Sharing oral histories

This afternoon, the local community was invited to a gathering to learn about the local history of the former Field Estate, which formed the majority of Trinity Ward in Stroud. I have recently been elected as a town councillor for Trinity Ward. Several local historians have initiated a project to collate records of the local houses which were built here in late Victorian times on various parts of the Field Estate.

We gathered at the local pub to meet, discuss and share information. Neil is one of the historians and has trained as an archaeologist. He has already completed a lot of research of maps and the landscape of an adjacent area called The Heavens and Weyhouse, which you may have noticed me refer to in my journals here. He also lives on our road, which adjoins the land that he and I are so interested in.

I was delighted to meet him and to compare notes. I am wholly amateur in my pursuit of landscape history, but I was able to offer him some of my research which I was pleased to find he thought was accurate and previously unknown to him. The work he showed today was fascinating and revealed a lot of new information to me and confirmed some other ideas I had about the ancient history of the Horns and Heavens valleys in which we live. I hope he will let me join him when he does some more 'digging' and initially we will go for walks around the woods, fields and streams to compare notes. What fun!

My picture shows Neil, in the foreground, talking to Eve, who has lived close by all her life, and she was able to give him several details about the landscape and its recent history, including names of specific places, which we had never heard before. Eve learnt a lot from the stories she was told by her mother, who is now 101 years old, about her life in this area. I wish I could show you some of the pictures mounted on the wall which she was looking at here.

We were gathered outside the pub on a narrow verandah, which was busy with a constant flow of people all wanting to look at the various maps, pictures, deeds and old documents. I am very excited to find so many others who share a similar urge to understand where we live.