After months of grizzly and confusing weather, dare we say it’s starting to feel a little like spring? The air feels fresher and all those aromas of budding leaves are filling our lungs here at Butser. Yesterday we were lucky enough to witness the birth of our first lamb! From now on they’ll be popping out all over the place, and soon our flock will have doubled in size.
Most excitingly, the A-frame of our wicker man has now been raised and the rest of the build will follow over the next few weeks, ready for our Beltain festival on 30th April. This year we have a brand new design that is rather different to our previous wicker men, but we’re hoping it will look grander than ever! As all Beltain-goers know, it’s very important to please the gods to ensure a hearty harvest…
Meanwhile, the wildlife on site is waking up to the bustle of spring. Yellowhammers, robins, dunnocks and blackbirds have been decorating the hedgerow behind the Roman villa, and the song thrush has been tooting her melodies in the forest by the car park. The goats are particularly happy, as the fresh air and sunshine means they can leave their wooden shack and play outside in the grass. The chickens are contented as ever, despite their ongoing hatred for the pheasants.
Wildlife at Night
We find all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures at Butser, and recently we decided to try and capture our most elusive creatures on camera. Local school Bedales kindly lent us their trail camera from the Biology department, and over the last few days we’ve been placing it around the farm to see what visitors we have at night.We know that a barn owl comes and eats in our Saxon house, and another bird of prey eats in the villa, but unfortunately our attempts to film them have so far been unsuccessful! Last night, however, we decided to place the camera at the junction between the paths and paddock near the Stone Age enclosure, and on the ground we placed a few dollops of dog food.Success! We spotted a fox, badger, bunny, pheasant, magpie and our own chickens. We’ll keep putting the camera out this week and next to see what we can find – lots of fingers crossed for the owl!
Badger
Chubby Fox
Tiny bunny
Magpie
Chickens
What is Imbolc?
This weekend at the farm we’ll be celebrating the festival of Imbolc, a Gaelic event marking the beginning of spring. Also known as Brigid’s Day, it is most commonly held in early February, half way between the winter solstice and spring equinox. Saturday afternoon will be filled with storytelling, poetry, music and a light feast by firelight; but why did our ancestors celebrate Imbolc? And why do we still honour it today?
The linguistic origin of Imbolc is still debated among etymologists, but the most common explanation comes from the Old Irish i mbolc, meaning ‘in the belly’ and referring to the vernal pregnancy of ewes. Seasonally, it has always been associated with lambing time and the blooming of the blackthorn tree, and in ancient Ireland it was one of four Gaelic festivals, the others known as Samhain, Beltain and Lughnasadh.
On the night before, the Gaelic goddess Brigid was said to visit virtuous households and bless their inhabitants. She represented fertility and the lighter half of the year, so her power to bring people from the dark season into the spring was very important. Families would make a special supper, typically including colcannon (mashed potatoes with kale), sowans (oat husks), dumplings (suet balls), barmbrack (fruited bread) and bannocks (flat bread).
At Butser Ancient Farm, we will be holding our own Imbolc event this Saturday 30th January from 1-4pm. We’ll hear stories from Jonathon Huet of Walk with Trees, poetry and singing around the roundhouse fire, with a light vegetarian meal included. Tickets are £12 and can be bought here. Join us to bid farewell to this grizzly winter weather and welcome in the warmer months!
Happy New Year!
Happy new year from everyone at Butser! We’re hoping we’ve left the drizzle behind us in 2015 as the new year has so far been cold and crisp, just how we like it! Over the festive break we were forced to shut the goats inside the piggery building to keep them warm, dry and away from their waterlogged paddock, and when they were finally released back into the fresh air they were full of joy. Here’s Bella eating a cantaloupe melon:
Elsewhere on the site our Saxon building is almost completed, with just the flooring and doors to finish in time for the warmer weather. Our barn owl is still making full use of the cosy rafters to eat her food, and had kindly left a mountain of pellets for us over the holidays. We are now hoping to invest in a trail camera to catch her on film and see what she’s up to!We will now also be gearing up for our Beltain festival over the next few months, with a huge wicker man to build, catering and music to organise and a whole farm to prepare. The oddly warm weather seems to have forced the wildlife into an early spring, and we’ve been enjoying listening to the song thrush singing in the conifer trees by the car park.We’re looking forward to what the new year will bring, and hope to see many new visitors among the familiar faces we welcome each year.
Piglet Party
Happy New Year to all our visitors, friends and readers! The staff have now returned from their well-deserved Christmas break, and the farm has kicked back into action.
There was one particularly exciting festive delivery over the Christmas holiday, as our three sows gave birth to piglets – seventeen of them! The sows arrived at Butser last summer and are a mixture of two breeds: two are Saddlebacks and came from Manor Farm in Bursledon, and one Oxford Sandy & Black was sent over from Bedales School in Petersfield. The piglets are a mixture of the two breeds and consequently some have spots while others have stripes.
