The Andover and Radstock Railway

Just how different would Market Lavington had been if this proposed railway line had actually been built? Probably it would have transformed the place which was at the end of its life as a market town...

West Lavington Poor Rate Survey

Now why do we have this elderly looking book- it dates from 1840 - about West Lavington? The answer is simple. Back at the time this book was produced the parish of West Lavington contained areas la...

Diana Benson

Diana Whishaw Benson was born in 1913. The birth was registered in the Bath district to parents John Benson and Enid (née) Whishaw. Both had connections with Tsarist Russia. Enid was born there in 18...

Charles Hitchcock

Charles Hitchcock owned and supervised the Fiddington House asylum for much of the second half of the nineteenth century. Fiddington, as ever, provides a slight inconvenience in that the area with th...

Fiddington Lodge

Time was when the area where the Fiddington Clays estate now stands was the site of the asylum. Fiddington House had been run for over 130 years as a private enterprise home for people with nervous di...

Doctor Donald Hood

We were recently asked if we knew anything of Dr Hood, born Market Lavington, who featured in a book about the Duke of Rutland. We had to find out more, so here is what we now know. We started by fin...

Fiddington from Lavington Hill

On the face of it, this is a rather uninteresting looking photo but in truth if we enlarge sections we can see that it tells us a great deal. The style of labelling tells us that this was a Peter F...

Ezra Price

This blog post stems from an almost chance find amongst our curator’s personal collection of old 78rpm records. It wasn’t any specific record, but rather the sleeve containing it that caught the e...

Geoff Alexander and family

The Alexander family had a farm in the Southcliffe area of Market Lavington. We think of Alfie Alexander as the founder of the Alexander dynasty, although, of course, the family really goes back year...

Fiddington House – 1963

Fiddington House has an interesting history although we know little of its origins.  In 1834 Robert Willett purchased house and grounds to replace his first asylum in Market Lavington – there were ...