Horse harness decorations

Metal detectorists tend to do us proud. Their finds help to paint a little of the history of our area. And here we concentrate on the time when horses ruled the road and the field; a time when people ...

Maintaining some tension in a rope

This item was recently given to us at Market Lavington Museum. It came, originally, from Vicarage Farm in Easterton. This is a roughly made metal ball, a little smaller than a cricket ball, with a ...

One that got away

Here we have a news item which has been sellotaped into an album (and thus damaged). This news item dates from 28th February 1952. The person who kept it hasn’t named the paper. It shows a wonder...

Before World War One

This year, and quite rightly, there has been much talk about World War One – and we’ve done our share of that. But of course, parts of our area were militarised before the Great War – that war w...

The Horse Bus

Edwin Potter’s horse bus service connected Market Lavington to the rest of the world. Until the railway arrived in 1900, the only way out of our parish was by road and the only regular bus service w...

The top end of High Street

This postcard dates from the early days of such cards, when only the address appeared on the back. A small space has been left underneath the image for a message to be written. On the left we have ...

A Trowbridge Carnival

A Trowbridge Carnival? What has that got to do with Market Lavington?  Well in this case, the vehicle in use was Market Lavington based. This was Edwin Potter’s bus, which had normally plied bet...

Harvest – men and horses

As this is written, the harvesting of corn on Lavington Hill is all but over for 2013. The mighty combine has hurried round the fields, cutting huge swathes of the crop at each pass. Tractors with gr...

A horsewhip

Those of us who are not horsemen or women might be surprised at the savage looking nature of this item. It could surely inflict a huge amount of pain to any victim who was whipped. But of course, crue...

Photos that beg a question

We are going to see, today, a couple of photos showing ‘The Grove’ in Market Lavington. The photos are certainly not brilliant in quality or condition. Here’s the first – it could be almost an...