A Golden Wedding Celebration

How does a bell ringer celebrate his Golden Wedding? Well in the case of Tom Gye, one way was to have the bells of St Mary’s rung to mark the occasion. A group of six ringers rang a quarter peal of ...

Wessex Archaeology at Work

Back in 1990 a Saxon burial site was discovered on the Grove Farm estate. Building work was temporarily halted so that Wessex Archaeology could investigate. The dig uncovered people who lived in...

Farewell to Ralph Wilkins

Was it really twenty five years ago when Ralph Wilkins, Vicar of Market Lavington and Easterton moved on to pastures new? Well yes, it was indeed in 1990. We have recently been given a fairly formal...

Beechwood from the Church Tower

These fairly modern photos have arrived at the museum via a roundabout route. I’m afraid we have no way of knowing, for sure, who the original photographer was. All three show a similar scene during...

Tha Girt Harchaeology

My title today is the title of a Wiltshire dialect poem by Edward Slow who was born in 1842. He was, we believe, referring to the large number of visitors who came to see the archaeology of Wiltshire...

Helena May Elisha

We have met Helena before on this blog. It would be impossible not to come across this wonderful lady if talking about Market Lavington in the 20th century. Helena came into this world in 1903 at a t...

A view from the church tower in 1990

Views from on high are always interesting. In Market Lavington to get the best vantage point you have to get to the top of the church tower. That’s something photographers have done for well over 10...

Wilts Ag!

It is hard to remember, now, just what a central area of Market Lavington looked like for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Back then, the village was very much a working place and the...

Storm Damage

The great hurricane of 1987 was certainly fairly wild in the Lavingtons but that exerted its strongest force in the south east of England It was a storm of February 1990 that caused more structural d...