Understanding Exmoor’s special qualities through using archives
This new project, which commenced on 1 July 2016, concentrates on utilising all the material that have been assessed and catalogued over the past two years. The Society’s Archivist, Dr Helen Blackman, is leading this project to achieve the following:
- Archive Hub: Links made to other archives, history groups and museums locally, regionally and nationally. Training made available to volunteers and other organisations. Establishing this hub will enable the work that follows
- Exmoor Studies: with modern knowledge, and previously unused information from the archives, now is the ideal time to commission new studies on Exmoor ponies; red deer; rivers; railways; outlaws of Exmoor and the Lorna Doone trail. These will be around 10,000 words long and will complement the Exmoor Review, allowing for more in depth articles
- Then and Now: using our historic slides and photographs, volunteers will venture out to re-capture images from the same spots, providing a record of landscape change
- Boundaries and communication: Recording the different pathways across the moor such as post paths; greenways and drovers’ ways. To show the ways people negotiated the moor and communicated across it paying particular attention to boundary sites such as pubs; gateways; important stones and markers
- History of Exmoor National Park: A book-length study of the history of Exmoor as a National Park, covering the last 70 years of continuity and change. To include studies of the different landscape types— coast; moorland; farmland; woodland and commons.
We would like to thank everyone who donated to the appeal to fund this project. Without you, none of this would be possible.
