J UST BEFORE Christmas the town council heard that there is to be an archaeological excavation in the two car parks in Bridge Street.

The purpose of this is to check the site as part of a historical evaluation of the area in order to identify any "risks" for potential developers. I find this very exciting as to my knowledge there has only ever been one previous archaeological dig in the town which was one I organised back in the 1980s just prior to the New Street redevelopment. This uncovered a rich mix of medieval and later material some of which is now displayed in the Burton Museum.

On this occasion 14 exploratory trenches are to be cut in the Torridge-owned car park which will cover about 5% of the total area. This does of course mean that the facility will be closed for around a week — and possibly more if something of great interest is discovered. I understand negotiations over the loss of parking income are still going on with Torridge but if all goes well the archaeologists should be starting either in late January or early February.

The area is of some interest as following the construction of the Bridge, probably in the thirteenth century, the main entrance to Bideford was via Allhalland Street so that Bridge Street was very close to the centre of the medieval town. Its crowded nature is shown well in the attached photograph which dates from the 1930s and comes from my Illustrations of Old Bideford Volume 1. I will be pushing for an exhibition of anything found to be staged in the Burton after the dig is completed.

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BEFORE Christmas I wrote about the Core Strategy for Torridge and North Devon district councils — which is the plan for the future of the two areas up until 2026. The councils have now published a four-page glossy leaflet setting out the plan outlines, which include 6,100 new houses in Bideford and Northam of which roughly one third will be "affordable". In order to collect responses from the public a series of Public Information Events is to be held over the next month. The Bideford one is being staged in the Town Hall on Thursday, January 28, from 2 to 8pm, along with a Northam event at Windmill Lane on Tuesday, February 9, from 2 to 8 pm. I would urge anyone interested in the future of this area to become involved. One unfortunate point is that of the seven meetings in North Devon three are on the weekend and thus more accessible to a lot of working people whereas all of Torridge's are on a weekday, which seems a missed opportunity.

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CAN I JUST put in a word of praise for the dustmen? Over the last few weeks they have faced the Christmas avalanche of rubbish bags, the snow and the consequent disruption of and difficulties that created — yet they have kept struggling to clear the backlog — for the most part successfully. There is a feeling amongst councillors that so long as peoples' rubbish is collected most council taxpayers are satisfied — well it's nice to know that this most valued service has been carried on under great difficulties by Torridge's staff.

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GO TO THE library and you will find a leaflet put out by the county council on Devon Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC). Briefly put the HLC "is a method for understanding and mapping the landscape that we see today with reference to its historical development". The actual work uses old and modern Ordnance Survey maps married together with air photography and has now been made available via www.devon.gov.uk/historicenvironment.

If you visit you will find two main sections – HLC Modern, which is self-explanatory, and HLC Post-medieval, which characterises the landscape to be found in the late 1800s. Additionally there is a section on field boundary loss and another on orchard loss. The whole thing takes a bit of getting used to and I am slightly puzzled why it has been done as any planning applications today are always looked at in their local historical context — and I do wonder how useful this series of maps will be as the "characterisation" is very broad.