At Kilmington his friend Francis Potter was Rector, a Wiltshireman like himself, born at Mere under Castle Hill and, like Aubrey, a lover of clear-cut chalk hills, such as Cley Hill, near Warminster, and the Knolls.
"He took great delight in Knoll Hill," says Aubrey. This man became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He "had an admirable mechanical invention," and made quadrants with a graduated compass—his own invention. Above the well at the parsonage, which was very deep, was the most ingenious and useful contrivance Aubrey had ever seen, for emptying the vast bucket without a strain. He wrote an "Interpretation of the Number 666." It was a pity, says Aubrey, that he was "staked to a private preferment in an obscure corner," to contract moss "like an old pole in an orchard." But Aubrey had never enjoyed anywhere else "such philosophical and hearty entertainment" as at Kilmington. He describes the old man like a monk, "pretty long-visaged," with "pale clear skin" and grey eye, talking "all new and unvulgar," his house undecked as a monk's cell, but with a "pretty contrived garden," "all fortified (as you may say) and adorned" with the finest of box hedges. On the other side of the old westward road lies Stourton, home of the Stourtons, of whom Aubrey has a story. The seventh Baron, like the other old peers, envied the upstart Herbert of Wilton, Lord Pembroke, and as he passed Wilton House on his way to or from Salisbury his retainers sounded trumpets and gave "reproachful challenging words": which was, says Aubrey, "a relique of knighthood errantry." This Lord Stourton was executed for murder in 1557. Still farther away from Kilmington, at Gillingham, Edward
