Sound Recordings, Dorset

Description

Mr. Spiller of Broadwindsor talks about farming; milking cows; hedging and the decline in the numbers of hedgers; farm horses and ploughing; weeding corn; haymaking; women labourers; informant's family; discusses the village and changes, with reference to an old photograph; the workhouse; village fetes; father's working day; mother's breadmaking; oven in chimney corner, fuelled by gorse faggots; subsistence farming; pig killing; winters and summers; coronation celebrations; school and education; other local villages and their churches; Broadwindsor village name; farms and church tithes; Roman road; Iron-Age earthworks; vegetable gardening; the village Reading Room; singing, pubs and changes after 1914; photograph of informant's grandfather; fruit growing; informant's house; thatching (house, corn ricks); old and modern thatch compared; seeing his first motor car; World War One and changes - loss of men, mechanisation of farming (seeing his first tractor); recollections of the old days - entertainment, cost of living, day trips by horse and cart to West Bay; cider orchards; cider making; farm milk used to make Dorset Blue (cheese) - describes the process and the taste; Easter; Sundays; the village policeman; fox hunting; rabbiting. [Tr. 3] Mrs. Gale of Stoke Abbot talks about local white dog, phantom coach and white horse supernatural legends; the history and name of the village; the poet William Crow; underground passage between Stoke Farm and the Rectory; Manor Farm and corn stealing; village's flour mills; travel and local roads; describes bread ovens (in fireplace); mill stones and uses; the village's church; Roman antiquities and the Tolley Collection at Bridport Museum; cave at Lewesdon Hill where King Charles alleged to have hidden; corn dollies - history, making of and decoration; Stoke Club (Sick Club) - banner, entertainments, rules; talk of a number of local characters; fieldnames; local legend regarding the Devil and a secret pathway; May Day celebrations at ? , Swyre and Abbotsbury; changes in Dorset villages, working practices and employment; the Curfew Plot and the ringing of a bell to wake workers. [Tr. 4] 11 of 11.

Metadata

Identifier jrtbgcrw
IRN 414755
Class Mark LAVC/SRE/A704r
Level Item
Type of Record Archives - ISAD(G)
Peristent Link http://prototype1.library.leeds.ac.uk/jrtbgcrw
Collection(s) Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture
Category Archive
Parent Record Audiotape Sound Recordings
Creator(s) Panheinen, Ossi
Date [1970]
Size and Medium 1 x 12.7cm open reel spool, Duration: 91' 50".

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