Unforgotten Exmoor

Unforgotten Exmoor will tell you what Exmoor was really like in the old days. If it’s social history you want, then you’ve got to talk to the people who know what they’re talking about, find out what’s locked away in the memories of ordinary, decent folk.

With Unforgotten Exmoor  David Ramsay does just that, skilfully interviewing a handful of elderly locals (‘the old people’ he calls them) about their early lives in Barbrook, Brendon, Countisbury and Lynton. And the result is a charmingly edited and wonderfully readable set of reminiscences on an old way of life when values were different and communities were everything. Octogenarian Victor Lock tells us what it was like to be a coffin maker, spending days bending the elm sides with parallel saw cuts and boiling water, making oversize templates for the grave-digger. Blanch and John Pile reminisce on pig killing and offal sausages, lamb tail pie and plucking fowl. Ted Lethaby recalls how his mother took in washing from Glenthorne, boiling, ironing and starching night and day, never venturing far from the home farm. After the war Ted joined the AA. He was good with motorbikes: ‘Back then there wasn’t much to an engine – you had a set of plugs, a set of points, a condenser, a coil, some spark plugs, and if you had petrol it would go!’ Roy Kellaway recalls playing cricket on the local recreation ground, listening to the BBC’s ‘Children’s Hour’ and adventures with his faithful dog Spud (there’s a lovely old photo of Spud sitting on top of Roy’s rather confused looking show-pony, Misty.)

Unforgotten Exmoor is such a nostalgic treat that it leaves you hungry for more of these first-hand strolls down memory lane. There are two more similar volumes of these evocative memories scheduled for publication over the next twelve months.

Unforgotten Exmoor : Words and Pictures from a Vanished Era.
By David Ramsay
Published by Rare Books and Berry
128 printed pages inc 130 Black and White photographs
Hardback
Price £9-95
ISBN 978-0-9557119-8-5

Available from all good bookshops or
direct  from the publisher (£9-95 plus £1-63 post)

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Unforgotten Exmoor | Volume Two Unforgotten Exmoor Volume 2  this is the second volume in a series of the social history of ordinary folk in a part of the world that most of us have forgotten or will never know. Reflecting on their ordinary lives, their stories are extraordinary, evoking a deeply nostalgic and affectionate portrait of bygone days in pre-war Exmoor.

Unforgotten Exmoor | Volume Three Unforgotten Exmoor, the third volume in the series, takes another look into the past lives of four more ordinary people who were born on Exmoor. It tells the story of their early lives, the problems they encountered, the humour of situations, the lifelong friendships they have held and their recollections of pre war times. Extraordinary accounts of everyday life.

Unforgotten Exmoor | Volume Four One of the most striking things about that world is how it’s one in which health and safety are just the ghosts of Christmases yet to come. Children drive tractors into stone pillars or hang onto bullocks’ tails to be dragged round muddy yards without ever suffering much harm. But then, this was a world emerging from a war in which many of those who came home did so with terrible wounds: “Colonel Jackson himself had returned from the war with both of his legs blown off, and father learned him to ride,” recalls Gerald Down, in a very matter-of-fact summation of what was, after all, a matter of fact.