Bird’s Marsh is no stranger to controversy.

The “quiet” and “unremarkable” place is at the heart of a present-day campaign to stop development.

And a newly published book, Birds’ Marsh, Chippenham, An Unfinished Story, chronicles campaigns to save the marsh, once part of Langley Common.

Author Stephen Hunt is the great-great grandson of David Hunt and his wife Agnes, the last gamekeeper to live in Keepers Cottage, which had no running water, gas, electricity or flush toilets. The cottage had six rooms – kitchen, dining room, living room and parents’ bedroom.

Mr Hunt built bunks in the recesses in the walls around the chimney breast to create a boys’ and a girls’ bedroom.

The toilet stayed in the memory of Sheena Cox, the Hunts’ great granddaughter who describes it in the book as: “A shed with a three-holed toilet seat to suit small, medium and large bottoms.”

The marsh, once part of common land known as Langley Common, later became part of the Langley Estate, owned by the Ashe family since 1665.

The Scott-Ashe family still own Bird’s Marsh Wood although it is managed by Humberts estate agents.

The book traces the lives of the Hunts from around the mid 1880s to the 1950s when Philomena, the last Hunt family member, moved out.

The cottage was home to others but was later left empty and vandals are believed to have destroyed it by fire during the 1960s.

Stephen Hunt’s book includes descriptions of the marsh by diarist Francis Kilvert who served as a curate in Langley Burrell in the 1860s and 70s.

It also features chronicles by socialists Robin and Heather Tanner who write of gypsies living on the marsh.

Robin Tanner, an early hunt saboteur who lived from 1904 to 1988, writes of how he and his wife opened fox earths, or holes, that had been “stopped” by supporters of the Beaufort Hunt.

“We would un-stop every one we could, hurling away the boughs and logs that had been brutally stuffed down them. But we could not stop the slaughter,” he writes.

He had no time for the hunt supporters, describing Mark Phillips, then husband of Princess Anne, as “that stupid oaf” and saying: “We saw no beauty nor romance in oafish men and their hard-faced women, dressed up for murder, tearing heedlessly over any man’s property in their blood lust.”

Birds’ Marsh was a firm fixture in the hunting calendar until the 1970s when hounds strayed onto the M4.

The book finishes with a mention of three campaigns to stop development in 1987, 1991 and 1994 to 1996.

Stephen Hunt writes that present opposition has been driven, in part, by: “surprise and indignation that the local authorities would even be considering yet again the possibility of building in this area, (a proposal) that has been so forthrightly rejected in the recent past.”

* Birds’ Marsh, Chippenham, An Unfinished Story, by Stephen E Hunt, Hobnob Press on behalf of Chippenham Museum and Heritage Centre, £6.95.