Have you ever been to.........Tackley?

Well of course I have! I can hear voices saying and I too have often been to services in the lovely old church of St Nicholas, set on rising land at the edge of the village. I had not, however, visited the Tackley Through Time exhibition in the South Porch of the church. I’d planned to go soon after it was opened in 2018 but what with Covid (the Pandemic begins to be a handy excuse for anything we’ve failed to do!) and one thing and another I’ve only just got round to spending some time in this lovely peaceful church investigating the exhibition.

It proved to be an interesting and pleasant surprise, giving the visitor a great deal of information about Tackley village and the countryside it sits in. There are neat and well produced information boards which give a clear timeline of what has happened in Tackley from prehistoric times until today. The boards display a series of maps which chart changes and developments in the village. Below the maps, significant dates are listed. Just a few examples will give you the flavour: the earliest record of the Gardiner Arms public house is 1788; in 1845 45 emigrants from Tackley died when the Cataraqui hit the rocks off the coast of Tasmania and in 1932 Electricity came to Tackley. (Is that later than might have been expected?).