Sweetstone
Life on a Devon Farm

The pattern of farming in Devon is changing, and many of the traditional farm skills—such as hand-turning butter and making a mangold ‘cave’—are disappearing. Over a twelve-year period, Jacqueline Sarsby regularly visited two brothers and a sister and their elderly mother who farmed near Blackawton in South Devon, talking to them and taking photographs of their daily activities and village life. Sweetstone, A Farm in the South Hams is the result: a beautiful photographic record and intimate picture of a vanishing way of life. The family keeps local breeds of cattle and sheep, and has resisted the move to more intensive farming. They recall traditional ways of farming which often involved hard and heavy work, but which were less isolating than the lonely field-work of the modern farmer, and often less harmful to the land and to the people who worked it. More than 80 beautiful and atmospheric black and white photographs are complemented by insightful text, creating a fascinating portrait of family life on the farm as it used to be.

Jacqueline Sarsby

Jacqueline Sarsby is a photographer, who began her career as a social anthropologist and oral historian. She lectured at the University of Kent for nine years, and researched such subjects as romantic love in Western Society, the lives of Staffordshire pottery-workers and women on Devon farms. She was a consultant to the Channel 4 series about the history of the countryside, ‘Green and Pleasant Land’, loves to photograph in black and white, and also contributes colour features on rural life to magazines like Gardens Illustrated, Country Living and NFU Countryside.