Author Jacqueline Sarsby who used to live in the Rotherfold, Totnes will be launching her third book ‘The Devon Farm Through Women’s Eyes’ at the Mansion in Totnes at 4.30pm on Wednesday, March 25.

The book looks back in words and photographs at what life was like for women who lived and worked on Devon farms eighty or a hundred years ago.

Included are accounts in their own words from about ten women from the South Hams - tape-recorded interviews, with photographs of them taken by the author in the 1980s and 1990s.

There's Mollie Tucker, born at Hollacombe Farm near Start Point, in 1913, who would rub treacle and lard on a cow's sore udder!, and could remember going down to the village of Hallsands before it was washed away.

Eda Rowdon and her daughter Phyllis lived at Sweetstone Farm, Blackawton.

They made butter in the Devonshire way, in a wooden butter tub, and sold it at Dartmouth market for many years.

Eda was born in 1896, the fifth of eleven children.

Her life spanned every decade of the 20th century and Molly Moore tells of her time as a Land Girl during WWII at a farm near Kingsbridge (when she was badly kicked while milking a cow...).

Later, in her 50s, she wrote the weekly farming column, 'Shippon', for the South Hams newspapers for more than 20 years.

There are many more stories from other South Hams farm women.

Some have since passed away, but through interviewing them and photographing them in the 1980s and 1990s,

Jacqueline has ensured that these women's voices will not be lost.

Women’s experience was diverse; it was not the same for the wife or daughter of a smallholder with two fields as for the woman on a farm of 200 or 400 acres, and in this book they describe both in their own words.