The 'Stories from the Stones pilot launched in 2005 with 50K of funding from the Heritage Lotttery Fund, by January 2008 it had developed a series of interlocking visitor activities that focused on the heritage of church and countryside.

Go West had always intended that its activities should appeal to visitors but it took a good few years to discover how to hone a mass of different but interlockaing ideas into something focused enough to start applying for funding. Funding application forms are always very searching, they almost require a project to have been completed (in ones head anyway) in advance of submitting the papers! We were a group of volunteers who came together only occasionally but everyone had an expertise of some kind; the challenge was to use those skills and talents in ways that would achieve our objectives and would be sustainable.

We worked on several ideas, consulted widely and really thought through every detail before making our application - fortunately it paid off. The Heritage Lottery Fund's 'Your Heritage' Grant fitted our project well and it wasn't too difficult to answer the questions, I suppose we fitted their criterion but that would not have been the case with some of the other funders we considered approaching. As a consequence we were able to carry put an ambitious project and could pay for the parts that we could not do ourselves. The experience, professional and friendly service of our partners, consultants ATS HERITAGE(leading suppliers of audio guides, video guides and interactive tours to the museum and heritage industry) enabled us to move into activities that without the funding we could only dream about.

As a voluntary organisation with no source of income and very little funding it was wonderful to find a funding organisation that put such a value on the voluntary input, we could use our labour as match funding - over 180 volunteers contributed in their different ways to the Stories from the Stones pilot. Scroll to see how it all developed.