A collection of all of the blogs and social media postings about the Virtual Visits Project – in chronological order………
Post No. 1 June 25th 2025
We look forward, over the next weeks and months, to sharing a new project being undertaken by The Friends of Hoar Oak Cottage – The Virtual Visits Project.
In 2011, The Friends of Hoar Oak Cottage submitted a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund’s “All Our Stories” funding stream. The summary of our project’s aim was…
….to engage people in exploring and sharing memories and stories about two remote places in the Hoar Oak Valley, Exmoor:
- Hoar Oak Cottage, an abandoned shepherds cottage which was home to 13 shepherd families from the 1800s to 1950s
- The Exmoor Centre, a charity offering, since 1968, low cost bunkhouse/learning accommodation for young people/families to experience remote Exmoor.
Many local people are descendants of the Hoar Oak Cottage shepherd families and many have stayed at the Exmoor Centre giving access to a timeline of over 200 years of memories and stories of the Hoar Oak Valley.
It was so exciting to receive an HLF Grant of just over £8,000 which was added to by ‘in kind’ donations of £2,000. That £10,000 helped us to engage with a huge number of people and find many more people with links (and stories to tell) about Hoar Oak Cottage. That work provided huge insights and documentary material which went on to form the core of the Friends of HOC website and archive. Material still continues to arrive – either through research projects or from descendants getting in touch with the Friends.
One thing that many participants in the Voices Project asked was if it might it be possible to create ‘virtual visits’ to the cottage to view online. The cottage’s remoteness and the challenging moorland walk makes it difficult for many to ever be able to visit in person. People said they’d like to ‘see’ the cottage but also somehow ‘feel’ the sense of actually walking out there –the quietness, the remoteness, the birdsong and sheep bleats as well hearing wind that always blows around the cottage and across the nearby landscape.
Enquiries made soon after the Voices Project ended weren’t encouraging. It was 2012 and drone photography was not what it is today. Costs to create ‘virtual visits’ were astronomical and the technology to convert footage into something The Friends could easily hold and share through their website was not readily available. But now, as ChatGP tells us, ‘Today, drones equipped with high-resolution cameras have revolutionized photography, allowing for unique perspectives and compositions that were previously difficult to achieve. The affordability and ease of use of modern drones have democratised aerial photography, making it accessible to hobbyists and professionals alike.’ Thanks, AI, for that neat summary 😊
The Friends of Hoar Oak Cottage committee have grabbed these new ‘democratic’ opportunities with both hands and this year – over 12 years on – we have made the first steps to start creating ‘virtual visits’. These new Virtual Visits Wednesday postings will aim to keep you up to date. Keep following and find out what has happened so far, what the plans are for the future and how you could get involved. #virtualvisitswednesdays
Post No. 2 2nd July, 2025
Last week, in the first posting about our Virtual Visits Project, we described the long held ambition to set up a project to respond to requests for online visits to Hoar Oak Cottage. These requests came from people who, for whatever reason, would not be able to undertake the long and challenging walk out across Exmoor to reach the cottage.
As the images on this posting show the scenery is beautiful but the terrain is challenging, and you really need to have a decent bit of weather to do the walk. Over the years we have posted short video clips on our social media site and some can be seen on the HOC Website’s Archive pages – go to this link to view them Video Archive – hoaroak
These images and videos are great, and we know visitors to our website and social media still enjoy the opportunity they give to seeing the cottage and the landscape it sits in. But we are very attracted to the developments in drone photography and the opportunities it now presents for small heritage organisations like The Friends of Hoar Oak Cottage.
Drone images were used in the Spring 2025 issue of the Exmoor Magazine to illustrate an article about our new publication The Women of Hoar Oak Cottage. Editor Naomi Cudmore engaged drone photographer Shaun Davey to contribute some stunning images of the cottage to the article. Since then, The Friends have been in touch with Shaun to take our first, tentative steps towards fulfilling our aim to create Virtual Visits to Hoar Oak Cottage.
It is very exciting and there’s more to come in our Virtual Visits Project postings.
To see more of Shaun Davey’s work go to: Shaun Davey Photography – Landscape & Nature, Exmoor National Park www.shaundaveyphotography.com
To get a copy of the Exmoor Magazine Spring 2025 edition with the article about The Women of Hoar Oak Cottage go to Editions – Exmoor Magazine https://exmoormagazine.co.uk
Post No. 3 9th July, 2025
In earlier social media postings, we introduced Exmoor Drone Photographer Shaun Davey who is working with The Friends on this ‘proof of concept’ project to create online virtual visits to the cottage.
‘Proof of concept’ may be a grand sounding project title but we really do need to make sure we know exactly what is involved to deliver our long held wish to have ‘virtual visits’ out across the moor to Hoar Oak Cottage available online.
We need to gather data on the technical and practical aspects of this project as well as where we might find sources of funding. Where, for example, might we find grants and what are the application dates and processes? And how we might fundraise perhaps using one of the many crowd funding sites.
But in today’s “Virtual Visits Wednesdays” posting we are excited to give you a first ‘taster’ clip of some of the initial filming work undertaken by Shaun Davey. His brief was to try and replicate the ordinary walker’s experience of going out to the cottage including, for example, capturing the sense of quiet missed with the sound of wind, the river and the birdsong. Isn’t it a great clip? Shaun suggest setting the playback quality to ‘high’ as You Tube defaults to ‘low.
Here’s the You Tube Clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb-Gwid0bBc
Watch this space for more news, every Wednesday, about the project and please feel free to get in touch with your thoughts, ideas, inputs. If you are someone who would enjoy being able to take a Virtual Visit to Hoar Oak Cottage please tell us what you’d like to see and hear. All suggestions to info@clients.jacobstow.com or DM to this site.
And keep your eyes peeled – in a couple of weeks we’ll be sharing a much longer clip of a ‘virtual visit’ out to Hoar Oak Cottage. Exciting eh??
All postings in this series stored on this blog link https://hoaroakcottage.org/2025/07/02/virtual-visits-wednesday-blog/