William and Wendy Underwood, NDAS members living at Vielstone near Buckland Brewer have spent many years renovating a fire damaged Devon farmhouse. In the course of the work they discovered a bricked-up bread oven and among the rubble stuffed into it, they found three glazed tiles with Tudor rose and fleur-de-lis designs. Cynthia Cramp, who has made a study of such North Devon tiles, and is about to publish her findings in the DAS Proceedings, has written the following for the Newsletter.

A series of North Devon relief tiles was published in 1969, listing 64 designs and naming the churches where they were found. (Keen, L. 1969 ‘A series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lead-glazed relief tiles from North Devon’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 32, 144-70).
In the autumn of 1993 a few pieces of relief tile were retrieved during an investigation of a kiln waster site on Castle Hill in Great Torrington. One large fragment was soon identified by Dr Alison Grant as matching examples of relief tiles in a nearby church. This was significant as it provided evidence that the local 17th-century relief tiles, known to have been made in Bideford and Barnstaple, were also made in Torrington.

Soon after this Alison accompanied me on a visit to some of the more distant churches in the area, and on finding some of the relief tiles present in a church which did not appear in the previous series, Alison remarked ‘we really should be recording these, you know’. After this my interest in the tiles, already kindled, intensified and I did start recording, visiting many churches and building up a collection of rubbings, tracings and photographs of the designs found in them, also researching
contemporary church and local records for further information.