Blog ……..
…. Blog….
…….. Blog
This page provides information & summaries of recent Wreningham Heritage meetings – usually six per year – plus information on ‘how to get the most from’ this website. The latter is provided in the grey feature boxes.
…. December 2024, more about the Website
A recent addition to site discoverability is the Gallery page. This contains sample images from across the website and each gallery image is directly linked to a page where that image is already employed; this gives the visitor a dynamic and unexpected way to find more information about the gallery images. From time to time, gallery images will be changed to provide fresh routes to discovering our village story.
This Blog page has principally been added to provide summary articles about recent Wreningham Heritage Group meetings. This is intended to enhance the connection between the website and ongoing heritage group events. The Blog page will also provide details about the website’s design and functionality – as well as its organisation if / when changes or further enhancements occur.
December 2024 WHG meeting ….
We had our second annual ‘Multi-meeting’ where surrounding village groups are invited to join us for a broadly based event – including a set of mini-talks:
David Kirk from the Wreningham Heritage Group and Mike Merrick from the Forncett History Group gave a joint talk on two recent discoveries linking the two villages.
Tim Ward from the Hapton History Group described recent old building investigations in Hapton.
John Herne, the Honorary Archivist at Wymondham Abbey, gave an overview of their old document collections – some very ancient, indeed.
Robert Sharpe from the Ketteringham & East Carleton History Group told us about their local ‘Lost Village’ of Cantilose.
Finally, a presentation in a novel format (uploaded to YouTube – see here – with several others in the collection) by Colin Wilson from Hethersett. In this online presentation, he describes ‘farms and farmers’ in Hethersett over the last 100+ years.
October 2024 WHG meeting ….
Rachael Long gave a fascinating illustrated talk on ‘30 Years of Long’s Wood’ at Fir Grove, Wreningham. It covered Dennis Long’s creation of the 70-acre wood in the 1990s and the resulting accessibility benefits for those who visit – including the school’s early involvement and the arrival of an art trail in 2005. We were shown the gradual evolution of the wood into its current state of maturity and the impressive improvements in biodiversity. The wood now sits alongside Fir Grove’s Coronation Meadow – established in 2012 – which was also described. The talk has been encapsulated in a new webpage: here.
September 2024 WHG meeting ….
Steve Hickling, who has considerable knowledge of the old built environment, gave us a talk on ‘Old Wreningham Buildings’. He explained how surviving houses from c1600 onwards are only with us today due to the introduction of oak floorplates – along the bottom of ground floor walls. This greatly reduced the tendency for timber/lath & plaster houses to rot from the ground up, as had been the case, before. He also showed how the majority of these buildings had been designed to a common three-room plan – illustrating this with multiple examples from around Wreningham.
July 2024 WHG meeting ….
David Kirk gave a talk called ‘Bits and Pieces’. It covered various subjects, including information derivable from our Tithe mapping, possible siting reasons for an old railway bridge, the contents of an old farm journal, old aerial photography of the Wreningham flax retting area, more about local steam threshing and information from a Wreningham Home Guard Comrades Club minutes book – including a listing of all the village’s Home Guard members.
April 2024 WHG meeting ….
Robert Sharpe from the Ketteringham & East Carleton History Group gave us an insightful talk about how the local area first evolved. His starting point was the Ice Age and the resulting geology and terrain which impacted how the land could be used. His themes included farming, trade, and governance together with church and abbey relationships. He described how the peoples of the Bronze & Iron Ages, the Romans, Vikings, Saxons and Normans successfully adopted, and were shaped by, this local environment and how many of their impacts can still be seen today.
February 2024 WHG meeting ….
During our October 2021 Exhibition, we played a pair of video recordings – each, 25 minutes in duration – which had been made with the superb assistance of Wreningham School, in 2019. These recordings had given an opportunity for pupils in two different year groups to interview ‘historic’ pupils (some going back to the 1940s), plus one former teacher, about their not-yet-forgotten(!) Wreningham school recollections. There had been a demand from villagers to see both recordings again and the February meeting provided an enjoyable and perfect opportunity.
…. about the website
Although this website was first launched in September 2022, the new arrival of our Blog page has provided an opportunity to describe the website’s design concepts:
From the outset, we wanted to maximise subject discoverability and accessibility. To aid this, topic pages are mostly provided under one of three menu headers: People, Places and Events. Anything less specific is listed under Stories. The primary navigation of the pages is from the drop-down menus from each header button. Sub-menus have been employed to combine subsidiary topics into logical groups.
Where the page subject needs to include slightly ‘off-topic’ supporting elements, this detail is inserted into a grey ‘feature box’ to avoid distraction from the principal narrative.
However, many subjects have the potential to stray beyond the originally intended theme. To accommodate this, most pages include active links so readers, having found the main subject material, can use these to find the related pages – potentially travelling through other menu topics, too.
Further links are included to ensure – with a single click – a reader can switch to a third-party website where more ‘specialist’ aspects – with greater depth – can be found.
Each link – both internal to this site and to third-party sites – opens a new page under another tab. This ensures the original page remains immediately available within its existing tab, and not ‘lost’. (This multi-tab process is not available when viewing the site on a mobile phone.)
A large number of our ‘Village Voice’ audio recordings have been suitable for editing down to one-minute sequences. These short extracts have been ideal for adding to web pages where the edited subject supports an individual page’s content.
Searching for subjects is enabled from the Search Box which is displayed on the sidebar to the left of each page – or at the bottom edge when viewing on a mobile phone. The left sidebar is ‘sticky’ so that it remains in the view even though the user might be scrolling up and down the main part of the page. The links on this sticky sidebar also ensure the reader can immediately click to return to the Home, Contacts or the About Us pages at any point.
On most pages, clicking on any static image (or photograph) will enlarge that image to full-page size. A subsequent click returns the user to the originally displayed page. This function is more practical on desktop / laptop / tablet formats – although it can be used on mobile phones if the phone screen is held with its shorter screen dimension being up.