By the end of this year the volunteers of Purton Historical Society are hoping that the name and achievements of Nevil Maskelyne will be known throughout the land (or at least Wiltshire!).

The Society has managed to secure a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to commemorate the life of one of Purton’s greatest sons, the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne who died 200 years ago in 1811.

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 We recently had an enquiry regarding the origins of the road Sally In The Wood, which can in fact be found just over the border in the parish of Bathford, Somerset. It forms a section of the A363 as it journeys through Home Wood towards Bathford.

The explanations of the road name are both varied and intriguing, and as they are also closely related to the parish of Monkton Farleigh in Wiltshire, I thought I’d share them with you.

 
OS 1st edition, 1887, Ref: 32/5
Warleigh Manor can be seen in the top left corner, with the road Sally in the Wood running through Home Wood immediately to the right of the Manor.

John Chandler in his book ‘The Reflection in the Pond’, gives us three versions of the tale. The first is of a supernatural nature, and was published by Kathleen Wiltshire in 1984. It tells the story of a young couple who knocked down a girl dressed in white when she ran from trees across the road in front of their car. Another version, this time by Maggie Dobson and Simone Brightstein relate that Sally was murdered in the woods or imprisoned in nearby Brown’s Folly, or that she was an actual road accident victim. Interestingly, the name of the small section of woodland immediately below Home Wood is called 'Dead Man Wood'. Katy Jordan in her book ‘The Haunted Landscape’ mentions that Sally in the Woods does have the reputation of being an eerie place, where ‘no birds sing’, so you never know...
To find out more about the other versions of the tale, please 'read more'.

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Hello, my name is Robert Pearson, and I am an archivist and help desk assistant here at the History Centre. As part of an enquiry I had been asked to find a sergeant in the ‘A’ or Chippenham Troop of the Wiltshire Yeomanry (the cavalry equivalent of the Territorial Army) in c.1882.

We have quite a good collection of muster rolls of the regiment for that period, although there is a gap after 1877. On examining the next roll for 1883-1890 (ref no.1882/17), I found that the first two pages covering ‘A’ Troop were missing, possibly when the hard covers of the book were removed; so I was temporarily frustrated in my search.

Yeomanry, 1863

At that time there was a small permanent staff of non-commissioned officers from the regular army attached to the Yeomanry to instruct in drill, run the administration etc. and I wondered if my man had been among them.

The records of these men are in a separate file (ref no.1882/22) and the first documents I saw on opening this file were the missing pages of the muster roll, with the sergeant listed, and dating from 1882; they had been sent to us by the Yeomanry HQ in those separate bundles, and it was a joy to me to be able to reunite the pages and their register, probably for the first time since they were created. Nature abhorring a vacuum has nothing on an archivist with an incomplete series, so to be able to fill a gap, even only to the extent of one year, is very satisfying. It only remains to try and find the rolls for 1870-1881.

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