Archive Rambler: from Westward Ho! to Bideford

Having completed the first part of my journey, from Hartland to Clovelly, I was ready the next day to walk to Westward Ho! and travel onward to my accommodation in Bideford.

I had planned my journey in advance and knew I would get a bus, the journey being quite short but tiring after 30 miles. What a surprise to discover that until 1917 there was a railway station connecting the towns!

A disappeared railway

ZSPC 11 is an extensive collection of books, magazines, cuttings, photographs, timetables, maps and tickets compiled by the late W E Hayward of Weston-super-Mare, also known as the W E Hayward Collection.

• From our collection

  ZSPC 11

  Title

  The W E Hayward Collection

  Date

  1831–1977

The main subject is railway history but there are also a few books about the mines of Cornwall, canals and steamers. Each piece is a work of art of archival work. Ring binders are divided by area and include well-organised information on types of trains, tickets and timelines, and local photographs with and without trains.

I opened the record referring to 'Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore' and found a collection of old tickets, articles and photographs. I turned the pages carefully and stopped to read an article called 'Ticket Spotlight', from 1961.

The railway whose ticket is illustrated here is probably the least-known of British minor railways. [...] It was an odd line in many respects. It was owned by the British Electric Traction Co. Ltd., who had intended to electrify it, but in fact never did so, and it perished unsung in the midst of World War I, being first requisitioned and then dismantled.

Article describing the Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore Railway. Catalogue reference: ZSPC11/316

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The old railway line was seven miles long and took a curious zig-zag course across the peninsula. Imagine I had travelled back to Bideford by train?! What would it have looked like?

The answer was in one of the many postcards and photos inserted in tiny pockets, carefully crafted and attached to the pages of the record:

A wonderful view. But there was a more personal story waiting in the file, too.

Family treasures in Bideford

Before closing the record, I opened another little pocket and to my surprise I found a collection of tiny photographs of Bideford, taken by W E Hayward’s grandfather himself. I carefully laid them out on the table and admired them. ‘Five river-side photos taken by George – my father – c. 1899-1900 – and kept by Emily B. Hayward – my mother. W J Hayward, 25/7/1961’.

I don’t know if it was the care put into the crafting of the pocket and in those two words, ‘mother’ and ‘father’, typewritten with devotion at the centre, or the thought of a man sorting his parents' photographs, looking and piling them together to save them from time, but I found myself feeling emotional. Was it the materiality of those photographs or the thought of the actions behind it that suddenly moved me?

So many lives I had encountered on my journey through the catalogue of a state archive. Nurses, sailors, soldiers, photographers, people travelling on donkeys and people on ghost trains, collectors, sons, fathers and mothers. They are all there, fleeting traces of past lives that still live in our collective present.

Archives can be impenetrable, but once you can find your way, perhaps with a map, they can reveal an entire new world.

Northam Burrows and a Cold War precaution

The journey wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention my final discovery. On the way from Westward Ho! to Bideford, I glimpsed the beautiful expanse of Northam Burrows in the distance.

When I looked for information about it, I came across the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) Historic Archive. Formerly held at Taunton and transferred to The National Archives in 2005, this collection includes records related to the 1947 Operation Sandstone.

According to the information in the catalogue, the operation commissioned by the US, and carried out by The Royal Navy, intended to survey the coast of the British Isles to facilitate re-occupation by the United States in the event of the United Kingdom being overrun in war by the Soviet Union.

• From our collection

  ADM 326

  Title

  Admiralty and Ministry of Defence files on Operation Sandstone and later coastal surveys

  Date

  1945–1992

The coastline was split up into phases and parts so that every detail was recorded, but the survey team was disbanded in 1966 before the project was completed, as the original strategic concept was no longer seen as valid.

I picked the microfiche of Northam Burrows and walked to the lightbox to view it. A mysterious dark image formed in front of me. I took a picture of it and digitally transformed it into a positive photograph.

It was hard to identify anything I had seen, as I had travelled too quickly through the peninsula. But in the process of transforming the negative into a positive I suddenly realised that this echoed the journey I was about to end.

By retrieving records and discovering stories, seeing phantoms of people and traces of lost trains, by walking and looking at a map in the archive, I was transforming a space I had walked into a place. I was bringing it to life and was joining it.

Every time I think about the stretch of land from Hartland Point to Bideford, now, I can’t stop thinking about the stories I found in a state archive almost 250 miles away, and how these are just a small selection of many others, past and recent.

If there’s something this journey has left me with, it is the desire to dig and walk more, to try and design new routes, to uncover and feel more. I hope that from reading this, you might feel the same.