Writing in 1932, Victor Strode Manley, as part of his Regional Survey Of Warminster And District, wrote the following notes concerning Upton Lovell:
From the high road one sees the gaunt ruins of the cloth mills which remained after the fire of about thirty years ago. Cobbett mentioned them under date 2nd September 1826. He had just interviewed some ragged clothiers at Frome who “had much clearer views of what is likely to happen than the pretty gentlemen of Whitehall seem to have . . . they thought the trade would never come back again to what it was before . . . The first factories that I met with were at a village called Upton Lovell, just before I came to Heytesbury. There they were doing not more than a quarter work. There is one factory, I believe, here at Warminster, and that has been suspended during the harvest, at any rate . . . It is the same at Bradford and Trowbridge . . . The landlord at Heytesbury told me that every one of them had a licence to beg, given them, he said “by the Government.’ I suppose it was some pass from a magistrate.” – Culley’s ed. II. 154.