In April 2023, well-known local historian Margaret Reed died in Pilton House at the age of 90 years. Born Margaret Anne Bonvoisin in London, she came to Devon with her mother and brother as an evacuee and never went back. She studied at Barnstaple Girls Grammar School and left at the age of 16 having passed the School Certificate. She worked in the office of RGB in Barnstaple until her marriage to Douglas Harold Reed of The Reform Inn in 1954.
They first moved to live at 3 Bradiford, and then on to Gladavin in Bradiford in 1983. After their divorce, she lived for the last years of her life on Littabourne in Pilton. She had four children in 5 years, Martin, John, Cathy and Philip, and eventually a total of eleven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
She was best known in Pilton as a self-taught, local historian, the author of ‘Pilton – Its Past and Its People’, first published in 1991. It was based on her extensive research, much of it in the Records Office in Exeter. Using her book as a dissertation, she was awarded a BA, and then an MA in Local History by the University of Exeter at the age of 70, with a dissertation on ‘Civil War in Barnstaple 1603 -1650’.
Over the years she had published many articles and booklets among them ‘The Public Houses of Pilton’, ‘The Turnpike Roads of Pilton’ and ‘St Margaret’s Leper Hospital’. In 2014 the Pilton Arts Group, of which she was a life member, published her ‘Pilton Arts Group – The First Forty Years’. In her later years she was closely involved as a volunteer and historical expert for The Pilton Story heritage archive from its beginning in 2012. Her extensive knowledge of Pilton history will be much missed.
Martin Haddrill
This obituary was transferred from the old www.piltonfestival.co.uk website in March 2026.