‘All Aboard the Bandstand!’ was the cry on Aberystwyth promenade last week when Ceredigion Archives, the county record office, put on a range of special events with a maritime theme on the seafront stand to celebrate Explore Your Archives week.

Explore Your Archives is a UK annual event to celebrate the contents of Britain’s archives, record offices and specialist repositories.

Ceredigion has an age-old relationship with the sea – the county’s coat-of-arms even sports a herring against a background of the waves to symbolise the fishing industry.

Boatbuilding, fishing and merchant vessels which travelled the world are all important features of the county’s heritage. All of these are represented in the collections at Ceredigion Archives.

In more recent times, as the seaside became a tourist destination, commercial postcards and private photographs generated countless other images of the sea and shoreline. Many of these too can be found in the archives.

During the week, nearly 300 people visited the archives at the bandstand and enjoyed a slideshow of historic photographs of Aberystwyth promenade and harbour.

Lots of people commented on pictures of storms in the 1890s and 1920s comparing it with today’s weather.

Archive students from Aberystwyth University’s department of information management, libraries and archives curated an exhibition of seaside images, with their own carefully-researched captions.

The Borth ‘sand beast’ was definitely the most popular image, but all were enjoyed, and many people pointed out the ‘ghost’ in the picture of the Aberystwyth lifeboat crew in the 1930s.

See this week's south papers for the full story, available in shops and as a digital edition tomorrow