Archives South West, led by Bristol Archives, has been awarded £175,000 by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to preserve at-risk local historical audio collections.

The ‘Sounds of the South West’ project will preserve rare and at-risk audio heritage from across South West England, including Wiltshire.

These archives, currently being stored on outdated formats such as reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes, are in danger of being lost due to format degradation and reliance on machines that are no longer in use. Experts widely agree that many sound collections will become unplayable in the next 12 years. The Sounds of the South West project seeks to address this issue.

The Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre was lucky enough to receive funding from the project to run a set of outreach events, employing local creative Marnie Forbes-Eldridge to assist us in working with a group of young people. The group have spent the past eight weeks enjoying getting to know each other and working together, using some of the newly digitised audio files as inspiration.

Our journey began with an introduction to the original medium, a set of cassette tapes dating back to the 1980s. The digitisation process undertaken as part of the project had enabled us to discover what was on the tapes; they were oral history recordings featuring Wiltshire residents from all over the county. We started by listening to two recordings and one of these, the voice of the farmer, writer and broadcaster Ralph Whitlock, was the spark which drew our interest. There was something about the way he spoke, about the old Wiltshire words he talked about that are used no more, that drew us to him. The History Centre holds other material of Ralph’s too, donated by Ralph himself whilst he was alive. These collections contain items like books that he published, notebooks that he wrote in as a child, and letters that he received about the work he did, including fan mail!

Ralph loved nature, studying creatures at home and abroad. He loved the Wiltshire landscape and old Wiltshire stories. We wanted to find out more.

So back then to our newly digitised audio collection and to Kathleen Wiltshire talking about ghosts and her experience of a spectral black dog, and to Mr Gilbert Sheppard talking about the Colerne Donkey, or the Parson’s ‘ass’ in the poetical recitation of the tale he gave us. We discovered the story of the Wiltshire Moonrakers as told in a lilting, gentle Wiltshire voice.

Looking at history and audio made us imagine how magical, extraordinary and otherworldly it must have been to hear the recorded voice for the very first time. The same must have been said about the photographic print, and of course one of the early pioneers of photography was Henry Fox-Talbot of Lacock. The magic of new inventions and the magic of the Wiltshire tales and landscape had gripped our imagination!

With the help of one of the group, we created our own cyanotypes and delved into the collections at the History Centre, discovering more supernatural and out of this world stories, from the tale of Sally in the Woods to John Aubrey’s mention of light orbs in the 1600s, crop circles and UFOs at Cley hill, and more… We found some artistic representations of the tales and saw examples of photography being used creatively and expressively to explore Wiltshire’s ancient sites, like Avebury.

Our journey was taking us full circle and back to audio. We decided we would like to interview John Chandler, the local historian who had interviewed Kathleen Wiltshire back in the 1980s, and the photographer Mark Somerville, who had inspired us with his photographs of Avebury and the Wiltshire landscape. With the help of the interviewees, these recordings will become our contribution to the audio record, a spoken moment in time today about our relationship with the past.

These recordings will form part of our creative journey too. We plan to make a set of audio-visual clips using parts of the 1980s recordings alongside parts of the 2025 interviews, set with visual material to showcase the stories that meant so much to us. A physical exhibition will also form part of the whole; we are planning for it to travel to a number of Wiltshire libraries so that others can hear our story and hopefully be inspired too.

Thank you to those who have helped us on our journey, and to the National Lottery Heritage Fund who enabled this outreach project to take place.

Julie Davis, SoSW outreach project lead on behalf of the SoSW project group. May, 2025