This year’s festival walk, an event which becomes more popular by the year, was down on the farm – New Farm off Lacock Road, the home of Paul and Susie Weaver.

It was subtitled ‘a walk through agricultural history’ but it was a lot more besides.

New Farm was built about 1700 and Mr Weaver’s great grandfather moved into it in the late 19th century, when it was part of the Lacock Abbey estates. The Pocock family, Mr Weaver’s maternal forebears, gradually bought the land as it became available until they owned the whole farm.

Documents and maps aplenty chart the farm’s history and development, but what it interesting is the way Mr Weaver and his family have managed to preserve the historic and embrace the future at the same time.

He was the first farmer in Wiltshire to join a scheme for restoring old orchards. The resulting cider from some of the trees was tasted later.

His cattle are rare breed Gloucesters – good for cheese (Gloucester and double Gloucester, of course) and, Mr Weaver claims, the best beef you will ever taste.

The walkers were shown the old mill stream of the Ladbrook, from which he hopes to generate electricity in the near future, and wild flower meadow which is the result of 30 years patience.

There is also a 300-year-old crab apple tree, still fruiting, marking the line of the old farm enclosure.

Mr Weaver is an enthusiastic preserver of the past. The farm houses numerous vintage cars, most of them working, an 1882 2nd class railway carriage of the London, Chatham and Dover line, currently being restored after a chequered and colourful career.

It will be let as an artist’s studio when the work is complete, to join two other studios created from unused farm building and already in use.

There is a steam engine, a piece of canal lifting gear and incongruously, the realistic-looking but fake market cross made for the film of Tess of the D’Urbervilles for which New Farm was one of the sets.

There was something surprising around every corner and most appropriately on Midsummer’s Night, a fairy ring in a field – sadly not magic but the result of a fungus.