We’ve got a new toilet at Treacle Valley, some photos of the build process are here and you can also find out how our ‘loo with a view’ is helping families in Nepal.
Loo With a View!
Donations to Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team and John Muir Trust
We take our obligations as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company very seriously. Being a CIC means the directors of the company do not benefit personally from the success of the business; any profits that the company ultimately makes will benefit the wider community and, more specifically, the organisation named in our ‘asset lock’. In our case, this means that any profits Taleblazers ultimately makes will be donated to the Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team based in Ashburton.
However, we intend to be running Taleblazers for a very long time! This means that DSRT could be waiting a long time before sharing any financial success. We have therefore decided to make a donation of £250 as a New Year’s gift to DSRT, as a kind of interim statement of our ongoing investment in the community and our desire for other organisations we love to benefit from our success.
Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team are a voluntary charity who help the emergency services to search for and rescue lost, missing, injured and vulnerable people. We most frequently associate them with finding lost walkers on the moors but they are also active in helping to find vulnerable people such as people with dementia, children and people experiencing mental health crises. Over 90% of their income is from donations and we are delighted to be in a position to support them.
At the same time, we have also decided to donate £100 to one of our favourite charities, the John Muir Trust, who conserve, protect and restore wild places across the UK. We share their passion for wild places and their John Muir Award programmes are central to our education work.
Introducing… the ACE Project!
We’re delighted to be able to announce a pilot project for families of children with SEND, which we will be running every Thursday morning from 18th January until 28th March 2024. We’ve called it the ACE Project because it brings together three things that we love at Taleblazers – art, craft and the environment. This project is being run as a pilot project for the Localmotion Environment group and at the end of the programme we would love to have your feedback on what we should do next to develop this idea!
We will run alternate weeks at our bases at Treacle Valley and at Cockington with a different focus each week. At Cockington we will run an art-based programme, while our Treacle Valley sessions will be focused on traditional crafts and conservation. We want to create friendly and welcoming spaces where you can come and meet other families of children with SEND, learn some new skills, be inspired and have some fun.
Children are very welcome to attend and depending on their age and numbers we may provide alternative activities for them so that parents can relax and enjoy the sessions.
To sign up, please complete our Microsoft Form by clicking here!
Job Opportunities
Come work for us!
Are you passionate about the natural world, history, heritage and arts? Are you able to communicate your passion to young people, particularly those who are disengaged from mainstream education? Can you inspire people to see the world with fresh perspectives?
If so, get in touch!
Alternative Education Tutor (Art, Bushcraft, or Primary)
Alternative Education tutors support our young people by planning, delivering and evaluating 1-1 and small group sessions. The programmes we run incorporate activities such as art, gardening, science, environmental education, forest/beach school and bushcraft, with an outdoor element always at the heart of the programme. They are differentiated both at programme and session level to maximise engagement and to ensure our offer is student-centred. The young people we work with on these sessions are usually struggling to access mainstream education and require high levels of individual support.
Full job description and application form:
Creative Associates
Creative Associates work with Taleblazers on workshop delivery and public events. They are creative people who can tell stories in several ways and bring our history and heritage to life. Our communities and landscapes are full of tales: historical, myth and legend, and the role of the Storytellers is to shape those stories into forms that people – young people in particular – can engage with.
Doorstep Arts bring theatre to Treacle Valley!
For this month’s Earthworks session we have a very special treat as Doorstep Arts are joining us for an introductory workshop to site-specific theatre in the woods!
Chelston Heritage Evening
Our Chelston Heritage Evenings are back! Come and find out more about the heritage of Chelston at the Chelston Manor on Tuesday 8th November, it would be great to see you.
The Chelston Heritage Map
We are absolutely delighted to announce that we have been given some funding from the Torbay Small Grants Lottery Fund to allow us to start work on our planned Chelston Heritage Map!
