Who am I?

See if you can recognise me from this picture taken in the late 1960s.
You can click it to take a closer look at the stile / style!
Laura and I were south of Brandy Row School, walking in the fields not far from the later Galleries Shopping Centre.
No joy?  Explore the website and, whether you know me or not, you'll soon discover my name.

[Photo: Laura Simpson]

About this site:

1. I've added some JavaScript to these pages to provide a bit of interactivity between the website and its visitors.

2.  I test each new page using the most up-to-date version of Mozilla Firefox and recheck with several other browsers.  I no longer try Internet Explorer.  It's way past its 'sell by date'.  If the pictures in the Photo Gallery don't pop up in the centre of your monitor when clicked, or some pages seem to have contents scattered all over the place, your browser probably needs upgrading to the latest version.

UPDATE (Sept 2015): Microsoft have included a new browser Microsoft Edge with their latest operating system, Windows 10.
This has replaced Internet Explorer.

3. The images in the Photo Gallery have been resized (usually to 900 pixels max.) and Adjusted for the Web.  It's an attempt to provide good quality pictures without excessively long download times.

However, inserting an image into Photo Gallery page PG1, for example, necessitates editing all the pages that follow it, in this case PG2 to PG15.
This will result in visitors having to re-download all of these pages on a subsequent visit.  Those of you with lightning-fast PCs and High-Speed Broadband won't notice.  To everyone else, please be patient.  The image thumbnails have very small files and should download fairly quickly.

4.  This is a private website over which I have 100% control.  Using material from many local and some more distant supporters, I run it as a hobby and to keep myself mentally active.  The subject matter is Washington's past in articles, maps and photographs.

5.  So while you're here, why not have a mosey around some of the wonderful items as supplied by the people of Washington?

I hope you enjoy your visit.  Have a good day and take care.

Editor

P.S.

What's in a name?
That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Romeo and Juliet (Act 2, Sc. 2)

So what's this Raggy Spelk business all about?  Well, I wanted a website with a simple memorable name and decided that the Geordie word
spelk would fit the bill.  The first website was for me alone; it's purpose was to help me teach myself HTML & CSS (web codes). A local history website was the furthest thing from my mind!  Alas, www.spelk.com & www.spelk.co.uk were already allocated - try them if you like! So I added the word raggy to arrive at a unique URL.  I'm neither raggy, nor skinny - not since I left Usworth Juniors!