Take a look at the black metal in front of you. Imagine lifting the handle, pushing it down and seeing the cool, clear water streaming from its mouth; water, which you might drink, use for washing, or you might use to dampen down the dusty road for the travellers who have come from London.

Let this pump take you back in time, to when Calne was a stop on the coaching road between London and fashionable Bath, or the international trading port of Bristol.

Imagine behind you, you can hear the sound of horses hooves click-clacking. The buzz of carriage wheels over stones. The noise of a busy, and newly laid street, built to cope with the volume of traffic. Traffic which had come over the lonely, bleak and sometimes dangerous hill between Beckhampton and Cherhill and on into the warm and welcoming heart of Calne. No longer did the traffic have to pass down the narrow Church Street, instead it proudly passed on this wide and purpose built thoroughfare alongside the river Marden.

Calne was a town of coaching inns. Here your coach driver might stop to change horses before the final stage of your journey. To your left up the hill is the White Hart pub; to your right, the Lansdowne Arms Hotel; and, where Infusion’s cafe and Salon XVIII now stand, the King’s Head. These large coaching inns all had stables, bars, and accommodation. This meant you could eat, drink and stay overnight, if your coach’s timetable allowed.

If you lived in Calne in the late 1700s or into the 1800s, you might have come to collect water from this pump for use in your home. Were you passing through, you may have used the pump to give your hard working horses a drink, or you may have been tasked with using the water from this pump to sprinkle over the dusty road in summertime, and stop the dust from dirtying the carriages of the wealthy and well-to-do people passing through and to keep the town of Calne a little cleaner.

Never heard of them? You must be new around here. Have you never seen their cursed picture hanging in The Black Horse pub? Never got a shiver down your back when cresting the hill in Cherhill, or when passing this pump in Calne on the road leading to London?

If you have, that’ll be the Cherhill Gang, watching you, waiting for the time to strike.

They’ve been haunting these roads since the 18th century, if you believe the tales. Some put them down to nothing but heresy and legend, and indeed there is no evidence of them: A gang of highwaymen who’d spring out on unsuspecting passers-by and relieve them of their valuables. Their modus operandi? All of them, naked. Stripped down to the skin, as bare-cheeked as the day they were born.

Oh, you’re thinking that’s funny, are you? Imagining all this fear over some unflattering naked figures shivering in the dark, no doubt.

Well, their nakedness would only help them. In the 18th century, the victims of their robberies – already shaken by their ordeal – would be far too modest to describe anything distinctive about their au naturale attackers.

And I suppose nakedness isn’t so funny when you’re being held at gunpoint.

Some say they even went so far as to oil themselves up before their robberies, so that if a brave victim managed to get the best of them, they would still slip fluidly from the clawing hands of their opposition, oiled skin gleaming in the moonlight as they darted away into the night...

Never to be seen again.

• Bath Road and the Pump text: Ruth Hill.
• Bath Road and the Pump audio: Paul Hill.
• The Cherhill Gang text: Gail Millward and Isabella Christopher.
• The Cherhill Gang audio: Georgia Halpin.
• Cherhill Gang Image: Steve Walters, with thanks to The Black Horse at Cherhill.
• Pump and Blue Plaque Images: Tim Havenith.