Ipplepen

A historical guide to the village of Ipplepen, Devon, first published in 2003.

Arthur French (1920-2016): 'I first came to Ipplepen in 1948. My father-in-law, who had a shop in Warland, Totnes, brought me here because in Ipplepen and Torbryan, he said, they made the best local cider.
In 1990 my wife and I decided that Ipplepen would be a good place to live in retirement. I was already interested in her ancestry in South Devon. I joined the Devon Family History Society to study it further. The DFHS was asking for people to copy and index the Census of 1851, and I volunteered to do Ipplepen and Torbryan. But the Victorian handwriting wasn't always easy to read, and I was soon asking my new friends in the village: "Is this a local surname? Was there a place with a name like this?" "Ah " they said, "you must meet Reg Honeywill "
Reg Honeywill died in 2002, just before his 98th birthday. He had worked in the offices of the Great Western Railway in Newton Abbot, but in his spare time and retirement he had amassed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the village, and he made that available to me. One of the many things he showed me was the diary of the girl who visited Ipplepen in 1859 (see pages 18-19). This brought the 1851 Census to life, and set me off on a study of the most prominent families who had lived there. We became good friends.'

Arthur dedicated the original 2003 edition of this book to Reg Honeywill.
With permission from Arthur's publisher and illustrator, Obelisk Publications, this new 2024 edition seeks to preserve his work for the future; as he says in the book, 'history matters today'.