“Welcome to Shaftesbury” is our final temporary exhibition of the season, showcasing a range of local printed tourist guides selected by our volunteer archives team and spanning nearly a century. Magnificent views to north, south, and west from Shaftesbury’s hilltop location are extolled by all the writers. (We are still doing it, with the benefit […]
Dr Nicola Tallis is fast emerging as one of Britain’s most popular historians, according to fellow writer Gareth Russell. Her brilliant new study of the early life of Elizabeth I, says the doyenne of Tudor biographers Alison Weir, is an outstanding achievement. The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society is delighted to welcome Nicola to Shaftesbury […]
The ninth century Alfred Jewel was unearthed by the ploughing of a field at North Petherton, Somerset, in 1693. It was given to the University of Oxford in 1718 and is now one of the Ashmolean Museum’s most prized treasures. North Petherton lies between Bridgwater and Taunton, six miles from King Alfred’s reedy Athelney hideaway […]
In 1915 Dorset Royal Flying Corps pilot Louis Strange fell out of the open cockpit of his single-seat Martinsyde S1 Scout biplane at 8000 feet above northern France. In the middle of a dogfight with a German Aviatik, the ammunition drum on his Lewis machine gun had jammed. When Strange stood up to try and […]
At 2.30p.m. on 09 April at Gold Hill Museum, the National Trust’s Collections and House Officer at Stourhead, Hannah Severn, will give an illustrated talk on The Life and Work of Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758-1838): Artist, Antiquarian, and Traveller. While it was the two Henry Hoares, Richard’s great-grandfather and grandfather, who first built the […]
Professor Maria Hayward, Head of History at Southampton University, has been working on the Privy Purse account books of Charles II’s Queen, Catherine of Braganza. (1638-1705) At 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 05 March at Gold Hill Museum, Maria takes time off her busy schedule to share with members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society what […]
Members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society will be presenting their own historical findings to the informal setting of a Tea and Talks event at Gold Hill Museum at 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 06 February. Among the proposed topics are photographs by Elizabeth Upfield (1854-1903); the Abbess of Shaftesbury’s Farmhouses in the Nadder Valley; and […]
A substantial piece of Shaftesbury’s industrial past has been restored and very kindly donated to Gold Hill Museum by a descendant of the Farris family at whose Belle Vue Iron Works it was first manufactured. John Farris and Sons were agricultural engineers renowned for their production of steam traction engines, road rollers, shepherds’ and road […]
On Tuesday 09 January at 2.30p.m. popular speaker Dr Amy Frost makes a welcome return to Gold Hill Museum to provide an update on the progress of the restoration and reinterpretation project at Beckford’s Tower and Museum at Lansdown, Bath. During her compelling 2022 Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture on William Beckford After Fonthill, Amy confessed […]
On Tuesday 05 December at 2.30p.m. at Gold Hill Museum, Professor Colin Divall takes as his subject “The Puffing Billy of the Hedgerows” – the politics of the Somerset & Dorset Railway closure, c.1951-67. Colin writes: “The Somerset & Dorset’s closure in March 1966 was one of the most bitterly fought of the Beeching cuts […]
