Trowbridge Museum explores surrounding villages for Beyond the Bounds exhibition

Exhibition: Beyond the Bounds - The Parishes of Trowbridge, Trowbridge Museum, Trowbridge, until July 30 2011

The Trowbridge Museum is exploring its surrounding villages and hamlets with an exhibition of film, photographs and folklore from Wiltshire, one of our most resolutely bucolic counties.

The museum itself is sited within a Georgian town that grew from a humble Saxon village and the county is still delightfully rural, with 400 villages and hamlets that boast unique identities.

Many of these villages were mentioned in the Domesday Book or occupy sites that have been inhabited since Roman Times.

Some of the fascinating facts that stem from them vary from the most timber framed buildings in a village, at Steeple Ashton, to having to get Parliament to sanction the presence of a  telephone box at Great Hinton.

The exhibition also features the film West Ashton: Our Village History. A ten-minute exploration of the social history of the village, the film introduces the  personal stories of villagers Cyril Sweetman, Sylvia Mills and Ken Rogers, who were interviewed by Year 6 students from West Ashton School.

Students were transported back to the 1930s (thanks to the power of film) and produced a series of beautiful animations to illustrate the stories they had been told, from the famous Armstrong Whitworth Whitley crash landing to the weavers working in their cottages. 

The film also features beautiful images from around West Ashton, Rood Ashton and East Town.

In a county where even the cathedral city of Salisbury is known as the city in the countryside, it's not surprising to learn that many of Wiltshire’s villages retain their character and charm.