IN 1931 the Women's Institute at Marnhull, Dorset, won first
prize in a County com- petition for the best village history. The leader in the project later added to the material, and a Marnhull book was published in 1940. To celebrate the Festival of Britain Marnhull decided to produce a new book. This large illustrated miscellany is the result. It is, the editor explains, a collection of contributions, not an encyclo- paedic survey; material contributed has had to be excluded; some places receive only cursory mention. The work ranges more widely than the previous collections, briefly covering the Blackmore Vale and its five border towns and extending to a few places that lie "up over" the hills, among them Salisbury. Nearly 300 plates are included, most of them photographs. Some are over- small, but all together they give a tranquil rich impression of a historic countryside. The text is various—not only in matter, with prehistoric and Roman remains, news- paper history, parish records, rhymes and ghost-stories, but. in manner, going from finished essays to notes and lists. It is a work for browsing, without too much concern for niceties of printing and arrange- ment; and will be read with special pleasure by those who know the district—or the Writings of Thomas Hardy and William
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