Notes. Images include family concepts and formal architectural drawings dating from the 1780s. The north aspect added the present portico (1820s) re-routing the drive to circle the house to form the formal entrance.

The library image with musical instruments. The piano in the foreground held a visitor’s book, Siegfried Sassoon, recording T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and others.

The bluestone forming a seat in Heytesbury Park. Originally from nearby Boles Barrow and, controversially, directly connected to Stonehenge. Currently at Salisbury Museum, donated by Siegfried Sassoon.

“The Boles Barrow Bluestone in Salisbury Museum is the only foreign rock from south west Wales found in Wiltshire not at Stonehenge that can be considered more than a fragment.”

Dennis Wheatley, author, based The Devil Rides Out (1934) at Heytesbury House, substituting Chilbury for Heytesbury supposedly to avoid upsetting Siegfried Sassoon.

Christmas Day 1965. The global phenomenon known as ‘The Warminster Thing’ began at Knook Camp (Heytesbury). A decade of the still unexplained followed.

Crop Circles. Naturally or otherwise, the global epicentre is Wiltshire. Equally, with an inevitable certainty, the earliest example (1950s) formed as a five of dice at…Heytesbury.

Original images of Siegfried Sassoon, novelist and poet, taken by his son, George Sassoon, at Heytesbury House, Wiltshire.

The images were originally in low resolution monochrome and have been colourised and enhanced with Ai. The formal portrait of Siegfried Sassoon and his, then, wife Hester (Gatty) is by Cecil Beaton.

Siegfried Sassoon does not play any part in this narrative. George, however, was fascinated by the strange. Many of the assembled apparitions mentioned here were referenced by him along with local lore and extra terrestrial activity. He very much subscribed to the Chariots of the Gods take on human evolution and held that we only actually exist on virtual servers.

This I share. Had he lived long enough to witness artificial intelligence, it would hardly have persuaded him otherwise.

“The film follows the life of Siegfried Sassoon, a British poet and decorated World War I combat veteran who was sent to a psychiatric facility for his anti-war stance. He had love affairs with several men during the 1920s, married, had a son, and converted to Catholicism.”

The director Terence Davies’ last film featuring Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as Siegfried Sassoon. The timeline of Davies’ biopic is, perhaps, deliberate but given that Sassoon lived at Heytesbury House from 1933 until his death in 1967 it is oddly substituted for wisteria suburbia.

George, who apparently loved a bit of 60s rock, lived with his parents despite not doing so not least because his mother had long since moved to Lochbuie, Isle of Mull.

One oddly accurate representation was the publicity shot used for the marketing. This painting from Heytesbury reflects, uncannily, the shot used of Jack Lowden. The late Terence Davies never came to Heytesbury.

But Steven Spielberg did come to Heytesbury. As a producer of the movie 1917 directed by Sam Mendes. Much of the action of this WW1, one take, production was filmed on Salisbury Plain. If you look again at the running sequence, during the full infantry assault, you will notice the ridges of Salisbury Plain, bright white chalk, excavated for the trench system.

The sequence involving the downed German aircraft was filmed at Heytesbury. Mr. Spielberg was accosted by a local housewife, in her dressing gown, who was idly wondering who was wandering about in her garden.

His security team invited her not to accost Mr. Spielberg and she was encouraged to retreat behind her net curtains whilst WW1 unfolded around her.

The Manna Machine is a 1978 book by George Sassoon and Rodney Dale, based upon a translation of a section of the Zohar.

The machine was reproduced by Sassoon who was an engineer, who followed the directions given in The Ancient of Days and he claimed it created a food source of algae. This explains how the Israelites survived their forty-year journey in the Sinai Desert. It is said by Sassoon and Dale that a nuclear reactor used to power the manna machine was stored within the Ark of the Covenant.