WESSEX TALES: Eight Thousand Years in the Life of an English Village - Volume 2 of 2

Wessex Tales, Volume 2 follows the first volume of Wessex Tales in presenting twenty new stories spanning the eight-thousand-year life of an English village.

Travel the ages through ancient forests and along the river that shaped the valleys and hills of the Blackmore Vale. Author Thomas Hardy named this 'The Vale of Little Dairies'.

Invite yourself to a medieval wedding, a country fair, a battle in the Civil Wars. March with the local men who banded together to oppose both warring armies. Explore country lanes and Iron Age hill forts engineered for firing slingers' stones. Archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes described these hill forts as 'More important than any others in Wessex, save Maiden Castle'.

Priests, bards, adventurers and poets, old wives' cures and shifting fortunes weave through both volumes of these Wessex Tales. Set among the Okeford villages in North Dorset, our stories start in the Stone Age and run to the aftermath of the First World War.

Here the ancient Ridgeway track drops off the hills to cross the River Stour and then climb into the hills again. This quiet countryside was 'Once a busy centre on the most important road in the Kingdom'.

Our land is magical, mystical, down-to-earth. Men and women toil, poach game, reap crops and venture as archers, soldiers, carters, smugglers.

Stories in both volumes of Wessex Tales are drawn from fiction, but some are set in the village that, in fact, not fiction, sent a higher proportion of its young men to the First World War in its early months than any other village in the United Kingdom. A century later, both volumes of Wessex Tales are dedicated to those who left their village bravely, never to return.