Wiltshire's locals are Moonrakers, named after smugglers who fooled the taxmen
Caught raking a village pond at night, Wiltshire smugglers hiding kegs of contraband liquor told excise men they were trying to rake in a big round cheese, really the moon's reflection. The officers took them for simpletons and left. The county that gave the world Stonehenge still calls its natives Moonrakers.
This ceremonial county in South West England covers 3,485 square kilometres and had an estimated 767,575 residents in 2024. It is mostly rural, with a thinly populated centre and southwest; Swindon, in the northeast, is the largest town, and the cathedral city of Salisbury sits in the southeast. The name, written Wiltunscir in the 9th century, comes from Wilton, the old county town.
Geology shapes almost everything. About two-thirds of the county lies on chalk, the soft, porous white limestone of the downs, while the northwest sits on the harder oolite of the Cotswolds. Because chalk soaks up rain, the hills have little surface water, so towns grew at wet spots; Salisbury lies where the chalk of Salisbury Plain meets marshy flood plains. Clay vales such as the Vale of Pewsey and the Avon Vale run between the uplands.
Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age communities built on these downs, leaving Stonehenge and Avebury, which together form a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today much of Salisbury Plain is a British Army training ground. In the 6th and 7th centuries Wiltshire marked the western fringe of Saxon Britain. By the Domesday Survey it had 390 mills and vineyards at Tollard and Lacock, and in the 13th and 14th centuries the Cistercian abbey at Stanley sold wool to Florence and Flanders.
During the English Civil War the county leaned Parliamentarian, though the Royalists won at Roundway Down near Devizes. Around 1800 the Kennet and Avon Canal carried goods between Bristol and London until the Great Western Railway took over. Visitors come for Salisbury's medieval cathedral and stately homes such as Longleat, with its safari park, and the National Trust's Stourhead. The population is changing too: White British residents fell from 94.8% in 2001 to 85.1% in 2021.
Source: Wiltshire
