We were pleased with the positive review of the book in the recently published Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine.

Bremhill Parish through the Ages: the Heritage of a Wiltshire Community, by Louise Ryland-Epton, with contributions from Ewen Bird, John Harris, Christopher Kent, Isobel Moore, Jim Scott, Helen Stuckey & David Wood. [xii], 220p.; colour illustrations. Bremhill Parish History Group, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-906978-19-8. £20.

This book is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Bremhill Parish History Group and the Victoria County History, and will be accompanied by the chapter prepared for a forthcoming VCH volume (on which it greatly expands). The VCH editor has successfully brought together a wide variety of contributions from members of the Group to form an integrated whole. The illustrations are numerous and well chosen. The book covers the period from the Roman invasion until the 21st century, but inevitably the sources (which have been well researched) are such that the last three or four centuries gain most of the attention. Nevertheless, one particularly noteworthy point is the suggestion that Bremhill church may have originally been founded by an Anglo-Saxon thegn.

The authors have taken a thematic rather than chronological approach, beginning with landscape and buildings, and progressing through three chapters dealing with various economic and social issues, to a chapter on 'folklore, superstition & witchcraft'. Chapters on local government and religion follow, ending with a chapter on the dramatic changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A series of 'case studies', presumably deriving from the work of particular members of the group (their authors are usually not individually identified), are a notable feature of the book. The subjects are diverse. Stanley Abbey and Maud Heath's Causeway are both, perhaps, obvious topics calling for case studies. Less well known topics also feature, for example, the 'sufferings' of the Quaker Joane Hale, a brief life of John Harding (an eighteenth century agricultural labourer), a village meeting of the Anti-Corn Law League, and the careers of 'Bremhill boys at sea'

Parish histories are generally considered to be only of interest to local people. This one is different, It is fluently written, and is well wirth reading even if you have never heard of Bremhill. The book is ti oe particualrly recommended as a model to other groups contemplating their own parish history project. The Bremhill Parish History Group is to be congratulated on a job well done.