At the beginning of June, all the commemoration events for the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings got me thinking about how land-locked Wiltshire would have been involved in repelling a German invasion and what evidence was recorded in our Historic Environment Record.

A series of defences, known as General Headquarters Anti-Tank Line or "GHQ stop-lines”, utilising natural and man-made features were constructed across England between late May and September 1940 to counter an imminently expected German invasion. The main GHQ stop-line was split into sections, several of which ran through or touched Wiltshire:

• Stop-Line Green ran from the Somerset coast north-east to Trowbridge, Melksham, Lacock and Chippenham, and then north-west into Gloucestershire.
• Stop-Line Blue branched east from Stop Line Green at Semington near Trowbridge, and followed the Kennet and Avon Canal eastwards.
• Stop-Line Red ran south from Oxford across the Cotswolds to Great Somerford.

These were reinforced with many features that can still be seen today: concrete pillboxes, gun emplacements, anti-tank obstacles and trench systems, etc.

Between April 1995 and December 2001, The Defence of Britain Project set out to record the 20th century militarised landscape of the United Kingdom. This was published by the Council for British Archaeology and is available online here 

During this project and subsequently, volunteers have spent hundreds of hours recording Anti-Invasion structures – members of the Pillbox Study Group in particular.

All this research has resulted in a fantastic database of these structures, which in turn has been transcribed onto the Wiltshire and Swindon HER by our own volunteers. When cataloguing entries, we refer to the Defence of Britain Thesaurus – a standard set of terminology relating to the Second World War that contains some fascinating terms including ‘Bison mobile pillbox’, 'Lyon Light emplacement’, ‘Allan Williams turret’, ‘Seagull trench’, ‘spider billet’ – sadly we don’t have all of these types in Wiltshire, but we do have a cluster (or flock?) of Seagull trenches in the north of the county (e.g. MWI78776).

Many of the features we have recorded can still be seen in the landscape, so get out and about and see how many you can spot – here are some examples (although we can’t guarantee they will still be in place). The MWI numbers can be looked up on our HER for more information.

We were recently lucky to receive a fascinating hand-made nature logbook as a deposit from Wiltshire North Girlguiding. The book records the natural history observations of the Swindon Rangers (for girls aged 14 to 18) section of the Wiltshire Guides, and covers the period 16 March to 31 December 1924.

When it arrived with us, the book was fragile and difficult to handle safely (probably because generations of Guides had browsed through it!), so our Archive Conservator Sophie set to work stabilising the volume so that it could be handled and viewed, as well as ensuring that the contents would be preserved for as long as possible.

A Complex Conservation Challenge
The Guide logbook was brought into us at one of our Conservation Surgeries. One of my favourite things about being a conservator is the constant variety of amazing historical items that I come across and the fascinating stories that they tell. Not only is the Guide logbook a beautiful, and unique item but also an interesting challenge from a conservation point of view. The combination of bark and leather cover, method of binding and variety of artworks, photographs, collages and ink writing, presented a conservation dilemma similar to that of a scrapbook. Scrapbooks are generally unique items crafted and created to give a unique insight and perspective into the experience of an individual, group and/or event. They often contain a variety of materials and a host of varying adhesives on varying quality papers. Where a conservator would often look to protect such materials individually, in a scrapbook format every element of the layout is part of the whole- therefore we must retain this making it accessible and storing as the maker intended as far as possible.

Above: the handmade tree bark cover with leather spine

The cover and way the pages were attached inside was the first problem that needed to be addressed. The pages or text block were attached to the back board of the cover by two leather thongs. The pages laced through the cords on the left side and then the cords knotted at the top to secure them.

Above: the text block attached to the cover with two leather thongs tied at the top

This style of binding meant that there was not much flexibility to open and look at the pages and over time many of the pages had started to tear and in some cases had completely detached from the thongs leaving them at risk of being damaged and lost completely. As with all items in the archive one of our key aims is to make them accessible to visitors in the search room whilst protecting items from any damage when they are handled.

Wiltshire Buildings Record was recently asked to look at not one, but two houses in Calne at the same time, both not far from the church. Calne is a typical Wiltshire town with a fairly bustling town centre clustered around a fine church, usually a little oasis of peace and quiet beauty. This is what I experienced when I looked at the two buildings, one in Church Street, the other on the opposite side in Mill Street. It has its modest place in history, being the home of Joseph Priestley, the 18th century chemist, and of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who lived with friends at 17 Church Street between 1814-19.

