Archive Rambler: from Lynmouth to Woolacombe

Combe Martin

I reached Combe Martin later on that day. Fortunately, the local museum was still open, giving me a chance to wander through its displays. Here, I discovered that the village appeared in the Domesday Book of 1086, one of The National Archives’ most precious records. It is listed as a settlement of 18 villagers, 10 smallholders and nine enslaved people.

At the museum, I also found out that during Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee on 3 June 2002, Combe Martin entered the Guinness World Records for hosting Britain’s longest street party: a celebration stretching for 1.5 miles, with 700 tables and between 5,000 and 8,000 visitors lining the main street.

WILLIAM DE FALAISE holds COMBE MARTIN from the king, in parage. Beorhtric and Eadwig held it freely TRE, and it paid geld for 2 hides and 1 virgate of land. There is land for 20 ploughs. In demesne are 3 ploughs, and 9 slaves; and 18 villans and 10 bordars with 14 ploughs. There is pasture 1 league long and as much broad, and 5 acres of woodland. Formerly, as now, worth 100s.

I found the two recorded events, almost a millennium apart, unexpectedly revealing. They reminded me of the subtle power that numbers and statistics hold over us. As I walked up the main street in the village towards my accommodation, I reflected on how these figures traced how the street had been inhabited across time. They speak of labour, land ownership and taxation, but also of communal celebration and collective joy. The long line of the street seemed to stretch between those two dates, 1086 and 2002, connecting them across the upheavals of history: through wars, economic shifts, stories of enclosure and privatisation, storms and shipwrecks, summers spent picking strawberries and decades of hard work in the silver mines. A millennium of History whose traces are preserved in different though connected ways, both in the local museum and further away at The National Archives, the state archive in London.

Ilfracombe

The final leg of my journey unfolded along the coast between Ilfracombe and Woolacombe. My preliminary research at The National Archives had not revealed anything especially unusual, but visiting the Ilfracombe Museum suddenly cast my earlier findings in a new light.

A simple search for ‘Ilfracombe’ on Discovery, The National Archives catalogue had returned nearly 2,000 results, most of them from Admiralty, Board of Trade, and Ministry of Health series. This made sense: naval personnel, registered trades, and the Barnstaple Poor Law Union (which included Ilfracombe parish) all generated substantial administrative records.

What was less expected was the presence of around 120 records from the series COPY 1.

• From our collection

  COPY 1

  Title

  Applications registering proprietorship (ownership) of artworks, commercial labels and advertisements under the Copyright Acts.

  Date

  1837–1912

Skimming through the entries on my first attempt, I noticed that ‘Ilfracombe’ appeared frequently, sometimes as the copyright owner’s address or in the title of the artwork. It was only after visiting the museum and seeing a display case dedicated to local photographers that the significance of the high volume of COPY 1 photographs registered to Ilfracombe became clear.

With its dramatic coastline, Victorian architecture, and the opening of the Barnstaple to Ilfracombe railway in 1874, Ilfracombe had quickly emerged as a desirable seaside destination in the late-19th century. Local photographers would sell portraits, cartes‑de‑visite (visiting cards), and scenic views to the visitors.

Among the most prolific photographers of Ilfracombe were the Catford brothers, who worked in the town in the 1870–90s. Some of their photographs can be found in COPY 1.

The Catford brothers’ work, which included portraits and landscape images, documented Ilfracombe during its rise as a resort town popular with tourists. Through this, they helped shape how the town was imagined, promoted, and remembered.

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The forms they deposited do not include any photographs, as is the case for most of the registers, so I could not see what they represented. I could, however, read the titles, which capture the elegance of the architecture, the pride of a seaside city becoming popular, the mottos painted on walls welcoming visitors, and the variety of poses, gestures, outfits and details of people who visited or lived in the town.

One title caught my attention once I revisited it after my journey:

The Ilfracombe Hotel, I discovered in the museum, was built in the 1860s ‘to accommodate the growing crowds of genteel tourists who were seduced by the ‘salubrious’ conditions of this seaside resort’. It was famous for early luxuries such as ‘electric lighting and boilers for hot and cold baths.’ Despite its exceptional history, it was demolished in 1976 after becoming derelict in the 1950s, leaving behind only the laundry, where carbolic soap was stocked. This was the very location where Ilfracombe Museum had begun its life.

