Hackpen, Warren & Gramp's Hill Downs
UK Site of Special Scientific Interest

Hackpen, Warren & Gramp's Hill Downs is a 71.4-hectare (176-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest in Letcombe Bassett in Oxfordshire.
Site features
The site is composed of three separate sloping areas of unimproved chalk downland, representing a type of habitat now uncommon in the Berkshire Downs. It was formerly notified as Hackpen Hill and Crowhole Bottom. Eleven species of butterfly have been recorded, including chalkhill blue, brown argus and marbled white. The site has extensive views over rolling countryside.
Gramp's Hill Down is the most easterly area, and the closest to Letcombe Bassett. The main grass is upright brome, and it has a rich variety of herbs, including yellow rattle, chalk milkwort and kidney vetch.
The eastern half of the central area, Warren Down, is also dominated by upright brome, with herbs including bulbous buttercup and salad burnet. The main grass in the western half is meadow grass, with bare patches and rabbit damaged areas which have been colonised by plants of disturbed ground such as henbane.
At the western end is Hackpen Down, the largest part of the site, which has a wide variety of aspects and gradients.
“Hackpen, Warren & Gramp's Hill Downs” enters the record as uK Site of Special Scientific Interest. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hackpen, Warren and Gramp's can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Hackpen, Warren & Gramp's Hill Downs” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hackpen, Warren and Gramp's provides the most credible route into that argument.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5637387. Authority coordinates are 51.558, -1.489. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hackpen, Warren & Gramp's Hill Downs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.