5 School Trips Kids Shouldn’t Miss!

English Heritage recently announced subsidised school travel to a selection of their sites. The list of available sites for the scheme was a subset of the National Heritage List, and very heavily skewed in favour of post-Roman sites. (The announcement itself was a little misleading as it suggested that free travel was being offered whereas the small print identified a cap of £4 per child). So we’d like to present our own list of sites to which schools can arrange visits (sadly, without the English Heritage subsidy). These are places that, rather than boring the children with facts, names, dates etc. (does anyone still remember the whole of the “Willie Willie Harry Steve, Harry Dick John Harry 3.” rhyme that was pumped into us at school?) can provide a proper education on what it was like to live in ancient times, using skills that could still prove useful today in helping to actually create something tangible. Most of these are commercial concerns rather than ‘National Heritage’ sites, but that doesn’t make them any less useful in engaging school children in our ancient heritage.

Wiltshire – The Ancient Technology Centre

The Ancient Technology Centre consists of 6 reconstructed buildings from different time periods, all built by schoolchildren and volunteers, using traditional tools and techniques. The Centre has developed a unique program of hands on learning for children of all ages.

Such is the standard of the work here that they have been awarded the English Heritage contract to reconstruct three Neolithic Houses based on excavations of house plans at Durrington Walls. Prototype building began this March at Old Sarum, and the final reconstructions will be built outside the new Stonehenge Visitor Centre in October 2013.

Hampshire – Butser Ancient Farm

Butser Ancient Farm, founded in 1970 following an idea from the Council fro British Archaeology, Consists of an Iron Age roundhouse and Roman Villa, in a farm setting. School visits are catered for, with material covering a wealth of topics including: Celts, Romans, Invaders and Settlers, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, Houses and Homes, Discovery for Reception Age, Medicine through Time, Sustainable Technologies and Archaeology. Carefully planned activities tie in with different aspects of Key Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 – from history and art to DT and maths.

Cambridgeshire – Flag Fen

Flag Fen archaeology park is home to a wooden causeway some 3,500 years old that is so unique it is held by experts all over the world in the same esteem as Stonehenge. There are reproduction roundhouses from the Bronze and Iron Ages on site and a small museum.

Schools are catered for with sessions covering ‘Invaders and Settlers’, ‘Dig! Hands on Archaeology’, ‘Hunting and Gathering’ and ‘Patterns in Nature’. Suitable for Key Stages 1,2,3.

Silchester – Calleva Atrebatum, A Roman Town

This Roman town, which was founded in the first century AD (nearly 2000 years ago), was built on the site of an Iron Age town, Calleva. The Roman amphitheatre and town walls are some of the best preserved in Britain. The site has been under excavation since 1997.

As this is an active and working archaeological dig site, activities for schools tend to be closely related to the archaeological activity and discoveries at Silchester rather than exclusively to a Roman theme. Activities include a children’s finds pit, a planning exercise, activity sheets, tours and talks, finds handling etc.

Pembrokeshire – Castell Henllys

Set within 30 acres of woodland and meadows, the hill fort at Castell Henllys contains four roundhouses and a granary, reconstructed on the Iron Age foundations. A wide range of education services is provided and their Schools Programme currently caters for up to 7000 children every year.

If you’re a schoolteacher or home educator who has taken children to one of these sites for educational purposes (rather than as a ‘treat’ day out), why not let us know how the trip went? Or better still, get some of the kids to tell us! We can offer an interactive CD tour of Avebury for any stories that we subsequently publish!

If you know of other, similar centres providing a service to schools, please let us know in the comments.

Stonehenge and Avebury: The Daws of Stonehenge

Postcards to friends of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site

About now the jackdaws should be busily raising their families in nests built in crevices in Stonehenge. One favoured spot is a “chimney” within Stone 60 which they have to patiently drop sticks though until one becomes wedged and they can start building their nest. How long jackdaws have been living at Stonehenge is anyone’s guess but it’s quite possible they have been there far longer than there have been ravens at the Tower of London. It certainly suits them very well. As 18th century English poet William Cowper wrote of the jackdaw….

A great frequenter of the church,
Where, bishoplike, he finds a perch,
And dormitory too

At around the same time the early ecologist, Gilbert White, noted that ….

“Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that amazing work of antiquity: which circumstance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, that they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the annoyance of shepherd-boys, who are always idling round that place”.

NRS

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This is part of a series of short “postcards” that anyone with something to share is welcome to submit, whether that is a digital snap and a “wish you were here” or something more involved. Please do join in by sending your postcards to theheritagejournal@gmail.com

For others in the series put postcards in the search box.

Archaeology: a church too broad?

