Next meeting -

18th October

‘Flax, Hemp & Rope in South Somerset.’ A presentation by Bruce Upton (Bridport Museum).

New pages added

Previous speakers websites added to links

Old OS maps available on line from National Museum of Scotland, see links

Membership

Membership is open to all, expert and non expert alike. The Group has a membership of some 70 people from all walks of life. A series of talks and visits for Group members is arranged during the year.

Photo of the month

No not a "cat hole". It is an original 19C "cash point".
The workers from Gawbridge Mill used to put their hand through the hole to collect their wages.


We need more "month photos" so if you have some please email us.

Twitter We are now on Twitter

Drawing of a house

The Group

The Somerset Vernacular Building Research Group, SVBRG is a voluntary organisation founded in 1979 to record and study the traditional houses and buildings of the historic county of Somerset. Of particular interest are the smaller manor houses, farmhouses, cottages and barns which are in the local style and built of local materials.

Publications

Our latest book is now available. Traditional Houses and Farms in the Parish of Trent

There are some second hand books available to purchase in our Amazon store, see the publications page for a link

We are currently working on a new web book store, further details to follow

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

We have recently been running OCR software on our older printed surveys to convert them to text files, with some success.
OCR seems to have improved considerably in recent years. The software uses Googles Tesseract This is a command line program.

If you want to have a play and don't want to use typed commands then, software from this list may be worth trying as it also uses the Tesseract OCR engine.
We have not tested any of the programs listed.