John Aubrey's visit External view of Methodist church Inside Methodist

Although we do not have any photographs of the Parish Church at Calne, we hope to visit the town to take some.   We have included the text from John Aubrey's Wiltshire Collections about the town and church.

We visited Calne after discovering from the 1871 census that Duncan's g.g.grandparents George Wilcox and Jane Ball lived there, George being a grocer and local Methodist preacher.   The Methodist chapel of that time was pulled down a long time ago, although we were able to find the site of the chapel (which now has two houses on it), thanks to a local man who asked if he could help us because we looked 'lost'!   He remembered the chapel being pulled down because the demolishers found a body in a vault in the foundations.   The body was taken to the local parish church yard to be interred.   The chapel was used for a number of businesses before being demolished.

The current Methodist church is only a few hundred metres from the old chapel, but is no doubt much bigger than the original building.

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Calne Methodist Church 1998 (609k)

Interior, from balcony 1998 (478k)

Interior showing pulpit and organ 1998 (490k)