This year’s Festival of British Archaeology has some great events and we’ll be highlighting some in the coming weeks. One general point stands out though. Archaeologists are always wanting better funding so you’d expect the Festival to be used to demonstrate to the Public that every penny of their taxes spent on Archaeology and the historic environment is well spent. Mostly it is. But ….

Dowsing? Good luck to dowsers, they’re entitled to their hobby but should the Archaeo-church be so broad as to include them? Should the Festival include a demonstration of “archaeology dowsing techniques” to locate and record a former house? Shouldn’t Archaeology be presenting itself as something that doesn’t include some things? After all, no-one would want their taxes spent on the NHS if it included projects conducted by witchdoctors!

And then there’s metal detecting. Which archaeologist would wish the public to think artefact hunting is Archaeology. Or even worse, that Archaeology is artefact hunting! However widely you define Archaeology, collecting stuff for personal benefit it ain’t. Yet it’s still there in full view (albeit less than last year) in the heart of the Festival listings. So perhaps the church IS too broad?

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Cheers and boos: Stonehenge puzzle, Government speaks out and a waste of time

A Stonehenge puzzle
The new Stonehenge land trains will carry a maximum of 900 visitor per hour whereas up to 35,000 people have turned up at summer solstice previously. So what’s to be done? Well presumably while most visitors will soon be asked to co-operate in the “splendid isolation” project by parking some distance away and using the land train and those who take part in the winter lantern parade happily use shanks’ pony, summer solstice attendees will be provided with a convenient, free car park close to the stones, opened up specially for them. If anyone can explain this puzzle please leave a Comment below. There’s a prize.

Government speaks out at last!
The Government of Belize has condemned the deliberate bulldozing of a 2,300 year old monument as “ignorant and unforgivable” and says that such cultural landmarks should be protected at all costs and that the “disdain for our laws and policies is incomprehensible.”

The millionaire culprit will offer to finance research into what is no longer there and be given a £4,000 fine and a slapped wrist. Oh no, sorry, that last bit applies to the bulldozing of Priddy Henges, a monument in southern England that’s twice as old!

A waste of time
Metal detectorists are running a petition against the use of contaminated green waste on fields. Quite right if it’s a health hazard. However they also complain that bits of metal in the waste is ruining their hobby. The Government isn’t likely to lose any sleep over that and Environment Minister Richard Benyon has just delivered some bad news for detectorists by pointing out that stringent limits on physical contaminants such as metals, plastics and glass “were revised down from a total of 0.5% of dry weight to 0.25% in 2011. They are now the toughest in Europe.”  In other words, they’ll deal with breaches that cause health hazards but there’s no chance they’ll be changing what’s considered acceptable levels – which includes one part in 400 being metal. That’s a lot of beeps. And it’s legal innit! (To coin a phrase).

PS… Perhaps (says Paul Barford) the petition signers “would be better employed getting more fellow hobbyists applying best practice more frequently to their hoiking“. Depends what best practice means though doesn’t it? “Do no harm to the public’s interest” would be an appropriate definition since they reckon that’s what the petition is about but how much metal detecting conforms to that?

 

Spam, or Light Entertainment?

Many of the comments we publish here on the Heritage Journal are relevant and insightful. Some are argumentative or controversial. And to those that take sensible part in such debate, we offer our thanks.

However, sadly in these unenlightened times there are many comments which are *not* suitable for publication, either because an argument has run its course, the topic is off subject, or because for the vast majority of unpublished comments, the spam filter on the website has done it’s job and consigned them to the dustbin.

It seems there are ‘bots out there designed to comment randomly on web sites, in the hope that the comments will be published, thus giving exposure to the poster’s web site address. This is done in the vain hope of improving search engine rankings for malicious sites, so the scammers can claim their pound of flesh from innocent or naive users.

Luckily, our site catches the vast majority of these, and they are deleted without further thought. It’s one reason we moderate *all* comments on the site, and don’t generally allow comments that come via anonymous proxies. The few that slip by the filter are then manually deleted.

However, it can be useful from time to time to review those comments caught in the net, and also entertaining!

We happen to think that over the years, we’ve provided a good mix of content on our primary chosen subject matter: The Pre-Roman Heritage of Britain and the threats thereto. So, in the spirit of all the best West End shows and best selling paperback cover blurbs (remember those?), we present a selection of recent (in the last week) ‘positive review’ comments from our net, for your delectation and delight. Posters details have not been included, for obvious reasons!

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• Aw, this was an exceptionally nice post. Taking a few minutes and actual effort to generate a really good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate a lot and never seem to get anything done. (Try sending less spam – you’ll have lots of time then! – ed)
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• Fantastic items from you, man. I have take note your stuff previous to and you are simply too magnificent. I actually like what you have received here, certainly like what you are stating and the way in which wherein you are saying it. You are making it entertaining and you still care for to stay it wise. I cant wait to learn far more from you. That is really a great web site. (I’m lost for words – ed)

It seems odd that people with the wherewithal to set up such automated systems are so poor at the Queen’s English. Do they really think we’re fooled?

