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THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 



their lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth 

 centuries. This was not to last and the story of the 

 eviction and dispersal of the villagers is told with 

 feeling. This, however, was not the end of the story 

 and the last part of the book chronicles the post 

 war campaigns for the reinstatement of the village 

 and the various reunions of the surviving villagers. 

 The remarkable number of photographs, assembled 

 in the book, add faces to the names and depict the 

 variety of village life, its work and its leisure. The 

 village economy was founded on farming and most 

 of the working population was directly employed on 

 the land. Other crafts, such as the blacksmith, the 

 carpenter and the boot maker, were also dependent 

 on agriculture. An old craft, important on the downs, 

 was the dewpond maker. There are photographs of 

 school and church groups and of village celebrations 

 such as the coronation of George V. 



It would be very easy to paint an over rosy 

 picture of village life. Rex Sawyer does not fall into 

 this trap, he shows the other side as well. He talks 

 about the dangers and hardships of an isolated 

 community; the story of the robbery of Matthew 

 Dean and subsequent events is well known. There 

 was also the continuous threat of flooding which 

 caused great distress in the lower parts of the village. 

 Another concern was the uncertain nature of 

 farming, in particular the agricultural depression 

 of the later nineteenth century meant that many 

 men had to leave the village to find work and this 

 started a decline in the population that continued 

 till the evacuation. 



Of course the saddest parts of the book concern 

 the eviction and dispersal of the villagers. Given 

 only 47 days notice many of them left believing they 

 would return after the war. Perhaps their attitude 

 is summed up by a part of a quotation from one of 

 them, T know that it sounds silly now that we left 

 so willingly, but then we thought we might be 

 helping win the war.' 



However they were not to return. The military 

 authorities claimed a continuing need for the area. 

 This led, in the fifties and sixties to a campaign, for 

 the reinstatement of the village and the preservation 

 of rights of way, in which a leading part was played 

 by the late Austin Underwood. This was mainly 

 unsuccessful and the villagers were left only with 

 access to the church for an annual service. 



This is a book which needed to be written while 

 there were still memories to draw upon. Rex Sawyer 

 has done a great service both to those of us whose 

 knowledge of Imber life came secondhand, from 

 older relatives, and to remind future generations, 



who may not even be able to find Imber on the 

 map, that for over thousand years it was a living 

 community. 



BRIAN LAWRENCE 



Stephen Palmer. The Microlepidoptera of 



Wiltshire. Published by the author 2001, 234 pages; 

 Price £15.95, paperback, ISBN 954057 60 0. 



Baron Charles de Worms published his 

 Macrolepidoptera of Wiltshire in 1962, after an 

 intensive personal survey of the county's larger 

 moths and close perusal of much the same sources 

 as used in this book. He lived in Surrey. In his 

 Introduction he recorded that Wiltshire was a rich 

 county for a large proportion of our 

 Macrolepidoptera and it was to be hoped that at 

 some not far distant date a work on the even greater 

 number of the Microlepidoptera would be 

 undertaken. 



Now Stephen Palmer has achieved this, 

 although living in the county for only ten years and 

 using sources less substantial than de Worms. The 

 number of people living in Wiltshire able to identify 

 more than a handful of micros can be counted on 

 the fingers of one hand. 



It is an essential handbook for anyone interested 

 in the moths ofWiltshire and follows in the footsteps 

 of many similar lists for other counties. Except for 

 the cover, there are no illustrations, which might 

 come as a surprise, but would have radically affected 

 the costs. There are 234 pages, the major proportion 

 of which is the systematic list of the species with a 

 series of charts at the end showing their distribution 

 within each 10 kilometre square. These latter 

 replace the more usual dot maps, which the author 

 rightly concludes would have very little meaning at 

 this early stage of recording in the county; very 

 common moths should be recorded in every square 

 and probably every tetrad in the county. Dot maps 

 tend to show those areas where microlepidopterists 

 are most active rather than the true nature of 

 distribution. The author's tables demonstrate 

 concisely those areas where recording needs to be 

 concentrated. 



The introduction includes a useful series of 

 paragraphs on conservation, species of conservation 

 interest in Wiltshire and a survey of the 

 microlepidopterists in the county. In the main text 

 the status of each species is listed separately under 

 each Vice-County heading (Wiltshire is divided into 

 two Watsonian Vice-counties, VC7 andVCS) using 



