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29. Neolithic Stone Axes The stone objects seen here are axe heads from the ‘New Stone Age’ or Neolithic period found near Clovelly.  The people of the Neolithic are known as the first farmers, who, spreading from the eastern Mediterranean, arrived in Britain round about 4,000 BC. To create their fields of early wheat and …

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36. The Barnstaple Pottery Kiln The largest artefact in the Museum, and the most evocative of life in seventeenth century Barnstaple, is the pottery kiln excavated in 1987 on the site of the future library. The remains found on the library site were intact enough to be lifted and rebuilt in the Museum, where a …

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40. North Devon's Oldest Pottery In 1864 the geologist Townshend Hall was alerted to a concentration of prehistoric flint material at a spot on Baggy Point called Freshwater Gut, where rabbits had been burrowing. Conducting the earliest archaeological excavation in North Devon, Townshend Hall uncovered flint tools and waste together with these two fragments of …

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46. The Buckland Brewer Tiles You can still see tiles like this built into the floors of some North Devon churches.  This one was removed from Buckland Brewer Church.  The potters in the Barnstaple-Bideford area of North Devon had started making tiles like this by the 17th century, with designs raised in relief above a …

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50. The Holworthy Pot Last used over 3,000 years ago, this is the Holworthy pot which was excavated in 2005 from a Bronze Age settlement at Holworthy Farm, Parracombe.  When North Devon Archaeological Society opened up the site, almost the very first evidence to come to light were the part intact remains of a clay …

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52. The Cloam Oven Most old farmhouses in North Devon would once have been equipped with cloam ovens like this one.  Made of local clay, they were still being manufactured in various standard sizes as late as the 1930s.  The word cloam just means clay.  William Fishley Holland describes how they were made at the …

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60. The Brockenbarrow Urn This undecorated vessel once held cremated human remains from the second or early first millennium BC. It was recovered in 1906 from a round barrow (earth mound) on Challacombe Down by the Reverend Chanter of Parracombe who restored it and presented it to the North Devon Athenaeum. Dating from the Bronze …

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61. Wooden Water Pipes These unprepossessing lengths of wood are remnants of Barnstaple’s first piped water supply from the late 17th century. They were dug up around 1900 in Joy Street. As with most towns, poor sanitation in Barnstaple combined with a growing population to make the town increasingly smelly and unhealthy.  In 1698 an …

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70. Footprints from Westward Ho! This block of consolidated clay preserves ancient hoofprints from Northam Burrows.  In winter 2008 storms damaged the pebble ridge causing it to retreat and to expose a surface in which were preserved the prints of animals, most probably deer. These must have been made before the pebble ridge was formed …

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75. Roman Pottery from Brayford Roman pottery came to light at Brayford in the early 2000s. For years people digging their gardens had turned up lumps of heavy, knobbly material that they called ‘black ram’. In fact this is slag resulting from the smelting of iron. Its association with Roman pottery and the widespread occurrence …