Charnwood Roots is
a heritage lottery funded project currently being carried out by the Leicestershire
Victoria County History Trust. The project is exploring the history of
thirty-five towns and villages in and around Charnwood Forest with the help of volunteers
and local communities. Volunteers of all ages are receiving training in order
to research, record and write the history of Charnwood from pre-history to the
present day. The four year project will involve archival research, oral
histories, landscape surveys, surveys of historic buildings and community
archaeology. Research will focus on four key areas: building communities,
working lives, crime and conflict and landscapes of leisure.
I feel very
fortunate to be peripherally involved in the project, not just because my own
PhD thesis will benefit enormously from the research, but because my
involvement allows me to share the enthusiasm of local people for the history
of their area and to appreciate their impressive local knowledge and wealth of
experience.
As post-graduate history
students it would be all too easy to shut ourselves away in our academic ivory
towers, to assume that we have a monopoly on historical research, and to forget
that the rest of the world exists. We should resist those temptations. History
is about people - and involving the people of the communities we study in the
research process, as fellow researchers rather than simply as research
subjects, is exciting, stimulating, fun and very much worthwhile.
I am learning
a lot from the people of Charnwood – not least that I am not nearly as clever
as I thought I was. We work in an academic environment where there is great
deal of emphasis on ‘impact’. ‘Impact’, however, is a two way process and I am
grateful that Charnwood Roots has
impacted on me.
