Whether your interest in history is personal, academic, or just a more general desire to find out how our forefathers lived, the Linton and District History Society offers a friendly welcome and helpful advice.
We meet on the first Wednesday of every month except January, 7 for 7:30 p.m., in Linton Village Hall. Tea and coffee are available at the start of the meeting. Annual membership is £20, and speaker meetings are free to members. Visitors are always welcome, and pay £5 per meeting.
Our programmes aim to cover local, national and international history – there is something for all interests, and we welcome suggestions for topics.
For all enquiries, contact the Society’s Secretary, Mrs Teresa Squires at sec.lintonhistsoc@gmail.com
For our November meeting, we are glad to welcome a previous Chairman of the Society, Fiona Morison, to talk about nursing during the Great War. Fiona says :
My interest in the First World War nurses grew when I read “The Testament of Youth” by Vera Brittain. The accounts of service, resilience and suffering is usually focused on the men who fought, were wounded, died and survived. But the role played by the nurses in the War was incredible – humane, courageous, often understated and vital to the war effort. My talk considers how this remarkable group of women came together, the part they played and the sacrifices they also made.
This is a most appropriate talk for Remembrance-tide, when once again Linton Church will have a display of the men of our village who went to war but did not return. Our Chairman, Roger Davies, has devoted much time and energy to visiting their graves and memorials so that they are commemorated with honour. Society members, whether Linton residents or not, are very welcome to join us on Remembrance Sunday for the short ceremony at the War Memorial in the churchyard, followed by a service in church. Details can be found in Chimes https://www.thechimes.org.uk/church-services or on the Church website, https://www.ariconium.church/services
Programme 2025
| 5th November | Fiona Morison | The Roses of No Man’s Land |
| 3rd December | John Putley | A Gloucestershire Christmas |
Programme 2026
| January | NO LECTURE | |
| 4th February | Gillian White | Mary, Queen of Scots |
| 4th March | Roger Davies | Korea and the Glorious GlostersChairman’s Lecture |
| 1st April | AGM | Teresa Squires : A National Trust Pot-Pourri |
Review of our October meeting
This meeting was a very special event. Lee Hines, former Chairman of the Society, died in June 2023, shortly before she was due to give a talk to the Society on Place Names. We honoured her memory with a talk on the same topic by Dr. Simon Draper. Dr Draper is Assistant Editor of the Oxfordshire Victoria County History (VCH) having previously worked for the VCH in Gloucestershire (2007-10), so was ideally placed to talk about place names in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.
Members who attended Professor Keith Ray’s talk on the post-Roman history of our immediate area already knew that this was part of the Welsh kingdom of Ergyng. Little wonder, then, that there is a particularly high concentration of Welsh-derived place names in south-east Herefordshire. Indeed, the old name for May Hill, Yartleton, literally means the place of the people of Ergyng.
Most people also know that many place names have geographic connotations – the Anglo-Saxons seem to have had almost as many words for “valley” as the Inuit are supposed to have for snow. A stranger looking for a “dean” was looking out for a long, narrow valley, as opposed to a “coomb”, a rounded valley. Similarly, a traveller coming to a place ending -lode or -lade was forewarned that the river crossing there would quickly become impassable if the river rose after rain (what a lot of meaning to put on to a short suffix), well-illustrated with the bottom of Wainlode Hill with the Severn out of its banks, a very common sight. But place names could also denote function, as in Barton, the farm where barley was grown, or Ashton, where there was a stand of ash trees. Linton itself falls into this category, though whether the “Lin” was flax or lime trees was the subject of some gentle disagreement!
Then there was Walton, the place where the Welsh lived, or more likely, the steading on which the slaves were kept, the slaves in Anglo-Saxon society in this area being often Welsh. Charlton, the place of ceorls, or the landed middle class, was obviously more upmarket, though Knighton did not refer to “knights in shining armour”, but to a group of riders who were entrusted with messages.
A large audience thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Draper’s entertaining and well-illustrated talk.
Before the talk, a booklet about Lee’s father Frank Lively was presented to the Society’s library. Frank was killed in action as the navigator of a Lancaster bomber during a raid in June 1944. This booklet was written by our Chairman, Roger Davies, and former Secretary Jonquil Dodd. Like the Founders’ Lecture, the booklet is dedicated in memory of Lee, who was Chairman at a critical juncture in the Society’s history, and subsequently its Secretary.
Co-author Jonquil Dodd presents the booklet to former Chairman and Archivist of the Society Dr. Ernst Zillekens
Family history
We have transferred the main part of our Archive to the Herefordshire Archive and Record Centre, which is also the main port of call for those researching family history. Some of our parish records can be accessed via this link
Articles of interest
Society members write a weekly column for the Ross Gazette, and we are lucky that these are regularly published. If you would like to submit an article, please contact our Secretary.
Committee members :
Roger Davies (Chairman)
Teresa Squires (Secretary)
Nic Walker (Treasurer)
Valerie Boxley (Outings Secretary)
Pamela Bruce