I was delighted to be amongst over 200 people in Devizes on Monday to celebrate the official opening of the new Prehistoric Wiltshire galleries at the Wiltshire Museum.

The culmination of years of planning, fundraising and hard graft by staff and volunteers has allowed the museum to put together a suite of galleries that any museum would be proud of.

As you may have see in previous blog entries we recently held our annual History Centre Open Day. This year the Conservation and Museums Advisory Service hosted an Anglo-Saxon warrior and displayed a rare seax (Anglo-Saxon knife) from Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum (link listed at the end of this entry). We also hosted a series of Wiltshire at War talks given by our friends from Chippenham Museum and The Rifles Museum in Salisbury (also see at the end of this article).

In amongst all this activity visitors on the day might have missed our small display about Winnie the Pooh in Wiltshire. Yes, there is a link between A.A. Milne’s famous bear and Wiltshire and yes it does relate to Wiltshire at War, which was the theme of our open day. The story goes…..

Market Lavington Museum is one of Wiltshire’s smallest museums, situated just off St Mary’s churchyard and based at the former Old Schoolmasters House which was built in 1846. The museum collection covers all aspects of village life - Market Lavington industries included brick and basket making as well as market gardening, brewing and agriculture. The large village has always been thriving and has had its own professional photographers since 1880 who recorded everyday events and people.

Rog Frost, Curator of the museum, is one of the most prolific bloggers I’ve come across, and his almost daily blogs cover the varieties of objects that the museum holds, from photographs to books, medical instruments to sheep bells, costume to military badges.
This is a fantastic way of letting people gain an insight into the individual objects that a museum holds, often ordinary but with a tale to be told and part of the identity of an ever changing community.

Here are some examples of Rog’s blogs...

One of my favourite aspects of working with the museums of Wiltshire is the fantastic variety of stories, events, people and places represented in the many thousands of items in their collections. Mostly these are used in a very structured way. You go to the museum to see an exhibition on a particular subject or the museum is contacted about the history of a specific village. The volunteers and staff at Wiltshire’s museums spend many hundreds of hours cataloguing the items in their collections so that they are able to know which items are relevant when they come to mount their exhibitions or answer enquires.