Explore North Devon

Explore North Devon began in 2006 as an Archives 4 All project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund with additional funding from Natural England through the North Devon Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Our project partners were the North Devon Record Office, North Devon and Torridge museums service, North Devon Theatres Trust, the Northern Devon Coast & Countryside Service and The National Archives.

Our aim was to work with 5 community groups in the northern Devon area to develop their collections of local history information, encourage the participation of residents in contributing new material and digitise the resulting data to populate a web-based resource linked to the national Access to Archives (A2A) programme.Community events, volunteering, training opportunities, heritage trails and classroom resources are among the benefits that the project generated.

We reached the conclusion of the Archives 4 All phase of the project in 2008 but managed to secure further funding to extend the project from Devon County Council’s cultural development programme, so that we now have an ever increasing range of fascinating images, stories and heritage trails from around our region on view on our website.  This has enabled us to extend our community archives work to many more parishes in the northern Devon area, as well as developing our existing projects further. We now have over 40 groups participating in the project.

A recent development has been to migrate our collections from the original bespoke website to a more modern, collaborative system provided by www.ehive.com. Communities participating in the Explore North Devon project now have their own section within a wider ‘Devon’s Heritage’ community on this site.