Holding the copyright form signed by James Stoyle Catford, I imagined what the hotel, with its triumphal arch at the front and the motto ‘one and all’, had looked like. I wondered if the absence of the sample images indicated the hotel’s resistance to the inclusion of its own image in a state archive, not wanting to be reduced to intellectual property or be visually appropriated. Somehow, the lack of a picture was making the grandeur of the seemingly phantom hotel more tangible.

I was nearing the end of my research when I opened my final record on Discovery: MPE 1/1329. I had ordered it because the description suggested that it included a ‘plan of the town of Ilfracombe’. Unfolding the plan on the table, a small detail caught my attention immediately in the middle of the map.

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Overlooking Wildersmouth Bay, standing as a dark geometric shape, is the Ilfracombe Hotel I had been trying to imagine from Catford’s missing photographs. There it was, another trace of the disappeared hotel in a state record. Was this a sign I had to pursue my research? Would I eventually find the hotel? And if so, where? I raised my eyes from the map and moved back to the catalogue. Surely there must be something else.

And indeed, there was. I typed ’Ilfracombe Hotel’ into the catalogue, expecting nothing, hoping for something. Hidden among hundreds of other records, including the Catford brothers’, there it was: ‘a photo of Ilfracombe Hotel’.

On a February morning in 1887, William Wood Perkins had walked to the Stationers’ Office to register his photographs of the Ilfracombe Hotel. And with it, a dozen other images of Lynton and Lynmouth, of Plymouth and other areas in Devon. Why had I not found these immediately? Why had I not seen his pictures?

I looked at the photographs, one by one, with the joy of a researcher who finally stumbles upon the fragment that ties together all the hours, days and months of research.

Among his pictures, Perkins had also registered a photo of the Valley of Rocks taken in 1887. Almost half a century before Dixon-Scott, and without tourists. Somehow, looking for a hotel, I had found the old beauty of Lynmouth I had unsuccessfully searched for earlier.

The journey had circled back to its origin. Was I travelling or wayfaring?

Returning to my questions

After leaving Ilfracombe, I walked the last few miles of my journey to reach Woolacombe beach, where I met some friends for a well-deserved tea break. A couple of days later ​I returned to the archive

The day after, I returned to the archive. I re-ordered the documents I had originally consulted, viewing them with a new-found knowledge of the places I had searched and a renewed, embodied sense of space and place.

As I sat down to write my journey, on foot and in the archive, I got back to my original questions: to what extent can walking provide a spatial way to access and explore archival collections? To what extent can archival collections shed light on the places we cross while walking? How much is the process of moving across different state collections akin to travel and how much is it more like wayfaring? How does our knowledge of a place, that we acquire through researching it, change after walking in it? Can walking constitute a form of embodied research? A process by which we understand how archival research works? Is the iterative process of walking and researching at a state archive changing my perspective on both practices? And if so, to what extent?

These questions are still very much open, and I hope to continue exploring them in my future journeys and ongoing research. If there is something I have discovered, beyond the heartbreaking and joyous facts, events and stories of the villages and communities of a fairly short stretch of coast in Devon, it is that no archival collection exists in isolation. Walking not only brings us from one place to another, but also, in this case, it helps to connect a central archive to local ones.

• From our collection

  INF 9/562/16

  Title

  Photograph of the Valley of the rocks titled ‘The view from Castle Rock’

  Date

  Undated

• From our collection

  E 31/2/1/4376

  Title

  Combe Martin in the Great Domesday Book Domesday

  Date

  1086

• From our collection

  COPY 1/26/184

  Title

  Copyright form for a photograph of the Ilfracombe Hotel, triumphal arch in front with motto

  Date

  14 August 1874

• From our collection

  COPY 1/26/185

  Title

  Copyright form for a photograph of Sir B P Wrey's house

  Date

  14 August 1874

• From our collection

  COPY 1/26/186

  Title

  Copyright form for a photograph of triumphal arch at Ilfracombe

  Date

  14 August 1874

• From our collection

  COPY 1/26/187

  Title

  Copyright form for a photograph of arch at railway station

  Date

  14 August 1874

• From our collection

  MPE 1/1329

  Title

  A lithographed map of the north coast of Devon

  Date

  April 1868

• From our collection

  COPY 1/379/137

  Title

  A Photo of Ilfracombe Hotel

  Date

  9 February 1887

• From our collection

  COPY 1/379/136

  Title

  Photograph of Castle Rock, Lynton Copyright form

  Date

  9 February 1887

References

• Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications, 1990.
• Dominici, Sara. Travel Marketing and Popular Photography in Britain, 1888–1939: Reading the Travel Image. New York: Routledge, 2017.