South Devon National Landscape – Celebrating 60 years
2nd August 2020 was the 60th anniversary of the designation of South Devon National Landscape.
The Glover Review, highlighted the importance of National Landscapes and we are tasked with ensuring more and a wider range of people engage with their natural heritage and benefit from their national assets. To celebrate our anniversary we decided to engage with our communities and help them find out
- How has the landscape of the National Landscape been shaped in the past?
- Who is looking after and influencing how it looks today?
- What might it look like in 60 years time?
Thanks to a £10,000 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we ran a series of online and in person events and activities over the year and a bit from our birthday to the end of October 2021.
During this time just under 2000 people got involved in storymaking, heritage walks, online zoom talks, film making, food tasting, painting, hiking, surfing and wildlife watching. The project has been a great success, despite the restrictions we faced with Covid-19 and has been a great way to celebrate our big birthday.
Here are some of the things we did.
Living here in the past
We worked with 4 local primary schools (Salcombe, Malborough with South Huish, Stokenham area and Charleton), Chivelstone Church PCC Restoration and Community project and a local artist, Sara Hurley, to deliver a remote schools project during lockdown.
The project was based around shipwrecks during the Great Blizzard of 1891, some of the sailors are buried in the churchyard. We sent a resource pack out to all schools with images, maps, tips for writing stories, references and articles from the time and a film, with Mrs Perry, the Coastguards wife telling the beginning of the story. The children were then challenged to write the end of the story and submit them for judging with volunteers from the church group.