly strung out along the single road through the village, which broadly follows the course of the River Test north-south. Houghton is dominated by substantial agricultural/sporting estates at each end, the Houghton Lodge estate to the north and the Bossington estate to the south. Each owns a number of properties in the village.Manors and housesHoughton Lodge itself is an example of the rare 'Cottage ornée' style, of the late eighteenth century. The village also has an ancient church, All Saints, where services run on a weekly basis (with more at the tiny St James's church Bossington, set in open fields just to the south of the village.) In the Summer of 1415, during the Hundred Years' War, the army of Henry V of England camped on Agincourt Field on the Bossington estate on its way to embark for northern France and the campaign which ended with the Battle of Agincourt.John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, a son of Edward III from whom the Plantagenet House of Lancaster was descended, had a palace or hunting lodge in the neighbouring village of King's Somborne and a medieval deer park in the valley here in the fourteenth century. Some of the remains of the deer park's boundary embankments (or pale) can still be seen near Black Lake Farm as you cross the valley on foot on the Clarendon Way.