Historic documents for Wiltshire
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-02-16 15:09:05 - Graham EllisYesterday, we visited the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre near to Chippenham station, and spent several enthralling hours looking through old documents and rare books, and several frustrating hours learning our way around the vast resources and working out how to find the needles we were looking for in the huge haystack. We're researching public transport in Melksham, and found some gems to look at such as drawings of the Westlands Road bridge over the railway in Beanacre, and the original timber viaduct over the river Avon between Melksham and Trowbridge. Beautiful drawings, but it's very hard to start drawing any sort of complete picture from them, and it was hard (but possible) to resist getting sidetracked by an undated list of inhabitants of Semington who were licensed to use hair powder.
With a photographic license, we've recorded some items - mostly texts to read at our leisure, and relating to other things Melksham. Such photographs are for personal and research use, and permission of the Copyright owner much be source before reproduction. Nor sure of the status / implications for out of copyright drawings; I may be able to illustrate this blog article once I know.