It all started in 1994 when Dee Taylor; writer, freelance journalist and broadcaster got together with Wendy Jones and decided that as Cockshutt was quite an old village, it would be interesting to do some research into this. The best place to start seemed to be the present since a number of residents have lived here for many years; their memories would give a vivid picture of recent history and needed capturing before it was too late. Sadly Dee soon became ill with cancer and died in 1998 and the project came to a halt. By this stage Dee and Wendy had taken a course on interviewing and collected a number of recordings which were stored by Wendy.

In 2002, Wendy discovered while researching the history of the church that there were two other people in the village researching aspects of the history of Cockshutt. One was looking into the lost houses and the other into the Public Houses. The three of them got together and the project was reborn.

Wendy and Helen spent many hours in the reference library in Shrewsbury researching the archives for Cockshutt references. An appeal went out for material – old photos, stories and information. The response was huge, so in September 2003, the collected material was exhibited in the Millennium Hall. The support for this was overwhelming and encouraged Wendy, Helen and Dean to look into publishing this material in some way. A book was decided upon but research showed that to produce this to a decent standard, financial backing was required. Undaunted, they started looking at sources and discovered the Local Heritage Initiative. A Committee was formed and a grant applied for; granted in April 2004.

The more we have discovered, the bigger the project has grown; there were so many cross references to Petton that we have decided to incorporate this into the book too.

Collecting the materials has not been easy but the task ahead is not simple; we have to collate and store the material, translate what we have discovered from notes into readable text then pull the whole together into a proper narrative. We have set ourselves a deadline of publication by October 2005. It will be a challenging time!