Finding the time to sum up 2005 for the Marple Website's seventh Christmas on-line has been a difficult task. We ended 2004 with a family funeral close to Christmas and unfortunately that situation has been repeated this year. The intervening months have seen a number of other problems come and go and these have resulted in us very much looking forward to putting this year behind us and making a fresh start in 2006. If any of you have felt that the web site has seemed a little neglected compared to previous years, hopefully this will give you an insight into the reasons why. It's our intention to bounce back in the New Year!

Despite these difficulties 2005 has not been without one or two successes:

The campaign begun in 2004 with the Friends of Marple Memorial Park to collect money towards a memorial bench for Jim Heald raised the required amount and the bench was ordered by Stockport Council in August this year. It was due for delivery in October but transport problems have resulted in a lengthy delay and it has only just arrived a couple of days ago. Hopefully we'll now be able to get it installed early in the New Year.

Continuing our close links with the Friends of Marple Memorial Park, we hosted an on-line consultation to obtain people's views about what sort of equipment should be included in the new junior play area. This received a great response from our visitors and helped to shape the design for this great new facility, which was completed in time for the school summer holidays. The play area was jointly funded by the Council and a £25,000 grant obtained by the Friends from 'Living Spaces'.

Following the success of our first on-line consultation we repeated this to find out if there was support for our idea of placing a circular bench around the Coronation Tree in Memorial Park. Support was amply demonstrated with an excellent response and this enabled us to obtain a £500 'Green Space Development' grant from Stockport Council to pay for it. Metalwork artist Wayne Chaisty, of 'Ironwood' on Stockport Road, is due to commence construction of a made-to-measure bench in January 2006.

We were delighted to get involved in the campaign to recognise International Merchant Navy Day after local man Ron Singleton posted a message in the forum about his efforts to organise the flying of the Red Ensign flag at the Town Hall on this special day. After several years of campaigning Ron had been successful in persuading the Council to allow it to be flown on 3rd September but he was going to have to pay for the flag himself! The Marple Website's donation towards this set the ball rolling and the cost of the Town Hall flag was covered without Ron having to dip into his own pocket. In addition, through the Friends of the Park, we approached Marple Area Committee about flying a flag in Memorial Park too. This was also successful and we came away with a grant of £50 to pay for the Friends' own Red Ensign. It had been intended to hold a flag raising ceremony at the Town Hall on IMND but this proved impractical and the ceremony was moved to Memorial Park. It was attended by the Mayor of Stockport and local MP Andrew Stunnell and was a fitting acknowledgement of the Merchant Navy's huge contribution during the Second World War. The Friends have since had a new flag pole erected to make raising of the flag on IMND and Remembrance Days much easier in the future and we are proud of our involvement in this.

Before moving away from Memorial Park to another local park, we should also mention that we had the unfortunate task of erecting a commemorative bench to Ian Rice, who made some great contributions to the Marple Website with his 'Marple Remembers' journals. Ian, who lectured at Ridge Danyers college for 28 years, died in 2004 after loosing his second battle with cancer.

The project to restore the Iron Bridge in Brabyns Park has consumed much of our time this past year. In December 2004 we thought we were close to a final solution and were hoping to have an approved scheme ready in January 2005. Unexpected complications concerning the 6" gas main running across the bridge set the project back enormously and it was not until September this year when approval of the scheme was finally achieved. As someone said to us recently about their dealings with the Council, "unfortunately progress can be slow and sometimes nonexistent but invariably frustrating." That has certainly been our experience this year. Although dealing with the council never seems to get any easier and our frustrations continue to grow, the project is now moving forward in the right direction. A planning application has been submitted and tenders were due to be issued before Christmas. Fund-raising is going well and we are hopeful that work will be able to start in May or June 2006, providing we can make a second successful application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for the money required. To learn the latest news, visit the Iron Bridge Project Diary.

We were able to continue our efforts to preserve a little of Marple's heritage this year by rescuing a huge print of Marple Hall from the offices of Park & Paterson, the firm on Cross Lane that closed after 130 years on the site. The cleaned and restored print is now on public display above the stairs in Marple Library. We've also managed to recover the Liberal Club sign that has been missing for several years since the club was demolished and hope to put that on display in 2006, once it has been properly restored.

With our Marple Promotions hat on we've been busy too. Our 2006 Marple and Mellor Calendar has been a great success and by the time sales are over it will have raised in the region of £1,200 towards the match-funding on the Iron Bridge Project. We've also produce two new packs of Marple and Mellor Christmas cards and four new open cards this year, although we haven't had time to put them on-line yet! In addition, just in time for Christmas, we've completed construction of a brand new web site for the Marple Business Forum. This compliments the excellent free 'Visit Marple' guide that the forum have produced and should by now have been distributed to every home in Marple. We're delighted to have been involved in this project with the Business Forum.

One extremely popular area of the Marple Website is the 'Virtual Tour' and this has benefited from the addition of 22 new galleries of local pictures this year. If you can help us to continue expanding this fascinating insight into Marple's past by lending us any photographs that we don't have yet, then please get in touch.

Another very popular area is the Forum and Noticeboard. As regular visitors will know, this was recently down for more than a week after we experienced serious software problems. Fortunately it was eventually restored after the site was moved to a new server. We've since learnt that Jigsaw Hosting are making arrangements to transfer much of their business, including the Marple Website account, to another company. We don't know much about this at present but are hopeful that it will be achieved without interruption to our service.

If the visitor counter is any measure, the popularity of the Marple Website has continued to rise and we have seen a new record level of approximately 47,000 hits in 2005. This is an increase of 8,000 on last year and we look forward to building on this popularity and trying to continue this sort of growth in 2006.