"I was very impressed by one little village I visited in France which had a ‘street museum’, with signs talking about the history of the shops and the locality.

After discussion in the village, we are putting up street boards with information about the village, and in three or four shops we’re putting the story of what happened in the shop and what the local commercial activities were.

You don’t have to go into a museum to discover the history of the village. Just by walking through it, using the shops and visiting its attractions you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s been going on here.

We had fourteen pubs at one stage, but there are only three now, and they will all feature as part of the ‘museum’ display on the history of brewing in the village.

We also have a group of ‘House Detectives’ researching four or five houses. Ultimately we will extend the number to help others, once we become more experienced.

Another part of the project is archiving our material. The LHI project started about two years ago as a result of an exhibition of photographs of the village which generated a huge amount of interest not just within the village but in the locality.

We all thought it would be a shame to continue to keep all the photographs into a book in a darkened corner, to be hardly looked at again. So we started discussing how they and other source material could be put most effectively into the public domain. The LHI is helping us to do this by creating a website for the Historical Society which will be linked to the village’s own website.

We’re taking an initial range of about 400 photographs of the village over the last 150 years. We are intending that people who want copies can buy them from us - the definition on copies downloaded from the Internet won’t be good enough for reproduction.

We’ll also put on elements such as the various censuses there have been, maps of the area dating back to 1790, plans of the village, and so on; all of which will help people from literally all over the world who continue to ask the historical society about their family roots in Cerne.

Last year a collection of portraits of people in the village was created by one of our members, and we now have roughly 100 taken during 2004 - which we would like to put on the website, with their permission. Over time we hope also to record their voices in discussions about their lives and the village where most of them have lived for a long time."