Background

Aware that the reservoir of early Exmoor memories was fast disappearing David began recording contrasting life stories in 2007.

What began to emerge were details of a past more distant than the life-span of the people being interviewed.  Many for example could recall hearing stories from their grandparents, first hand descriptions of life on Exmoor going back as far as the mid 1800s, long before they themselves were born.

Indeed for some the reach of living memory could go back further still, with accounts handed down through the generations and told to David as the culmination of a truly wonderful oral tradition, and confirming that all history was such until recorded in writing.

This oral tradition can still occur – just – in parts of Exmoor where families have remained in the same small area for many generations and can tap deeply into their past and that of their local communities as well as drawing on the dwindling folk-memory of the larger area.

These recordings began with a chance meeting in Brendon churchyard between David and a brother and sister who had been re-visiting the area. They were overheard talking about Cranscombe, a local farm on which they had both been born – she more than ninety years previously – and where four generations of their family had lived and worked.  It also happened to be where David was then living.

After a couple of subsequent meetings they were invited to return to their old home and to stay for a few days.  In September 2007, more than 50 years after originally leaving, they returned for the first time.

During their visit, memories of childhood in the area and of everyday life on a vanished Exmoor were tape-recorded in a series of conversations, and written up. Their reminiscences began to spark stories from other local people, which were in turn recorded, and gradually an oral history of this part of Exmoor’s coastal fringe began to emerge.

Old family photographs were then added to these stories.  Most of these had been taken by rich Edwardian holiday-makers who had visited the area and were sent back as mementos to the host families as a thank-you-very-much for their time on Exmoor.  Most of these photographs had been taken with extremely good photographic equipment and have never been seen outside the individual Exmoor families until now.

The original intention had been to place all this in the record office, but publisher Mike Berry of Rare Books and Berry was shown the material and said that it deserved a far wider audience. He took the decision therefore to publish the work, and this is the result; sixteen contrasting life stories of ordinary Exmoor people in the four volumes of Unforgotten Exmoor.

I have subsequently republished the books under Oaken Pin Publishing.