IT is easy to think of record offices as being full of old council documents, business ledgers, bills and plans but they can also be home to some amazing pieces of creative writing.

A few examples from Barrow Archive and Local Studies Library have been taken out to inspire school pupils in an Archives for Literacy project.

The end results – and examples of archives material which inspired them – can be seen in a display at Barrow archive until the end of October.

The archive is open Wednesdays to Fridays, from 9.30am to 5pm, next to the Ramsden Square public library.

The archive items shown to youngsters included the diary written by Margaret Bainbridge which covers the dramatic period of the Barrow Blitz during the Second World War.

During April and May in 1941 she records events such as the destruction of the Trevelyan Hotel and the Abbey Road Baptist Church.

There is an invitation to accompany the corpse of Sir William Rawlinson, of Graythwaite Hall, to his funeral at Hendon Parish Church in 1703.

It notes that coaches were provided to take the mourners. On a rather lighter note is a sketch of the castle of Sir Thomas Skeltonne – complete with dragon, dungeons, ogre and buried treasure.

This somehow made its way into a set of Borough Surveyor’s plans. Other unusual items designed to spark ideas for creative writing were a 1916 passport to Mr A. R. Pennington who retired to Broughton.

The many stamps in his passport reflect the legal expert’s trips to Africa after appointment to the Supreme Court of Nigeria.

There was also a statement produced after attacks by young men on a group of women attending a Suffragette meeting held at Hawkshead in 1912.

Barrow archivist Susan Benson showed the archive material to a Year 8 group at Furness Academy and you can read some of the prose, poetry and diary entries they came up with featuring everything from a fearsome ogre attacking a castle to what it might have been like to live through an air raid.