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Question

What was the Winterslow Hut?

Question asked on

04 July 2011

Answer

The Winterslow Hut was an inn, now known as the Pheasant Inn. It was a famous coaching inn where William Hazlitt once resided and wrote his Winterslow Essays and which, at different times, was visited by Charles and Mary Lamb and Rudyard Kipling. It was here that the Exeter mail coach was attacked by a lioness in 1816. The lioness was part of a menagerie on its way to Salisbury Fair and severely mauled one of the horses plus a large Newfoundland dog before being recap-tured. The coach passengers with great presence of mind locked themselves inside the inn while the keepers recaptured the lioness from under a granary. Several of the inns on the turnpike and coaching roads in southern Wiltshire were 'Huts'. There was a Cribbage Hut at Sutton Mandeville, which must have been named from the card game that was played there. The word 'Hut' may have derived from its meaning of a shelter for troops which seems to been in use from the mid 16th century. The inn provided shelter to travellers for the night and may have begun life as a wooden hut.

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