"When we had our first book meeting, we decided that the website would be the basis for the book. Some members took the articles that are already on the website and linked them into whatever they wanted to put for their subject. Other members started from scratch and wrote completely new text.

We split up into sub-groups and the sub-groups had meetings. Then we all came together and our webmaster, my husband Mike, made sure that we all had a copy of everybody else’s work. Then we had another meeting where we discussed anything that people felt wasn’t quite right, and it was then amended to everyone’s satisfaction. We went through this process several times until we ended up with a final version.

Mike and I have done all the co-ordination of the nine different sections - History Overview, People, Employment, Services, Geography, Buildings, Religion, Organisations, and Military - and written some of them ourselves. We’ve proof read it, and we’ve recently taken all the graphics to Dr John Chandler, who has his own publishing firm. He is very much into local publishing in our area, and has helped me on various other things in the past.

Our only previous experience of publishing was a booklet about the local footpaths that my husband produced, which has sold like hot cakes in the local pub and shop. I started writing up my own researches in the early 1980s, but then I had a heart attack and other health problems so I never got round to producing my own book.

We might eventually have been able to do this without the LHI grant, but it wouldn’t have been easy. Our publisher explained other possible ways to finance a book, like selling advance copies on subscription, or putting up the money ourselves and getting it back through sales. But quite apart from the funding, the LHI has given us a lot of support and encouragement and, most importantly, a deadline which made sure we did get it done.

There’s always more to learn, and we now know much more now thanks to this project. Because local people are aware of our interest they keep on turning up things that they find in their attics, and when relatives are clearing out houses after a bereavement they don’t throw out things that they might have done before.

People are also very interested to know what their houses were like originally - we have quite a lot of stone cottages here that have been altered, and some of them have been investigated without cost by the Wiltshire Buildings Record Trust, who we invited here a couple of times for a field day."