As the research progressed my colleague pointed out that both houses in Church and Mill Street had been subjected to disastrous flooding at the same time. The flood possibly causing the departure of the tenant of the Mill Street house we were looking at. Historically, flooding has been a regular occurrence in Calne and parts of Church Street did not escape this. Calne is the only town on the small river Marden.

On 20 November 1725, the Stamford Mercury reported that in Calne, Wiltshire:
‘We have had a prodigious quantity of rain in these parts which has done a great deal of damage. The water rose so suddenly and so high that they justly alarmed the whole town. A great many goods were spoiled, the quantity of which cannot yet be known. Two men were drownded (sic) in the very street in the sight of all their neighbours who could give them no assistance; one of them is much regretted; he has left a wife and nine children almost unprovided for. He was lost in going to help his neighbour. A cask of oil weighing eleven hundredweight was also carried away by the force of the water and has not been found since. We also hear that from several places around us a great deal of mischief has been done by floods which have been larger than was ever known by the oldest person in those parts.’

A more recent example of flooding occurred in 1920 impacting Church and Mill Streets, which the dramatic images below show. Steps have been taken in more modern times to prevent such occurrences.

“The familiar everyday scene was soon out of sight; I came to other trees, meadows, and fields; I began to breathe a new air and to have a fresher aspiration. I restrained my soul till I reached the sward of the hill; psyche, the soul that longed to be loose.” The Story of My Heart 1883 [part of his description of the journey from Coate Farmhouse to Liddington Hill]

The Richard Jefferies Society was founded in 1950 to promote appreciation and study of the writings of Richard Jefferies (1848-1887). Thanks to funding provided by the society, there is a new catalogue listing of the Richard Jefferies Society archive collection (ref 3573) which includes a whole range of documents from scrapbooks created by the society, correspondence, photographs, original letters written by Jefferies and his family, commentary, review and celebration of Jefferies’ works, and papers of the first president of the society (1950-1965) Samuel Looker, of whom more later.

A fantastic team of volunteers have also been listing much of the correspondence contained within the collection with brief summaries of the contents of each letter, as well as indexing the contents of a series of scrapbooks created by the society (1948-1992).

Those They Called Idiots 

By Simon Jarrett 

Today marks the 4th anniversary of me joining the archaeology service at Wiltshire Council and I thought it might be a good time to look back in the changes that the service has been through over the past few years.

April 2020 was of course the early days of the first lockdown and we all found ourselves working from backrooms, makeshift offices and sometimes bedrooms, trying the keep the machinery of local government working, while also adjusting to what was then known as ‘the new normal’ and which then bloomed into the hybrid systems that characterises much of working life in the UK today. While the pre-covid style of office-bound work has fallen away, we have now settled into a pattern that mixes the advantages of working from home with regular days in the History Centre where we can meet face to face to discuss important issues and bounce ideas off each other. In this way we have worked out a system where there is always a presence in the History Centre, while Wednesdays have become the day we all meet up. I think that we have all appreciated this new way of working; one that may have been on the cards anyway prior to covid, but which was certainly accelerated by it, and that it has improved our lives while maintaining the standards of the service.

The last 4 years have also seen a substantial change in the make-up of the archaeology team, with the departures of Rachel Foster and then later Mike Cepak as assistant county archaeologists and the loss of Sarah Simmonds, Sarah Askham and Anne Carney from the World Heritage Site (WHS) Co-ordination Unit, while Tom Sunley moved on from his position of Historic Environment Record (HER) manager. In their places have come Roland Smith and Tim Havard into the positions of Assistant County Archaeologists, the excellent Claire Selman and Becky Banbury have taken over the running of the WHS Co-ordination Unit, while Jacqui Ramsay, Carol Lewis, Charlotte Godsiffe and Cecily Cropper now manage the HER with great effect.

The nature of the work we deal with in development control hasn’t changed greatly. We still deal with the many planning applications that come into us and these remain a mixture of the very small (house extensions) right up to the large capital projects such as major housing schemes, utility works and road schemes.