A Village Lost and Found

Now my great interest in the history of Chorlton will always be the rural township which was on the edge of disappearing in the years after the 1860s. It is also a great sadness to me that there are almost no pictures of this rural community which makes the book A Village Lost and Found such a wonderful find. The book is an annotated collection of stereoscopic photographs taken by Thomas Richard Williams and published by Brian May and Elena Vidal in 2009.
The original pictures were taken in 1856 and bring back to life a country village. Here are wattle and daub cottages, along with their gardens, scenes of farming and shots of the inhabitants going about their day. The authors have tracked the village to Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire. It remains for me a vivid depiction of rural life and I constantly revisit the book to draw comparisons with what our village would have been like.
The picture is the cover to the book and I have included it as a way of drawing attention to a superb collection of pictures of a farming community. A Village Lost and Found: Scenes in Our Village By T.R.Williams, Brian May & Elena Vidal ISBN 9780711230392, Publisher & © Frances Lincoln