CAMBRIDGESHIRE

I'm a self employed artist by trade, but my first love has always been ghosts and their histories. By nature I am a collector, so pretty much as soon as I started working (my first job and for ten years afterwards I was an insurance broker) I started buying books on ghosts and hauntings. I especially loved the old ones and soon began to collect a varied selection of editions on British ghosts, folklore and local history. I also had a complution to write down and keep andy stories that people told me in conversation. Of course there is always a question mark of the validity of ghost stories told over a glass of whisky of an evening, but many I have been able to a least place in history and ally with other sightings.

 

You might say I have an over-active imagination, but I find it very easy to go to almost anywhere and imagine people of the past around me; going about their busness and me a witness to a long lost way of life. I am not a medium, I do not 'connect' with people. I just believe it is a love of history that fuels these visions and gives me a uniue respect for our ancestors. 

 

The more stories I heard of and collected the more I wanted to do something with this information. Not just hauted places, but anywhere that linked to our past. Old windmills, closed pubs, crumbling manors. Places where life was lived and tragedies happened. I started visiting places in person and taking photos. Then I started to draw these places. The artwork allowed me to indulge my fanciful imaginings, drawing sites without interuptions of power lines, parked cars and modern housing. This was really where my Grandfather, Peter Jeevar, came in. I always knew he had written a couple of booklets on old Cambridgeshire; I also knew he was researching for more when he decided to move from Cambridgeshire to Galloway in South West Scotland. I have since been given a huge pile of photographs of local sites that he took in the late 1970s.

 

My Grandfather's books 'Curiosities of Rural Cambridgeshire' and 'Dovecots of Cambridgeshire' gave me the starting point from which to revisit the sites he had and see how much had changed in the 30 years since he was there. It was sad and inspiring. Some old buildings had been restored to perfection, being given a new purpose for years to come, while others had vanished entirely. I decided I must use this to push me forward. Just how much had happened to these precious links with our past shocked me in some ways. Would anywhere else be lost between me starting this book and photographing all the places I wanted to? I felt a sense of panic. The reason was that the places I was interested in were not listed palaces or castles protected by national insttitutions; they were everyday buildings that could be subect to demolition or restoration on the whim of an unsypathetic owner. It will be a long journey, but I hope visitors to this website will enjoy the time they spend here and feel they can contact me with any information they feel may be of interest to the project.