I just happened to be trawling through some indexes to our records when a subject caught my eye - the Great flood in the Wylye Valley 1841. Now I am just about to visit the Wylye World War 1 Project group, one of several trips to the south of our county this week, and have an eye on the weather since the heavy rain over the last few days. Investigating this story in more detail it appears that the flood took place 170 years ago, almost to the day!  (Apparently there was a similar flood in 1789 around the same time of year - I am taking my waterproofs).  What particularly drew me to the reference was a note concerning a piece of doggerel about the event.

I have always been curious about doggerel and other poetic forms as an historical record commemorating events (and people), especially disasters, such as William McGonagall’s poem on the Tay Railway Bridge disaster of 1879. But what I found was even more astonishing; forget the 8 verses by McGonagall, our document contains 51 verses, in part 1, and a further 25 in part 2, a grand total of 76 stanzas detailing an event that, according to contemporary local newspapers, lasted a mere 12 hours, though with such force and hugely disastrous consequences for the local communities. The document (WSA 1336/98) is a transcript of a letter by Ann Doughty of Hanging Langford to her mother some days after the flood with a doggerel rhyme by an unknown author.

Comment (0) Read More...

 As the New Year is now upon us, I thought to take a look at how some of our previous Wiltshire inhabitants spent their New Years’ Day by taking a look at their diary entries. The authors’ backgrounds range from lords to schoolboys, schoolmasters to reverends, and how different their experiences of New Year were…

Advert from the Wiltshire Times, 1st January, 1910, p.7

It was the plague that was the main concern at the beginning of January in 1666 when Sir Edward Bayntun of Bromham noted in his Commonplace Book on January 6^th  :

Comment (0) Read More...