Pewsey will be taken over by the arts next month during a two-day festival featuring poetry, plays and puppetry.

Pewsey Fringe Theatre is the brainchild of Nettie Baskcomb Brown, director of PVADS youth theatre, who was inspired by a visit to the Ventnor Fringe Festival in the Isle of White this summer, and will feature 26 different acts.

Miss Baskcomb Brown said: “Originally the idea was to do something that meant lots of people could get involved and it was going to be the same each night but when I talked to local artists everyone seemed so enthusiastic about taking part in it I decided to make both nights different. Everyone has been very supportive and a lot of people have been talking about it so it should be well attended.”

If the event is a success, Ms Brown hopes to make it a bigger annual event using other venues in the village.

She said: “In Pewsey we have the carnival and a music festival and an art walk but we don’t really have anything for drama and the theatre so it’s about offering something different.”

Among the performers will be musicians Chris Giddins, Paul Darby, Mike Pickering and Lucinda Brown with the Southern Jacobites bagpipe band, Hayricks Round and Superstrings.

There will also be three original short plays based on the county called The Wiltshire Tales.

The trilogy is made up of Great Bustards, a comedy about the re-introduction of the birds to Salisbury Plain; Circles of Life, a comedy based on a true story about crop circles; and White Gold, a dramatic historical account of Mesolithic Wiltshire, 5,000 years before Stonehenge was built.

Donations at the performances will be given to local groups who work in the arts with the audience able to decide which group they would like to sponsor.

Tickets from www.pvads.net, or text 07775312144 or call (01672) 510436.