Packed with fascinating & enthralling historical information this book shows how the village of Bisley in Surrey has been endowed with a remarkably long & eventful history all the more surprising for it remains one of the smallest civil parishes in the county. Each chapter covers a specific aspect of the village in a way that the reader will find so much more absorbing than a chronological series of events. Who can fail to be allured by the tale of Bisley Detached for example (which is completely isolated from the rest of the village) or the inside-out" building the Grade Two Listed hole in the ground the witchcraft trial or the bird bath used at baptisms? Some of the village folk are no less interesting: The miscreants benefactors indolent hard-working & the poverty-stricken
- their stories are all here. Even the title of the book is taken from a chapter which records that this disparaging epithet was made on more than one occasion."