For decades a treasure trove of photographs of North Devon has lain untouched in cupboards and store rooms.

They are the surviving record of an age of photography receding fast in the new digital age.

Some were accidentally dumped, others have suffered from breakage and damp.

But thousands were preserved, more were rescued, and now they are seeing the light of day again.

They were glass negatives of press pictures taken by photographers employed by the Western Morning News' sister paper the North Devon Journal.

They reveal the population's highs and lows, the trivial and the traumatic, the magnificent and the mundane, from the old Queen's Hall to Her Majesty the Queen herself, from the Lynmouth Flood to long-demolished streets, and from post war rationing to postmen on horseback.

Now the North Devon Athenaeum has opened a collection of 6,000 digitised pictures made from the negatives covering a decade from 1949.

Thanks to a grant from the Bideford Bridge Trust, the entire collection has at long last completed the digital process.

Historian Peter Christie said of the collection: "It's fantastic. What's coming out is the social history of North Devon. Because we live in such a visually conscious age, it's a superb archive."

Many of the photographs have been locked away for decades and Peter has been carefully transporting the delicate negatives from Barnstaple to Bideford for digitising over a period of years.

Some were found in a skip at the rear entrance of the old shared offices of the North Devon Journal and Western Morning News in High Street, Barnstaple, remembered reporter and gardening writer, Graham Andrews.

"I was just going to lunch one day and came across some boxes in the skip," he said.

"I saw in the boxes all these glass negatives that someone had thrown out and quite a few were smashed beyond repair.

"I pulled out three or four boxes that hadn't been damaged.

"I went on to use some of them in the paper's column about past years and events."

Peter Christie said: "The old negatives are so brilliant you can blow them up and read what's on the posters in the background of the photographs.

"Used together with stories from the newspaper it's a valuable archive of North Devon life."

Most of the photographs were taken by two cameramen, Stuart Turner and Tom Moon who were working on the paper during those relevant years.

North Devon Athenaeum chairman Margeret Reed said: "It's a wonderful resource because the original newspapers we have are fragile and we can't let the general public loose on them. The paper is fragmenting.

"We did have them micro-filmed but those films have become scratched and the micro-readers aren't very good."

Librarian Naomi Ayre has spent many hours working on the presentation of the new collection.

She said: "Having the originals here is absolutely brilliant. It's given people a real opportunity to see the images as they were taken and to see photographs that never appeared in the paper at all."

Peter Christie said that costs in those days meant the photographers had only one chance to make their shot.

"Pictures were much more expensive so the cameramen had to make sure they were set up right first time," he said.

"It was lucky we were able to save so many. We discovered thousands of the glass negatives in cupboards and shelves in the old newspaper building.

"A few got broken and some were damp but the majority were in good condition.

"So I spent a year gingerly transporting them over to Bideford to be digitised.

"The company which processed them has done an excellent job and clearly enjoyed doing it and looking after what is a valuable collection."

Readers can see the pictures stored on DVDs in the North Devon Athenaeum at Barnstaple Library.

Low-resolution copies can be viewed on the Athenaeum's web page, www.northdevon athenaeum.org.uk/catalogue and good copies will be available for about £3 each.

There is now a display of some of the photographs in the entrance to the library.