Oh! The Stonehenge Emperor has no clothes!

It seems that a 2006 survey of summer solstice attendees revealed that …

• 50% of those questioned were first time attendees…..
• Only 15% mentioned a spiritual or religious reason for visiting, and …
• 80% weren’t members of organisations that see Stonehenge as significant!

That’s a real shock. Everyone knows that too many people are allowed into the stone circle, creating risks of possible harm to both the public and the stones – and that £200,000 has to be spent every year to combat those two risks. And for why? Because some say they have a spiritual right to have unfettered access. Maybe they do, but it seems that for the past seven years there’s been compelling evidence that only about 3,000 out of 20,000 come for spiritual reasons, only half of those who turn up have done so before and only 4,000 out of 20,000 are even in organisations that see the place as significant!

In other words, the overcrowding, risk and expense aren’t helping anyone achieve their spiritual needs, they’re simply giving a load of non-spiritual people a bit of a laugh!  Five weeks from today it will happen again. Time to re-think the whole thing maybe?

Stopping the bus

English Heritage are starting a free school bus scheme. They’ll provide up to £4 per pupil towards travel to many of their properties. It’s a great idea. However, from our point of view there’s one drawback – the list of eligible sites includes only about half a dozen prehistoric ones. Sadly, that’s consistent with how things are on the National curriculum and exactly nine years ago our colleague Tombo made a compelling plea for change in his article Reclaiming Prehistory.

He pointed out that at least three million years of ‘prehistory’ is skimmed over in only a handful of pages at the beginning of our history books and the space on any school timetable devoted to the study of pre-literate times is as nothing when compared to that spent teaching the written history of the Common Era. As Tristram Hunt has just asked in the Guardian – “How much information about Anne Boleyn can modern Britain really cope with?”

Here’s a small suggestion. Maybe EH could still help with travel costs to medieval priories and stately homes but make the subsidy conditional upon brief stops at one or two little-known prehistoric sites on the way?

Coldrum Long Barrow, Kent  © Alan S, Heritage Action.  Worth a brief stop en route to Anne Boleyn’s early home at Hever Castle?

Competition: Guess the Hillfort

Last summer, we teased with a competition to ‘Spot the Stone Circle‘,  and published the answers a month later.

This year, it’s the turn of hillforts, those large enclosures dating to the Iron Age, often with multiple ditch and bank defenses. We have pictures of twelve hill forts, courtesy of Google Maps, for you to identify. To make things slightly easier, we have restricted ourselves to a geographical area no further West than Bristol, no further North or East than Oxford, but stretching down to the South coast.

So, here are the twelve sites for you to identify, answers in a couple of weeks’ time:

Hillfort 1

Hillfort 2

Hillfort 3

Hillfort 4

Hillfort 5

Hillfort 6

Hillfort 7

Hillfort 8

Hillfort 9

Hillfort 10

Hillfort 11

Hillfort 12

…so, how many can you name? How many have you visited? Don’t forget to email us your answers.

All images taken from, and copyright of, Google Maps.

Stonehenge: a telling contrast?

As English Heritage publishes this year’s Conditions of Entry for solstice at Stonehenge and looks around for the £200,000 it is going to cost to stage it, a couple of other recent events are noteworthy:

• Here’s a different Stonehenge gathering by Amesbury Museum: “If you are a parishioner of Amesbury, we would love you to join us at Stonehenge at 10am on 4th May and help us celebrate around a May Pole near the Heal Stone”…..

• And here’s the recent May Day / Beltane celebration service being conducted by Arch Druid Rollo Maughfling on Glastonbury Tor. 

In each case, no problems, no issues, no complaints, no £200,000 – in fact tuppence would probably be closer. In addition, over in Kent they’ve only raised £2,622 so far towards the £20,000 they need by June to ensure the replica of the Dover Bronze Age boat can go to sea. That’s £20,000, not £200,000. Time to re-think the Stonehenge solstice arrangements?

Windsult at Mynydd Y Betws….

by Heritage Action

There’s been a fuss over who should get payouts from the “Mynydd Y Betws fund”  – that’s money to compensate communities adversely affected by the wind farm. All sorts of accusations of political bias have been flying around but those arguments miss the far more profound point that ought to be causing universal concern: the Council’s officers have pointed out that “the developer decided what communities should be included, not the council”.

So imagine. A thug owns a vicious dog with rabies that he willingly allows to bite ten people …..

But it’s not the law or lawyers or officials or an independent tribunal that gets to decide which of them (if any) gets compensated and to what extent (if any). It’s the thug!