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from Village Green magazine
Branscombe Image Library
Branscombe residents turn 'House Detectives'
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from Village Green magazine
Location: Devon
An extract from an article about the Branscombe project published in Devon Rural Community Council's quarterly magazine Village Green (issue 87, March 2002)
In future, residents and visitors in one picturesque east Devon village will have a better understanding of the community - past and present.
'Where Memory Meets History' is the ongoing theme of a project at Branscombe, which involves people of all ages, long-term residents and newcomers alike, backed by the Local Heritage Initiative.
The project helps explore a community in the making, including people’s oral recollections, histories of individual houses, archaeological field-walks, a hedgerow survey, and other enterprising explorations of the area’s natural and manmade environment.
Elements of what make the community what it is today include Neolithic flint tools and bits of medieval pottery found in the surrounding fields, tales of smuggling and lace-making and a modern day multi-layered map of the parish.
The driving force behind the Project is Barbara Farquharson, who first bought a Branscombe house with her husband Jan in 1984.
She says: "The first fruit of the Project was an anthology of 'Ghost Stories from Branscombe' published in 1996.
“Since then there have been annual exhibitions and entertainments and another book, detailing 'Branscombe Shops, Trades & Getting By,' in the words of older villagers who recall times in living memory when the small community was almost self-sufficient - the blacksmith was also a postman and chimney sweep; the carpenter was the undertaker too and a farm labourer doubled as barber."
"The archaeology was brilliant," adds Canadian Joan Doern, who arrived in Branscombe in the mid-1970s. As it happens, the Project was particularly lucky - they found more Neolithic flint tools and waste per square metre than have been found anywhere else in England, including the Stonehenge area!
"On the field-walk the instructions from the archaeologist were so simple and clear that we were all seeing and picking up the right stuff. It was the most appalling day I've ever been out in, but nobody minded. We were so cold and so wet, and everybody was grinning from ear to ear!"
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