They are currently sleeping inside their shelter (known as ‘Pig Palace’) under a heat lamp, but over the next few weeks they will start coming out into the open, playing in the mud, and meeting schoolchildren and members of the public. Towards the end of February, most of the piglets will be available to buy as wieners – if anyone would like to purchase one, please get in touch for more details. Scroll down for a video!
The farm and visitor centre are now open to visitors every weekday from 10am-4pm.
Would you like to work at Butser Ancient Farm? We’re hiring!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CAzPAJT6Xc
December at the Farm
We’ve almost reached the end of another eventful and successful year at Butser Ancient Farm, and site staff are now winding down for the festive season with a touch of annual maintenance, painting walls, waxing floors and consuming mince pies. The animals are not loving the wet, muggy weather we’ve been having, and everyone’s hoping the new year will bring crisp, frosty days with bright sunshine.Around the farm we have been attempting to combat the mud that has arisen from excess daily drizzle. The goats have been given a wooden platform in their goat-shack to help keep them away from the sludge, and the sheep have been split into three separate paddocks to ensure they all have enough to graze on. We’ve also been particularly excited by a new nocturnal visitor. A barn owl has been eating in our Saxon and Stone Age houses, and we’ve been dissecting pellets kindly left for us each morning! It’s not a good time to be a vole…
This afternoon we will be celebrating the winter solstice in two ways; from 2-3pm we will be exploring Saturnalia, also known as the ‘Roman Christmas’. The holiday was held to worship the deity Saturn, and was usually accompanied by sacrifices, a public banquet and carnival atmosphere in which social norms were inverted and masters waited on the tables of their servants!
After Saturnalia we will be welcoming children to our Tales of Winter Magic storytelling event, with famed storyteller Red Phoenix. Families can join us around the fire for hot chocolate while listening to festive tales in the Little Woodbury roundhouse. We still have some spaces available for this event, so if you fancy coming along at 3.30pm then please do!In other news, one of the farm directors Simon Jay received a rather good Christmas present last Friday, as he and his wife Chloe welcomed baby Meredith Emily into the world. She’ll be daubing walls and building villas before she can say ‘the Saxons are coming!’
The farm will reopen on Monday 11th January when we will once again be teaching hoards of local schoolchildren about prehistoric Britain and our delicious ancestry. In the meantime, all the staff at Butser Ancient Farm wish our visitors a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Delving into the Deep
Last week, Butser’s experimental archaeologist Ryan Watts visited the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, for a glimpse into new and exciting techniques used in marine archaeology. He met with Dr Sarah Rich and two other experts from the National Maritime Trust to put mesolithic wood samples through an imaging system known as Reflexive Transformation Imaging (RTI).The best way to imagine the process is like looking for an engraving on a wedding ring. The camera takes lots of flash photographs at different angles to pick up tiny marks on the surface, and this is put through bespoke software to make a 3D image. You can then move this 3D image around to check for things like tool marks, incisions and flaws.
The wood samples used in this process were from a site called Bouldnor Cliff, a submerged mesolithic settlement site off the Isle of Wight. Over the summer Ryan and Sarah used different mesolithic tools on wood to give a sample set to put through the RTI imaging. When comparing with these modern samples, the prehistoric woodworking samples showed a scale of technology that wasn’t seen for another 2,000 years in Britain. An exciting discovery!
One example of this technology is tangentially splitting the wood, which is something we haven’t seen until much later on in human history. If we can identify this for certain, it could possibly be evidence for the building of a logboat – this might be the earliest logboat in the country! Watch this space…
November at the Farm
It’s certainly been wet and windy at the farm this month, but the autumnal weather hasn’t stopped our schoolchildren visitors having lots of fun in the mud! The education team have worked really hard to keep spirits high in the drizzle, and the positive feedback we’ve received from teachers has proven you don’t need glorious sunshine to enjoy the outdoors and learn about the past. Here’s our staff weather report from last Friday…
Elsewhere on the farm, we’re adding a new chimney pot onto our Roman villa roof so that we can actually use the fireplace. We’re basing the pot on one excavated in Yorkshire, now on display in the Yorkshire Museum. We’ve commissioned Bursledon Brickworks to make the pot, and West Meon Pottery are making the flue. Below on the left is the original Yorkshire pot, and on the right is the start of the new chimney in our villa. It should be ready to use in the new year, so expect lots of delicious Roman cookery demonstrations this summer…
We have also finally found a new home for our male kid Comfrey! He was born at the end of the summer and is a truly handsome young thing, but unfortunately he has been getting rather promiscuous with his female relatives and needs a new home where he can live out his years as a stud. After a long search, he will be joining the team at Manor Farm in Bursledon. They are coming to collect him this week, and we will miss him rather a lot… Here he is as a newborn, compared with the fluffy lad he has become!
