Heritage

Heritage

Our Heritage projects worked to revive, record and archive stories and skills of traditional crafts, industries, lifestyles, routes and Scheduled Monuments within the Chilterns. Working alongside our partners such as Wycombe Museum, Amersham Museum, Chiltern Rangers and Bucks New University, we aimed to bring our local heritage alive for the next generation.

Woodlanders Lives and Celebrating Crafts

Woodlanders’ Lives and Landscapes encouraged and trained volunteers to research and investigate how people made a living in Chilterns woodlands and went about their daily lives. Similarly with Celebrating Crafts, the project aimed to engage local people in heritage crafts, and bring them back to life.

These projects had some fantastic outputs:

  • We ran a six month exhibition entitled ‘Hidden Hands’ in partnership with Wycombe Museum and Bucks New University, which hunted down the hidden work of women in the Chiltern’s villages and who formed a crucial part of the economy in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The research from the exhibition was also made into a book of the same name, which was part of the Chilterns Stories collection.
  • Our volunteers researched and presented a series of personal stories which described work in traditional Chilterns’ industries of the 19th and 20th centuries. These were also made into a book for the Chilterns Stories collection. The stories come from three important collections of oral history interviews recorded onto reel to reel and cassette tapes between the 1950s and the 1980s, which had remained hidden in public and private archives.
  • We ran a one-day conference called Chilterns Women on International Womens Day in 2023. The conference was an inspiring day celebrating the women who excelled in some of the traditional crafts, skills and work found in the Chilterns National Landscape, where record books tell us that the development of a modern local economy was driven by the men of the High Wycombe furniture trade, agricultural merchants and landowning farmers. The lives and critical importance of contributions made by the working women in this area has often been overlooked. From weavers and sculptors, to historians and policy makers, we hosted a range of experts who presented and demonstrated their traditional craft.
  • All the research done by our volunteers has been made publicly available on the Bucks Family History Website and Buckinghamshire Archives
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View the conference brochure

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The Mystery of Grim's Ditch

Grim’s Ditch stretches through the Chilterns and across Southern England. It encompasses a number of prehistoric banks and ditch linear earth works of different dates, and some areas are a Scheduled Monument. In partnership with Buckinghamshire Council, we aimed to connect people to the history of their landscape and uncover some of the secrets surrounding it.

We engaged with the Chilterns Young Archaeologists Club (YAC) and Aylesbury YAC, offering visits and presentations, and facilitating artwork and creative writing around the subject. Our project lead visited schools to educate them about the history of the ditch. We also undertook a Geophysical survey of an area where there is a ‘gap’ in the ditch, with both clubs and New Shoots – and we found the ditch!

People and Mills of the Wye

The River Wye was historically an important part of the Chilterns landscape, providing a source of food, water, transport and eventually power for the local communities. This project aimed to connect the local urban community with their local chalk stream, to help increase understanding and protection of the river. As part of this project, 9 new interpretation panels have been installed along the Wye and volunteers were a big part of these, researching the Wye’s habitat, wildlife, heritage and history. Chiltern Rangers and Wycombe Museum also held River Wye-related events, such as paper making, making dyes from natural materials and learning more about coppicing and charcoal, all activities which would have historically happened along the River Wye.

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