WESSEX TALES: Eight Thousand Years in the Life of an English Village - Volume 1 of 2

Wessex Tales Volume 1

Six thousand years ago a trail led inland from a landing place on England's Channel coast. Turning northeast across Dorset, the track travelled on to country farmed by a community that would one day build Stonehenge.

For much of its route this trail kept to the ridges of hills, but at one point the Wessex Ridgeway came down to cross Dorset's River Stour before climbing into hills again.

Where the road crossed the river "was once a busy centre on the most important road in the Kingdom". Evidence of struggles to control this crossing is still carved into the land. Ramparts of Iron Age hill forts "more important than any others in Wessex" lour over the valley. Three rings of ditch and bank defences etch the crowns of hills. Old Ridgeway trails connect them all.

Wessex Tales Volume 1 presents twenty short stories set here, where villages named Okeford now stand. Our tales span nearly eight thousand years, from the Stone Age to the ruin of the First World War.

Our land is mystical, magical, sometimes brutal, always down-to-earth. Men and women toil, poach game, reap crops and venture as archers, soldiers, carters, smugglers. Press-ganged labourers dig ramparts for hill forts, or haul stones for Stonehenge. Fathers negotiate marriage for daughters.

Priests, shamans, bards, adventurers and poets; shepherds, cottars, old wives' cures and shifting fortunes weave their ways through "Wessex Tales".

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

Dettagli