The countryside in the part of Hampshire around the villages of Bossington and Houghton along the banks of the River Test has been inhabited by man for more than 4000 years. The conditions which originally drew men here still exist today and, although the technology of farming has improved dramatically in recent particularly in the last 50 years, the essentials remain the same.

The first known visitors to the valley were a party of mesolithic (middle stone-age) hunter/gathers who built a camp on the eastern side of the valley bottom near the site of Horsebridge station where, in 1994, an archaeoligical dig unearthed evidence of both hunting and fishing, primitive traps, together with the small flint tools typical of the period. The finds were dated to about 8000BC.