Aldbourne Village Gallery. The story so far – long may it last!

I started a Flickr Gallery in 2008. It now has just over 4,000 photos in it. Flickr has been acquired by something called Smug Mug, and I’ve decided not to add any more photos since there seems to be a risk that the Gallery might disappear; free accounts being a bit vulnerable to that, it would seem.

So here’s a link – enjoy! https://www.flickr.com/photos/aldbournevillagegallery/albums

Many aspects of village life are represented; particularly Carnival and the Beating of the Bounds. If there are any photos or albums you’d like to chat about, please drop me a line, aldbourne.archive@gmail.com

Jo Hutchings – August 2019

Gardens through the letterbox… widen the net!

I’ve been following the Gardens Trust blog for some time, and have just realised stories can be re-posted using the tech set up by those clever WordPress people. Here’s the Gardens Trust offering from today, a detailed look at ‘wonderful wheezes’ with postcards.  I’ve set up a new category called ‘widen the net’ here, so that I can do just that once in a while (but I’ll try to keep it local!).  Many years ago the lovely late Trish Rushen and I introduced the feature to http://www.aldbourne.org.uk to plug events and matters of interest outside the parish boundaries occasionally.  More clever people, this time at the WaybackMachine, allow us to catch a glimpse of the original Aldbourne Community Website back in 2006.

A word on postcards – there are some fabulous views of Aldbourne published by Swindon Local Studies and Family History as part of their extensive collection published on Flickr.

The Gardens Trust

Fort Belvedere “The Country Residence of His Majesty King Edward VIII” 

A brightly coloured old postcard on a market stall caught my eye the other day , and it turned out to be one of a series of “Famous Old Gardens” produced sometime in the very early 20thc by the firm of Raphael Tuck.

detail from a card of Drummond Castle

The Italian Garden at Bowood

This series of cards are all in a very distinctive style, so I decided to track down Mr Tuck and more of his garden postcards to see if  they’d make some light reading for the Saturday morning breakfast table, and indeed they do!

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