From Curragh to Ketch: the Story of Minehead's Quay Town

From Curragh to Ketch: the Story of Minehead's Quay Town ISBN 978-0-9549043-5-7

by John Gilman and Sue Lloyd

 

FIRST PUBLISHED  September 2012. Reprinted December 2012

This title is now on sale at local bookshops, price £10. Minehead outlets include: the Visitors Centre, the Reading Room in Friday Street, Greetings Plus and the WSR railway station. In Dunster, the book is avilable from Cobbles Bookshop; in Taunton the stockist is Brendon Books. The book may also be bought direct from the Genge Press, 45 Quay Street, Minehead. Please phone first: 01643-706461.

140 pp including introduction, bibliography and index; 21cm x 15 cm paperback with 32 mainly black and white illustrations Price £10 or 13 euros. P&p in UK £1.40

Quay Town developed from earliest times as a separate community in Minehead. This book tells the story of its inhabitants and how they lived by and from the sea, up to the end of the Second World War. The harbour was the main focus of Quay Town, so John Gilman has also described the kind of vessels that used the harbour through the ages. For more recent chapters we have been able to draw on the actual memories of former and present inhabitants.

The authors: John Gilman, writer, artist and poet, grew up in Minehead, West Somerset, and has always loved the sea and its vessels. He is the author of Exmoor's Maritime Heritage (1999) and has written many papers and articles on maritime history generally. For this book, he has drawn on his comprehensive collection of photographs and on his many conversations with local seamen. Sue Lloyd has lived in a seventeenth-century house in Quay Town for the past twelve years. During that time she has enjoyed meeting and corresponding with present and former residents who have helped her form a picture, however incomplete, of Quay Town over the ages.