This booklet was written as a companion guide to the second edition (Galileo Publishers, 2025) of Fanny Wale’s beautifully illustrated Record of Shelford Parva.
Falling somewhere between a history, a journal and an artist’s sketch book, Fanny Wale created her exquisite 81-page volume over a period of 11 years, between 1908 and 1919. After Fanny died in 1936, her niece Norah Powell presented the manuscript to the County Archives (now the Cambridgeshire Archives) where it is currently kept. Norah touchingly retained a photographic copy of it bound up in wooden boards which she would loan to newcomers to the village. In 2012, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, villager David Martin and Little Shelford Local History Society made the book widely available online, and through a first printed edition of 300 copies.
Like the 2012 publication, the new edition is a facsimile reproduction. It’s exciting to consult original work; when we hold personal texts from the past in our hands, they make an impressi