There have been people living in Chelston for a very long time – stone axes, flint scrapers and spear heads have all been found in the area which suggests may have been people passing through here up to six thousand years ago. In the Medieval period it was part of the manor of Cockington and the name Chilestone first appeared in the 13th century. The Cary family owned Chelston up until 1654, when it passed to the Mallocks. Amazingly, the Chelston Manor Hotel was originally a dower house for Cockington manor and it may even have been lived in by some of the Carys. Nearby Chelston Cottage is also very old and parts of it date from the 16th century.
Chelston, though, broadly remained a quiet, rural area. It was in the Victorian period, mainly in a burst of activity around 1880-1900, that most of the Chelston we know was built. Some large villas had already been built and all the things a young community needs were added – houses, churches, schools, shops, hotels, parks. The grandest of these landmarks are now listed buildings and the parks have avoided development. Chelston remains a green, friendly and pleasant place to live today.
Our heritage map will celebrate this by picking out some of the key locations from Chelston’s history and joining them together into a walking route. This will be hand-drawn by the Taleblazers team in a heritage style and will have details about each landmark on the reverse. We will then distribute our map free of charge to local schools, shops, pubs and cafes for residents to take themselves on a historic walk of the area in their own time. We hope to have a launch event on Trails Day, Saturday 5th June, when we will be offering guided walks and we will also reach out to local residents who may need support in getting around the route. We hope the walking route will encourage people to get outside and reconnect with one another post-covid, increase a positive connection between residents and their urban landscape and provide opportunities to reduce isolation and improve mental health.
We are broadly basing the geographical area of Chelston on the Torbay Council Ward Map of Cockington and Chelston, taking Chelston’s western boundary as the ridge following Seaway Lane and its continuation. To the east our map will go as far as the physical boundary of Avenue Road. To the north we will, for practical reasons, not go further north than the Haywain pub. Locations we have already identified are:
- Chelston Manor and Chelston Cottage
- St Matthews and St Cuthbert Mayne Churches
- Chelston Cross
- Chelston Drinking Fountain
- Torquay Railway Station
- Cockington Primary School
- Grand Hotel
- Location of the Old Mill
- Pretty Park
- Rosery Road houses
We don’t want to miss anywhere, so if there is anywhere that you think we should include please let us know!
Though this is a non-commercial activity, we are still looking for support from local businesses to help with production and printing costs and to support the outreach elements of the project. If you think you might be able to help, please get in touch!
Introducing… Taleblazers!
So here we are at last, then. Taleblazers. An idea and name that Kev and I first discussed about 15 years ago but never really had time to do much with. We always planned to come back and do something with it at some point, so here we are at last.
Taleblazers is our new CIC/social enterprise. Our core goal is to find, research and retell the folk stories of south Devon and Dartmoor and bring them to new audiences, and to engage young people in the art of oral storytelling. We’re also offering workshops for schools, expedition support for outdoor education programmes (eg Duke of Edinburgh) and support for students with special educational needs.
Kev and I have done a lot of stuff together. We met at Cubs at the age of seven, went to school together, played D&D together, went to gigs together, worked together, started a cricket club together. We both love walking, being in the outdoors, folklore and storytelling, so maybe it was inevitable that eventually we’d start this business together too.
He’s an amazing guy. He has a rare and natural ability to tell stories, to create an intimacy with his audience, to bring them in to the performance of his tales. Every audience I’ve seen him work his art on is captivated. More than that, his tales and ballads are meticulously researched, blending the art of the telling with a solid grounding in historical origins. He is so talented and I can’t wait until we start to bring his ballads to a wider audience.
The third member of our team is my friend Victoria who will be working on the project management side. Like us, she has a passion for the outdoors and for working on collaborative projects with the local community. She is also the queen of the Swedish fika (institutionalised coffee and cake) and is one of the most organised people I know, so she’s going to be a real asset to our team.
We have about a million ideas at the moment so our website shows just the main focus of our initial work, and we’ll expand it in time as our plans start to come to fruition. There are a lot of things in the pipeline so please sign up to our mailing list and give us a like and follow on your favoured social media. If you have any ideas or suggestions or would like to work with us, please give us a shout via the contact form.