Budleigh Past and Present

Fairlynch trustee and former museum chairman Roger Sherriff, pictured above, tells me that he is looking forward to the big Budleigh event on Saturday 16 April in the Public Hall when there will be live music all evening along with food and drink from 6.00 pm until midnig ht.  Locally produced real ales, cider and wine will be on offer with a selection of Good Game’s award winning artisan sausages to buy for your supper, including a ‘Beer Bangers and Bands’ special banger! The double headliner concert features the local Folk, Roots Rock band ‘Sam Green and the Midnight Heist’ and R&B, Blues & Rockabilly band ‘Hucklebuck’ with Budleigh’s own Ian Briggs, supported by the ever popular Budleigh Ukulele Rat Pack, with Budleigh duo Savoy and Exmouth’s Poppy Freya to open the night from 6.00 pm. As well as all the fantastic live music, a mini real ale festival featuring se...

  Image credit: www.voces8.com Talking of music, which I do here Budleigh Salterton’s Music Festival will be celebrating ten years of staging highly successful concerts by performers from all over the world in 2015. The Festival, described recently by Richard Morrison in the Times as a “nine-day wonder”, started in July 2005 with Friend of Fairlynch Museum Roger Bowen as its first Chairman. The main Festival takes place in the summer, but other exciting events are staged at other times in the year. A ‘Carols by Candlelight’ concert will take place in St Peter’s Church on 9 December. It will be sung by Voces8, seen above, an internationally acclaimed group who were a great success at the Festival in 2013. They will sing a new carol, composed by the winner of the Budleigh Carol Competition for which there were 79 entries. The winner will be announced shortly and will receive the prize, plus being invited to hear the first public performance of the car...

Talking of food, as I’ve done here it seems that quite a few Friends of Fairlynch Museum have been involved with the amazingly successful Food Festival. More festivals means more visitors to the town, which means more visitors to its museum, which means... well, we’re just pleased to be able to show off Budleigh Salterton and the Lower Otter Valley. I was asked recently if the Museum had any books of local fish recipes, and had to confess that I didn’t know of any.   But maybe, hiding in the Library is a handwritten cookbook, perhaps discovered long ago in the kitchen of Primrose Cottage, which was Fairlynch’s original name.   We certainly ought to have a first edition of the famous Book of Household Management written by Mrs Beeton, grandmother of a distinguished former Budleigh resident. Click here to read more.     The first Budleigh Salterton Food and Drink Festival in 2013 was so popular that the organisers decided to stage a one-day tast...