CELEBRATING YOUR PROJECTS
Alan Crosby finds out about a group’s efforts to preserve the past of a Lincolnshire village
A group’s success in recording parish life
Utterby is a small village with a population of 350, north of the market town of Louth, on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds. Its intriguing name is Scandinavian and means “the outlying or remote settlement”. Since 2011, Utterby Heritage Group has worked to collect historical information about the village and research its history, focusing on the beautiful Grade II listed parish church of St Andrew.
The group has produced guide sheets on the interesting features of the church and its surroundings including a medieval packhorse bridge, an ancient salt trail leading inland from salt-workings on the nearby coast, local links with the vanished abbey at North Ormsby, and the railway, which closed in 1969 and is now slowly being reopened as a heritage line. There is also an imaginative ‘ listening post’ in the church, where people can hear recordings of villagers’ stories and reminiscences, describing the changes Utterby has been through. The team recorded villagers and their recollections of how the place has changed over the years, to help present and future generations understand life in the recent but fast-disappearing past.
“The group set out to attract people to visit the church and has been enormously successful in doing so,” says Penny Would, one of the organisers. “There is a calendar of events throughout the year but the most exciting moments are when strangers or people from other villages spring from nowhere to offer their support and interest”.
The latest project is to be the installation of a new parish chest. As readers will know, the parish chest was where the vital documents were stored from the 16th century to the 20th. Those for Utterby – registers, churchwardens’ accounts, charity papers, vestry minutes, constables’ and highway accounts, tithe documents and enclosure records – are now at Lincolnshire Archives.
So the group decided to create a modern- day equivalent, a purpose-built secure chest full of contemporary records of Utterby and its life. There will be a glass display case for temporary exhibitions, and a touch-screen monitor to show items locked away. The chest will only be opened to add more material, to assist individual researchers, and for special occasions such as teas and social events.
Villagers are already donating material to the chest and the finished collection will include newspaper cuttings, maps, transcripts of stories and reminiscences, children’s observations of their community and photographs. These will build up a picture of the social, cultural and economic life of the parish, its landscape and architecture and its changing character. The heritage group will manage the collection and expand its scope – for example, by taking photographs of the village as it is now, and recording the development of new housing which is likely to bring change in the near future.
The chest, together with the monitor, is due to go on display from January next year. A member will archive all contributions and another will liaise with the school, working with the children who will come to sessions in the church to contribute their pieces to the chest. The project will create a snapshot of village life each year with everyday stories and details of families and how long they have lived in the village.
The group records material that is now held at the archives and uses cartography to record the layout of the village – its houses, shops, inns, blacksmith, farmhouses, garage, school, chapels, and workshops then and now.
“The volunteers list in the village has grown enormously and it is fabulous when new arrivals are keen to join in,” Penny adds. “We are looking forward to the launch of the parish chest and hopefully recruiting more enthusiasts who will become curators of our archive. It will be wonderful when children start to contribute to the chest and come back in a few years to see what they had written!”
The group has set out to attract people to visit the church and has been enormously successful