The Society is very proud of our Journal. It is issued free to members and copies are also sold in local libraries and by post. Every year we are delighted to be able to assemble a wide range of articles on local subjects, all the product of new research.

Our first Journal was published in 1980. The content was printed on a duplicator and the card covers were prepared by a local printer; we stapled it together ourselves. It was not very beautiful but it was our attempt to put on record some of the talks given to the Society and local history activities during the year. A few early articles are actually reports based upon notes taken by members who attended the talks – we have tried to indicate where this is the case. After a gap of a few years, when the talks had not been easy to transfer from slides to the page, the Journal was revived with issue 5. Gill Clegg took on the editorship and Val Bott designed the layout. This was hugely refined and upgraded when Rodney Walshaw took on the task of working preparing the Journal for production. He has worked with the printer to improve the quality of the illustrations in each article and introduced a full colour cover. In 2008 Carolyn Hammond became our Editor, serving for ten years and producing more editions of the Journal with rich content. Val Bott succeeded her as Editor, from Journal 27 (2018).

Sadly, Gill Clegg died in late February 2012. James Wisdom, our Chairman said: ‘The Society owes an enormous debt to Gill for her work as the Honorary Editor of our Journal. In 1996 she revived the Journal and oversaw its editing and production until 2007. She set it on a firm footing, balancing high quality and reliable historical content with material presented so well that it was able to reach a wide, general audience. We are very proud of the Journal, and will always thank the memory of Gill for setting such a standard’.

Many of the articles which appear on this site have been taken from past issues which are now out of print; details of those back numbers still available for sale can be found in the Bookshop pages. A great variety of topics has been covered. While we had permission to publish in print from all of our authors, digitising the contents of the Journal was not envisaged at the time. We would be pleased to hear via this website from any authors who we have not managed to contact in recent years if they wish to discuss the use of Journal articles here.

Journal 1 (1980)
Journal 2 (1981)
Journal 3 (1982)
Journal 4 (1985)
Journal 5 (1996)
Journal 6 (1997)
Journal 7 (1998)
Journal 8 (1999)
Journal 9 (2000)
Journal 10 (2001)
Journal 11 (2002)
Journal 12 (2003)
Journal 13 (2004)
Journal 14 (2005)
Journal 15 (2006)
Journal 16 (2007)
Journal 17 (2008)
Journal 18 (2009)
Journal 19 (2010)
Journal 20 (2011)
Journal 21 (2012)
Journal 22 (2013)
Journal 23 (2014)
Journal 24 (2015)
Journal 25 (2016)
Journal 26 (2017)
Journal 27 (2018)
Journal 28 (2019)
Journal 29 (2020)
Journal 30 (2021)
Journal 31 (2022)
Journal 32 (2023)
Journal 33 (2204)