A Lovely Sunny Summer Holiday in the West Country in the 1970s

The super 8 home movie featured in this post was taken during a sunny holiday in the West Country during the 1970s.

Story of the West Country film

This film is another in the collection I bought from eBay a couple of months back, and was taken by the same photographer who filmed the last few films I’ve published on Vintage Home Movies. The film is pretty good quality, although it suffers from a stray hair which got trapped in the camera gate when the film was taken, which has resulted in a line from the centre top of the frame being visible throughout the film.

It’s always interesting to try to work out the story behind the films, and so for this post I’m going to go into a little more detail about the film’s contents in this section of the post.

The film starts with a scene of a crowded town square and the photographer zooms into a group of three people in the middle of the scene who are looking back at the camera rather than forward. I think from this, we can work out that these three people are the photographer’s family or friends. These people also appear throughout the rest of the film, which cements this theory.

I wondered what the crowd had assembled for, and in the next scene there is a clue in the form of a car being driven through the crowd. The car obviously carries a royal occupant because there is a flag flying from it which I can make out is the Royal Standard. This makes me wonder if the year is 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. If that is the case, it’s likely that the film dates from June of that year, when the Queen carried out visits to most parts of the UK.

After the short sequence with the royal visit, the next part of the film covers a trip to the Wye Valley. The family seems to probably live in Gloucestershire or one of the counties around that area, because in order to get to the Wye Valley they drive across the Severn Bridge.

This is the second film on Vintage Home Movies which has the Severn Bridge on, although the other film was taken when the bridge was first opened.

With the family now safely transported to the Wye Valley, there is some footage of the surrounding scenery and a river cruise along the river Wye. It was this footage which helped me locate the holiday destination because it’s possible to make out a pub on the river bank called ‘Olde Ferrie Inn‘ and with a git of google searching I could find the location.

Interestingly, from the modern day pictures on google street view, it’s possible to see that the pub has hardly changed at all since this film was shot in 1977.

After the trip on the river Wye the film shows a bit more of the scenery around that part of the country and then cuts to the Roman Baths in Bath.

I don’t know if this trip to Bath was made during the same holiday, or in fact if this was a holiday or just a series of day trips, but the scene filmed in the Roman baths was one I recognised quite easily. I’ve seen many pictures of Bath in photos that I’ve published in the sister site to this one, Found Film and I could easily locate these scenes.

The film ends with this sequence.

The film of the West Country summer holiday

The digitised version of the film is shown below.