Cottingham Training

One Mark Kirby Scholar talks about Cottingham's past

Today we began work with Cottingham Parish Council on a series of workshops exploring the 18th Century history of the village, which lies on the outskirts of Hull. Over the next.three months we will deliver four workshtoops linking archival sources, archaeology and hands-on activities to discover childhood, costume, food and farming 300 years ago.

Today was about introducing the project to participants and training them in heritage interpretation and digital media. We have set up Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts for volunteers to record the workshops. They will also produce an exhibition for Cottingham Day in July.

Follow their progress at cottinghamstory.wordpress.com and on Twitter @CottinghamStory.

Tideswell Tales Website

The Tideswell Tales website is launched today.

Bill led a training workshop on using the free website service wordpress.com to promote and communicate the Tideswell Tales project to members of the Tideswell Living History Group. He taught participants how to add and edit pages, blog posts, media files and photographs - including how to create image galleries. We also went through how to upload audio files to AudioBoo and SoundCloud, then how to embed the audio files into Wordpress pages. The members of the groups created news pages with embedded radio broadcasts and new themed sections with pages containing oral history recordings.

Using social media audio services saves expensive media hosting fees and embeds excellent, easy-to-use media players into project and society websites. Wordpress allows societies to create free function-rich websites containing news, events, information, photographs, documents, PDFs, and embedded audio and video, which are easy to maintain with a little training.

You can listen to the project launch radio interviews and the first oral history excerpts at Tideswell Tales. Click on News or use the drop-down menus under Audio.

Oral History Training

Tideswell Living History Group at the oral history training workshop

The oral history training workshops for both the Calver Weir and Tideswell Tales oral history projects have been a great success. inHeritage brought in Colin Hyde of the East Midlands Oral History Archive to lead both sessions. The Tideswell workshop was held in the Tideswell School of Food, made famous by the BBC's Village SOS series.

The potential interviewers of both projects gained a lot from them and reported very positive feedback. Brilliant, fantastic, excellent were all used to describe the sessions. The sessions showcased good oral history projects, then went through interview techniques, using audio recorders, ethics, consents and archiving. Each participant had the chance to interview someone else in the group.

All the participants now feel that their projects are really underway and ready to carry out their first interviews.

Colin is just one of a number of Heritage Lottery Fund and Oral History Society approved oral history trainers from around the country we can supply for groups and societies beginning their own projects.

Colin Hyde

Industrial Heritage Interpretation Training

Today, Bill visited Wortley Top Forge to deliver a training workshop in heritage interpretation to members of South Yorkshire Industrial History Society.


The session was one of a series of ongoing training workshops for community groups working with industrial heritage sites in the East Peaks LEADER area. This area, to the north of Sheffield, has funding for groups to conserve and interpret their industrial heritage. Bill is contracted by East Peaks LEADER to deliver the workshops to those groups who have been awarded a small grant.


Bill has also produced interpretation guidelines on producing panels and leaflets. You can download the guidelines as PDFs from the East Peak LEADER website:


How to write Lively Leaflets

How to write Appealing Panels