Bramley

People were here before the Romans. Bullsdown Camp, on the edge of the parish, is a prehistoric enclosure of about ten acres inside a ring of ditches and banks, and flint tools have been found in it. The Roman road from Calleva at Silchester towards Chichester passes through the parish.

The parish church of St James is Norman, with a tower of 1636 and an addition of 1802 designed by John Soane. In the 1870s the vicar uncovered wall paintings from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries under the whitewash of the Reformation, among them the murder of Thomas Becket and a large St Christopher, and they are a large part of why the church is listed Grade I and why people come to see it.

The railway from Reading to Basingstoke opened in 1848 and ran straight past. The Duke of Wellington would not have a station on his land, and Bramley did not get one until 1895, when the buildings still standing on the platforms went up.

The First World War brought the army. An ordnance depot was begun at Bramley in 1917 and grew through the 1920s, and at its height in the Second World War Bramley Camp employed more than six thousand people. It closed in 1978, was used by the Americans for a time, and is a military training area today. The village itself had about nine hundred people in 1900 and stayed near that size until the 1960s, when the housing that makes up most of Bramley now began to go up.

Clift Meadow and the village hall were left to the village by the Clift brothers, local farmers, which is why the recreation ground carries their name.