MUIRHEAD`S MYSTERIES: A "ghost fair" in Wiltshire during World War One

I found this account of  a likely time-slip in The Northern Rambler of April 1942 ( vol 8 no. 72) recently:

QUEER TALES OF THE OPEN AIR (IX) THE GHOST FAIR

“ During the last war I was driving one evening in a part of Wiltshire which at that time was altogether unknown to me. It was a wet and cloudy day and my own desire was to arrive as soon as possible in the hospitable house towards which I was bound. I drove down one of the avenues of monoliths which I knew from hearsay were the approach to a well-known prehistoric temple, but which till that day I had not seen. A village has been built in the actual space originally occupied by the temple and here since prehistoric days generation after generation of simple country people have lived, unquestioning and at peace, without overmuch interest in their predecessors. Historians and archeologists dig and deliberate, whilst the natives earn their living and enjoy their holidays when they come.

It was one of these holidays that I came upon that evening. Of all rural festivities a fair is the gayest and most spontaneous and here in the middle of a village which itself had grown up, on the site connected with the life and religion of a race whose very names have almost been forgotten, the traditional sports were in full swing. If it had not been raining, I should have jumped out of the car to climb the embankment,and to run through the crowd to join in the fair. Shooting galleries, cocoa-nut shies, roundabouts,swingboats,and gingerbread stalls had attracted a small rural crowd clothed in non-descript garments…a few gipsies added colour to the scene. Darkness had not yet fallen, but candles or oil lamps already shone through some of the cottage windows, and the owners of the cockshies had lit their flares. There was nothing very brilliant about this typical country festival but it was a completely happy scene. I was sorry to leave it behind.

Several years later when I visited the place as a tourist I discovered to my amazement in the inn parlour a local guidebook which said that no fair had  been held there for over fifty years…The fair which I had watched with such pleasure that evening had no physical reality. The last to be held was more than half-a-century before.

Edith Oliver (“Country Life”, 9/1/42)