Why did I so the  Purton AV slideshow?

In the 1990s I lived in a South Derbyshire mining village called Overseal. During that time I watched a once proud mining industry which employed thousands of people and supported whole communities get systematically destroyed. As a final insult to these once proud communities, the mines that had been working the South Derbyshire coalfield for hundreds of years were erased off the face of the earth, in the government's hope that memories could not exist if there were no monuments to the mining industry.

Near Overseal is another mining village called Donisthorp which had the most beautiful churchyard. In this church yard were many Victorian grave stones, and some pre Victorian ones dating back to the end of the eighteenth century. Donisthorp churchyard was a model churchyard, and I loves the place. I used to walk there with an old miner who had a wealth of local knowledge about the people and the mines and the industry of the local area.

We would sit in the churchyard in the summer with a flask of tea and listen to the birds and marvel at the age of the grave stones, all made by a local mason from Measham.

Then one day I came to Donisthorp to find every single grave stone had been dug up and removed. Most of the flat stones were laid as flag stones round the back of the church, but there was no sign of the once fine monuments, and who ever had done this had not even done a decent job. Some of the flat name stones were just smashed with hammers to make them fit. To me it was one of the most mindless acts of vandalism (other than the destruction of the mining industry) I had ever seen, and it had been done, not by mindless vandals, but by so called upstanding leaders in the community.

Ordinary people have lived and died in Donisthorp for hundreds of years, and the only monument to these people's lives were these gravestones showing their last resting place, our Legacy was now gone.

I can't forgive the people who did this, because if they were challenged, they would find a way to justify their actions in the same way that terrorists justify their action.

I discovered Purton in 2004 after a visit to Gloucester Waterways Museum, where a local Photographer was displaying some pictures of the Purton Boats on the staircase. After seeing the photographs I was just fascinated that we still had a site in the UK of rotting wooden ships, which I wanted to photograph to show my Dad who had done some boat building in the past

When I found the site, I soon realised that these boat hulks were not just rotting away, they were being vandalised. Worse still, they were being vandalised for fire wood by people or visitors who were mooring in their own boats on the Sharpness canal, people I thought should know better.

I wanted to find more out about these hulks, as I could clearly see that some of these boat were enormous and well over one hundred years old, all hand made. All the timber had been hand sawn from rough logs, and all the nails and knee irons were wrought iron and forged by hand ( I know now that Harriett is 110 years old, and Dispatch was built on Speyside in 1888 and took 5 years to build).

All I could do was record what was left the best I could, so I took a number of colour digital images of everything I could see, then at least I had some record of these boats that were built by people long dead and forgotten about with no monument to their lives or our Legacy.

Continues.....

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