Ford Village Hall

The long road from Oxford to Winchester is a funny one - as the only route to the south coast from the Midlands people tend to treat it as a motorway.  Signs flash past without the traveller ever really taking in what they point to.  Just past Newbury, you start to pick up signs for the Sandham Memorial Chapel.  As a war memorial, it's unlike anything else you will ever see (and it's well worth the trip on one of the days that it's open), but it represents art painted to commission.  For something a little more esoteric, you have to go to the other end of the country, and a small village hall up in the Borders....

Picture the scene - you're a young Victorian lady (born 1818); well travelled in Europe and married to a dashing (if extremely shy) young aristocrat. You move between homes in Ireland and London and are set fair for a life of idleness.  Then your husband manages to get himself killed out foxhunting...

Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford came to Ford after the death of her husband in 1859, a childless widow.  Rather than take refuge in her grief, or perhaps to stop herself from doing so, she threw herself into restoring Ford Castle, and village philanthropy (sorting out housing, building a school, etc).

In 1861 she started the project for which she now ought to be famous outside the immediate locality.  For a period of 20 years she painted large murals around the inside wall of the schoolroom dealing with scenes from the key events of the Bible.  As an accomplished amateur artist, these would be competent, and perhaps interesting to the keen historian, were it not for one transcending factor - everyone in the pictures was drawn from life.

Louisa persuaded the men, women and children of the village to sit for her, and incorporated their features into the pictures.  Even today this small village gets a steady stream of visitors from around the world who are coming not just to see where their ancestors lived, or went to school, but to see their faces looking down from the walls.  The great houses of England have their portraits, so that the casual visitor can see the aristocracy of the past, but Ford gives you the working man, and that's certainly something you don't see every day.  For a couple of pounds, and if you're starting to find Alnwick a bit twee, get yourself up to Ford for an hour or two, and see some real folk art....