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Presidential Thoughts
This gold medal was struck by New York jeweller Tiffany & Co to mark the successful laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858 ‘Not much happens in Budleigh Salterton,’ they say....
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Raleigh among the Rhododendrons
OK, I now know that the bloke in the hat with the droopy Mexican moustache and the baggy red pants is telling young Walter Raleigh and his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert that one day they'll cross the...
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Raleigh 400 letter to Journal
This portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh in All Saints' Church East Budleigh is a copy of the work by Frederico Zuccaro (1542-1609) now in the National Portrait GalleryThe following letter was published in...
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1618-2018: Some things never change
Grapple with the character of Sir Walter Raleigh and you’ll find him difficult to pin down. He displays so many facets, and inspired so many myths in later centuries. Some of the changes came with age...
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Cheers, Sir Walter! My pub crawl in the great Elizabethan's footsteps (1)
The Sir Walter Raleigh pub, East Budleigh I’m writing on a more refreshing note after all that scholarly stuff about 17th century pamphlet wars, which you can read about hereThis time my search for Sir...
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Cheers, Sir Walter! My pub crawl in the great Elizabethan's footsteps (2)
Carrying on from Cheers, Sir Walter! (Part 1)So, across the Irish Sea we go, to land at Youghal, a seaside resort at the mouth of the River Blackwater in Ireland’s County Cork. It’s where Raleigh made...
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Echoes of Poldark in Budleigh's past
Just to prove that I'm not totally gripped by Raleighmania, and that I do occasionally do other things like watching TV soaps, here’s an informative piece about a Budleigh character who raised a few...
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Get Kids Out Learning at Fairlynch
Fairlynch has teamed up with an educational organization which we hope will result in more children visiting the Museum, making an afternoon at Fairlynch a truly enriching family experience. And it...
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Raleigh’s New World: Hunting Sir Walter among the alligators
Above: How Native Americans coped with alligators 400 years ago Florida in August… Disneyland and beaches, hurricanes and alligators. Maybe it wasn’t the best time to visit the Sunshine State. It was...
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Spicing up Salterton
Not many people know why our little town of Budleigh was, according to the author R.F. Delderfield, formerly known as The Curry.Fairlynch Museum hopes to explain the reason in the not too distant...
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Are you on the Raleigh 400 list?
Below is a rather long list of organisations which have been contacted in relation to Raleigh 400 – marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Sir Walter Raleigh. Some of them are actively...
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Sir Walter Raleigh and Music
Professor Ivan RootsBack in 2009, the late and great Ivan Roots, Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, was kind enough to give a talk in Budleigh Salterton about Sir Walter Raleigh’s...
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Syons of the Tymes
I think it's time for some sober scholarship, as opposed to pub crawling for Raleigh 400 - though there's more of that to come. Two rather different houses with the same name, both in the Georgian...
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Artist Dorothy Bradshaw (1897-1986)
Dorothy Bradshaw's Fairlynch by Night Like her fellow-artist Cecil Elgee and other Budleigh residents associated with Fairlynch such as museum co-founder Priscilla Hull, Dorothy Bradshaw was brought up...
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From Bushey to Budleigh: The life and death of painter and illustrator Sir...
I wrote the following piece in 2014, and it first appeared at http://fairlynchgreatwar.blogspot.com/, hence my thoughts about the German-born Herkomer, split between love of his native Bavaria and his...
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Defending the Ypres Salient: Sidney Alfred Demant 12 June 2015
This is a post which originally appeared on my Great War at Fairlynch blog, which you can find via Google. I found that Facebook did not like linking to the site because apparently the automatons...
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Another 50 years of Imperial's Budleigh shows?
This year is the 50th anniversary of Imperial Productions performing shows in Budleigh Salterton. Its name has gone through various changes over the years, but the gifted performers who’ve been...
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A limerick: Jack Rattenbury’s escape
An East Devon smuggler called JackOne evening came under attack.But he proved himself wilyIn behaving most slyly.Of escaping he’d developed the knack. © Michael Downes 2014This painting by Peter...
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The Baptist Church in Budleigh Salterton 1843-2018
Having written a history of Fairlynch in 2017 I naturally volunteered a year later to review a similar publication which tells the story of the Baptist Church in our town. The subjects are alike in...
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