Welcome to my Home Page!

I hope you enjoy your visit here and are able to find something to have a nose at, so please explore the links on the left which point to pages I have written studying specific subjects which are of interest to me, but which in many cases are poorly supported elsewhere on the web. I have also included links to external sites with subject matter which I have found to be of interest.

Perhaps now, though, a brief introduction is in order.............

As the name of my site may suggest, my name is Andrew Westcott, known informally amongst my friends as Andy. I was born in 1962 and was fortunate enough to have been brought up on a farm in the beautiful Teign Valley in the village of Doddiscombesleigh, which is located in the heart of the Devonshire countryside in the South-West of England, and this gave me almost unlimited scope for childhood exploration, with the vast woodlands, steep sided valleys and many disused quarries and mine workings in the area.

Unfortunately, the untimely death of my father made it necessary for us to sell up and move to the nearby city of Exeter where my mother still lives, although I got married to a local lady from Bridford and moved on again, and now live with my wife and five children in East Devon. It has, however, long been my wish to return to the Valley some day but the enormous rise in house prices over the last decade or two have made this unlikely in the foreseeable future.

I have many interests and hobbies, some of them perhaps a little eccentric and of, shall we say, minority interest, and this site came into being as an attempt to create an on-line repository for information on a selection of obscure topics, consisting of a photographic record combined with whatever information I am able to offer, for whoever may have use for it. In some cases this information is a little patchy, and may consist of little more, for example, than a collection of photographs to record what now remains, but I make no apology for this as this site is an ongoing project, and information will be added if and when I receive it.

By the very nature of this site, photographs have been used extensively on the various pages and because of this, they may take a moment or two to load especially on a dial-up connection. In most cases the pictures and associated text can be clicked on to load a high resolution version of the picture, and if you specifically require a very high quality version of any image on this site to print out or to do whatever with, just e-mail me your request and we can discuss the technicalities of transferring the file.

Please note: All photography and text is my own work unless otherwise stated, and is therefore subject to copyright. I may agree for photographs to appear in non-commercial works as long as my permission is first sought and I am clearly credited for the work. If photographs are to be used on another web site I will additionally require a prominent link to be provided to the page containing the photograph. Use of my photographs or text for commercial purposes without my prior permission is expressly prohibited.