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 […]
Historian and broadcaster Dr Vivien Newman will shed new light on the experience of children across the combatant nations in her illustrated talk at Gold Hill Museum at 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 07 November. The story of (evacuee) British children in World War Two is familiar, but their part in the First World War is much […]
On Tuesday 03 October at 7.30p.m. Professor James G. Clark of Exeter University will deliver the 2023 Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture at Shaftesbury Town Hall. In 2021 Professor Clark published a New History of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, to great acclaim. Reviewers typically described it as The best history yet written on English monasticism […]
