Tallys an Tir - Connecting up with Cornish stories

This last month we have been doing a lot of research and discovery. Some of us are on steep learning curves, trying to get our heads around subjects with which we were previously unfamiliar, such as me trying to understand traditional medicine in Cornwall. Through our work we have been discovering the wide range of projects promoting, educating and entertaining people about different aspects of Cornish heritage.

One of those is Tallys an Tir - Traditions and Stories of the Land, an initiative of the Institute of Cornish Studies and connected with the well-established Cornish Audio Visual Archive. Using oral history, storytelling and walking in the lanscape, the project in its own words aims to:

...capture and share stories that consider our relationships with the Cornish landscape. From farming with horses to foraging for goosegrass, furze stogs for firewood to folk songs, thrashing days to childhood games, crying the neck to croust time.

Women's work has been integral to farming, managing the land and conserving it for millennia, right up until today. Cornwall is blessed with a number of women famers, conservationists and cultivators and have been producing the food we eat and taking care of the land we live on. So this project has an important role to play in the continuity of the relationship between women and the land in Cornwall.

Tallys an Tir embraces digital storytelling to reach its audiences such as through its blog and I was particularly impressed with how it combined animation, archive photgraphy and oral history to produce short but deeply compelling videos about some of its subjects such as this testimony from Penzance-based Yorkshire Land Girl, Mickie.

We can learn a lot from this project and hope to produce even half as exciting videos from our activities! Enjoy this.

http://youtu.be/0YI7YrEDLGI