 this great idea but it's easy saying yes at the time go oh yes let's do that a lot of work involved and it's all in here now. Yeah exactly so a few of us kind of wanted to mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Rye Community Centre as well as the 100th anniversary of the old Rye National School. That's up the top of the hill is it? Exactly yeah up towards Glenala so not too far from the community centre but we got together and we thought a community history project would be ideal so we came up with an idea to collect old photos and stories, pieces of poetry whatever we could kind of gather from members of the community and we were absolutely inundated with the response from the community and the diaspora as well so for such a small place we managed to gather a huge amount of sources of photos and then we decided to pull a selection of those into a book and to kind of compile a history of the local area and that's what we have in front of us now today and that we're launching this evening. What sort of an area are we chatting about because I normally associate Rye with you know kind of above and beyond the community centre but it's yeah we kind of spread it out to the different schools in the area so you're talking from Brown now that area over into Rye and across to Craig and then back up towards Glenala and at the top of the hill around there so it's a fairly large if you like area that we've covered as part of this and part of it I suppose was in order to get buying from the community we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible and just because it's a small area we didn't want to leave the history untold so you have an awful lot of material here not just from the big landmarks and the grand landmarks if you like in the area but a family history and a history of normal people in the area social history exactly absolutely those are not from the area it would be between Remelton and Rathmullen and think of the bridge yes exactly and then sort of left from there as well up the hill towards Glenala beautiful area you know and there might have been people that have passed the main road endlessly and and never ventured off up the hill and up past the community centre and up up towards Glenala lovely up there yeah it's beautiful I mean in Rye we say we have it all from from the hills in the mountains right down to the the shores of Lux Willey so it is a beautiful area the community centre is ideally located and we have a number of walking trails now from the community centre as well as a new play park there and we'll have an astral pitch coming soon so we have a lot of facilities been developed there recently every year I seem to be mentioning I have something that's happening I'm out there and so a very progressive committee absolutely the committee are absolutely fantastic extremely active great great community spirit in the area and again this is just this book is another outworking of that community spirit of people coming together to capture this and to capture this history of this area so that it's preserved for future generations as well it's been preserved the photographs have been stored digitally as well yeah that's right so we have collected almost a thousand photos and there's probably around 200 of those in the book but we have the entire collection digitised and organised as well so we're just exploring options how to make that available to people going forward and we hope to share that with the Donegal County Museum as well so that they'll be captured forever if you like you know this is the sort of thing that a lot of us would talk about and we'd like to have it available in our own the townland or our own local area and all we need we should do this and we should do that and and it's important because these photographs now not only are they here or a selection of them in book form well I suppose it all starts with the idea and then you've got to move the project forward and gather up all the information and the photographs but then the finished article in this case a book but also a digital archive yeah very important and it's you know and it can replicate it I suppose in any local area absolutely and I mean as I say we had a very small committee working on this and what we did was essentially outsource the work if you like now the committee had to chase a fair few people to bring photos in that we wanted but I suppose you get to a point in time where the fear is that photos will be lost the fear is that stories will be lost and so it's always you know the best time to start a project like this is yesterday and the second best time is today and that was kind of the basis in which we operated on and as I say the community were absolutely fantastic and coming forward we used Milford and district resource center as a drop-off place so people who are bringing in their precious family photos could have them digitized there and then or if there was a lot of them over a space of 24 hours and then return to the owner directly so that kind of instilled a bit of confidence of people to come forward with and that's a very good point because people have photographs and they're absolutely precious to them and might not be digitized that might be the only copy of this photograph that they have so it's important then for them to know that listen we're gonna you know you can take it away with you again or we'll hold on to it for a short time and then you get it back and it's kept as part of the archive. Yeah absolutely and that was definitely a cornerstone to the success of the project and because people I suppose trusted us then to to take care of their photos for a short time and it's a social history in all its forms a lot of photographs of you know out in the field one and hay and and there's there's poems in there a lot of you know pictures with the horses and farm animals and there's poems and there's stories and a lot of group photographs individuals but also group photographs and photographs of old properties so in all its various forms social history. Absolutely and even we have a section of people who and photographs of people who went away from Rye to work abroad people in various different armies people in the police and people in holy orders as well so it's just it's very interesting to flick through some fantastic photos some beautiful shots of the wider Rye area and it's a gorgeous book put together lovely by brown printers and we had a fantastic designer there Anna Pavlak as well who worked with us and she was fantastic. Yeah I see towards the back there's a lot of pictures of men in military uniforms and also men as you say went away to work and women who went away to work and whether there was on the on the buses or in tunnels whatever pictures. Listen it's been launched tonight half past seven and everybody from around the area welcomed along. Absolutely yeah we look forward to seeing people there and books will also be available to buy online after this evening as well. And physically there'll be local shops? Yeah we're looking into that as well but mostly we'll be keeping it online and through the community centre. Okay brilliant. It's called Rye Remembered a photographic history of Rye and District Stagland. Thanks for my help. Thank you.