We’d been wanting to do something in the area for some time. We’ve got a lot of records of more recent history but nobody knew anything pre-Doomsday. We knew that we would need professional help to do anything on that, so we looked around for money to pay for it, and the LHI scheme was brought to our attention.

One of the LHI team came down and looked at our ideas with us, and gave us some steers - she suggested which bits it would be good to emphasise, and asked us to explain clearly how we planned to involve the community in what we were doing.

This project has made us look at things differently. I think it’s given a lot of local people much more of a sense of place, and its uniqueness. Without LHI, this could not have happened. It really was the key to the whole thing. It made us realise that if we’re really going to do original research, we do need to team up with professionals. There’s a lot that local people can do, we also need that help and guidance, which we’ve been able to pay for thanks to the LHI grant.

We have experts to guide us, but all the digging is done by a core group of 20 local volunteers, who responded to advertisements around the parish and through local archaeology groups. Their ages range from 20 to 70-odd.

We had several days of training at the start, depending on people’s abilities. One topic was field-walking technique, showing us how to see what was there. Some people had done things like this before, some had done nothing before. We needed professional training in how to do the job, because once you start digging something up, you’re destroying it. So if you don’t do it very professionally, you ruin things.

The project has given the community a whole lot of new skills, including how to construct a website. None of us had a clue about websites, and by taking advice we are creating our own local site that will link into the LHI one. Now that we know what’s involved, we’re not only going to do our own, but we’ll also link to another local website so that the parish magazine and local history society will both link together, and be able to work more closely than before.

This parish hasn’t got “a village”, it has five settlements which are mostly just hamlets - Bigbury Village, Bigbury on Sea, St. Ann's Chapel, Easton and Challaborough - so it’s quite a difficult place to get things together with a sense of “the parish”. This project has brought people from virtually all the different parts of the parish together, which has helped to create that sense of a community.

At the end of the first stage, we had an Open Day on the site, just to give people an indication of what was happening. For that we produced pictures of the trenches at various stages, where people could see the ditches that went round them, and pictures of what we had found there - we couldn’t display the originals because they would have been handled too much. At that stage we hadn’t formally identified the finds - the archaeologists couldn’t say anything too definite until it had been cleaned off and dated.

One of the things that pleases me most about the project so far is that 58 people out of a parish of 500 turned out to look at our Open Day, despite the most dreadful weather. It was howling with wind and blowing with rain, and this site is on a field 300 feet up, looking out over the sea towards the Eddystone Lighthouse. With a south-westerly gale blowing, you could hardly stand up there.

We haven’t done any filming, because we found that photographs are better for what we want to do. The LHI money has paid for a digital camera, and will also enable us to buy equipment to project the photographs onto a screen which we can then use to show what we’ve done.

We’re planning a permanent display in the local museum at Kingsbridge, but that won’t be tied up until we know exactly what we’ve got. We’re very keen that what is found is kept locally, and is on view - not put away in a drawer somewhere.