Meeting in St Paul's Church on January 13th

Poster for the meeting on Wednesday, January 13th

 at 7:30pm in St Paul's Curch, Starcross. Our speaker will be Andrew Cadbury who will talk about his family and the history of chocolate

Here's the link to this poster. Please can you print and display? Cheers

Because we don't want to exclude anyone from coming, we won't charge for admission, and we won't have a membership fee, but we need to cover the £20 cost to hire the rooms, and we also need money for our projects.
We raise money by asking you to bring a raffle prize - perhaps some of us might bring a chocolate raffle prize this time? We also sell tea&coffee withabiscuit, which costs £1, and we sell our hard enamel badges for £5. We also have some copies of the late Dick Forrester's book What was an Atmospheric Railway priced only £3 - they are advertised on eBay for twice that price!

We are always looking for speakers, and for help with running this group, and with our projects. The current projects are:

• Making a trail of peacocks' tails to commemorate Captain George Peacock. There will be a Dartmoor-style letterbox stamp sited near to each peacock tail. On St George's Day, 23rd April, we will sell you a trail card, and invite you to follow the trail and collect the stamps. There's a peacock's feather for the first 50 completed cards.

We are looking for a trophy or two to present to the best peacock tails - perhaps you may have an old trophy you no longer need? Or we could use a ceramic pot if it has two handles at the top.

• Recreating or locating the missing Stairs Cross. Read about this project on these links:

 The history of Stairs Cross
Starcross Parish Council backs the project if we can further prove the existence of a Stairs Cross
photograph of the stairs where the Stairs Cross was sited

We need someone to research the archives of Sherbourne Abbey. Perhaps we could raise enough money to fund a geophys exploration of the estuary, to see if the Stairs Cross lies buried underneath the silt. Maybe Henry V11th's men didn't destroy the cross, but merely tipped it into the estuary mud?

• Exploring archaeological remains. 

There's a wartime bunker around Warboro. Read about it on this link Operational Base of the Starcross Auxiliary Unit Patrol

ARCHI, the historical search hound, has  discovered 117 archaeological and historic sites within 10km of Starcross 117 archaeological sites near Starcross from ARCHIUK
Are there some enthusiasts to explore some of these sites.  Which site interests you the most?

• Commemorating Captain George Peacock. Captain Peacock invented the screw propeller... so let's have an enormous screw propeller with his name on it. Maybe site it on Parish Council land on The Strand?  We need researchers to discover more, and someone to contact Captain Peacock's descendants to tell them what we'd like to do. Then we'll need to approach the Parish Council with our ideas. 

HERE'S a link to some information about him from the Royal Museums at Greenwich. The links to the illustrations have been taken down, but they may be available elsewhere on the Royal Greenwich Museums' website
HERE'S another link. This is to the information on the National Archives website