Talk – 19th Century Life in Rural Dorset

Talk – 19th Century Life in Rural Dorset – Given by Martin Gething, National Trust.

The tiny Clouds Hill cottage, near Bovington, was a farm labourers’ tied cottage throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.

Today it’s preserved in the care of the National Trust as a memorial to T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – and is essentially ‘frozen in time’ in the mid-1930s.

Rather like the BBC television series on A House Through Time, this talk will build up a picture of the families who called Clouds Hill home over a period of more than a century, bringing to life a typical Dorset rural community that is so often invisible in documented records.

The story of the cottage draws extensively on the archives at Dorset History Centre, and in particular the Estate Papers of the Framptons of Moreton, together with information from The National Archives, the British Library and the British Newspaper Archive, and genealogical resources.

There’s no charge for this talk and it’s open to both members and non-members. Donations to the work of Weymouth Civic Society are welcome.

Refreshments available from 6.30pm and the talk is at 7pm.