From Hampshire to Dorset: Butser visits the ATC!

Last Thursday we had the privilege of visiting our friends at the Ancient Technology Centre in Cranborne, Dorset, to share ideas about archaeology, education and running an outdoor centre. We had a fantastic trip and learnt so much from the centre, managed by Luke and Pascale who are working incredibly hard to provide a brilliant educational facility for the people of Dorset and beyond.

We started with coffee, biscuits and a tour of the site, which looked beautiful in the bright winter sunshine. Below you can see the Viking longhouse and Iron Age roundhouse, which has been covered in turf. Inside the roundhouse the floor has been built in different levels, providing a truly unique atmosphere and a great venue for storytelling and parties!

The Viking House and Earth House

Inside the Earth House

The Viking house was a marvel to behold, with ancient runes carved into every timber and a blazing fire in the centre of the room. The ATC hold residential trips for children, who get the chance to stay overnight and live like a real Viking clan, chores and all! We then visited a Grubenhaus, a Roman water carrying device, another roundhouse, a Roman garden and a Mesolithic structure.

Inside the Viking House

Roman Water Lifting Machine

Mesolithic House

After a delicious lunch, we headed to the Roman forge to learn how to work Iron like the Romans. After a lot of tapping, whacking and bellowing, the team made one medieval ballista head – hoorah! Watch Mary have a go below:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U12h26UK-c&t=9s

A fine ballista head!

Thanks so much to Luke and Pascale for an inspiring day out – we look forward to welcoming them to the farm very soon! You can find out more about the Ancient Technology Centre by visiting their website here. 

Holly, Jolly Christmas

The days have finally darkened and winter is upon us! At the farm we’ve been eating mince pies and listening to festive tunes, and the site is now being prepared for a short sleep over Christmas while we take a break for holidays and maintenance. Why not join us for our two Christmas family events? We’ll be celebrating Saturnalia – the Roman Christmas on Friday 16th December and Tales of Winter Magic on Monday 19th December – join us for two unique festive experiences!

Our pregnant pigs have now moved back to Piggy Palace, their luxury winter cabin that keeps out the damp and cold. We’re expecting them to give birth any time from now until January, so there is lots of straw available for them to make nests with, and we are keeping a close eye on their behaviour to check for early signs of labour. Here’s to more little pigs in 2017!

A few weeks ago, our goats Sorrel and Yarrow went away on holiday to spend some quality time with their new boyfriend, a billy goat called Gandalf. We’re hoping they’ll have such a great time that in a few months we’ll have two new baby goats! Our two remaining goats Bella and Áine have been enjoying a little peace and quiet, as Sorrel and Yarrow are quite boisterous and squabblesome, rather like drunken aunts at Christmas dinner. Nevertheless, we all miss them and are looking forward to them being back together in the New Year.

The gift shop is fully stocked for Christmas gifts, with traditional honey mead to warm our hearts, natural soaps, handspun wool skeins, stocking fillers and homegrown meat for Christmas dinner. Visit us this week for last minute gifts, or take a look at our shop page here for more information.

A few fires have still been burning the roundhouses, as we’ve welcome the last remaining schoolchildren before Christmas. We’re looking forward to January when we will once again be travelling back in time with school groups, allowing them to experience first hand what it would have been like to live in Stone Age, Iron Age, Roman and Saxon Britain. We still have a few spaces left for January and February bookings, so please get in touch if you are interested in bringing your school to Butser.

We will be closed for Christmas from Tuesday 20 December 2016 – Monday 9 January 2017. Take a look at our Events and Workshops programmes for 2017 – we’ll see you in January for an exciting new year!

Back from Extinction

As part of our ongoing work with the Species Recovery Trust, our site is being used as an experimental area for Darnel (Lolium temulentum), a plant that arrived in Britain in Roman times and one that was originally considered a serious pest of crops, mentioned both in the Bible and Shakespeare. In the twentieth century, seed cleaning technology and the increased use of pesticides meant Darnel was exterminated from the wild, and up to now has been extinct in the UK. However, we are delighted to announce that the seeds planted at Butser have germinated and we now have a small crop of Darnel growing on site!

The plant has a fascinating history, particularly with regard to medieval myths surrounding witchcraft. The seeds contain a mild toxin if eaten, and can also act as a natural host for the ergot fungus. Ergot causes a wide range of symptoms including temporary hallucinations, and an outbreak in Massachusetts may have been behind the Salem witchcraft trials!

This particular project has used a small number of seeds collected from Inis Meain off the coast of western Ireland, and aims to bring the plant back from extinction and into a small number of trial sites like Butser Ancient Farm. For more information visit www.speciesrecoverytrust.org.uk

Three Little Piggies?

Regular visitors to the farm will know that in the summer months, we usually have a family of pigs tumbling about in the mud behind our Roman villa. This year was no exception, and we currently have two Saddlebacks and one Oxford Sandy and Black… But that’s not all! On Saturday we welcomed Michaela from Tedfold Cottage Farm in west Sussex, who carried out an ultrasound on our pigs to see if they were pregnant. The results? Not one, not two, but all THREE of our pigs are pregnant with a litter each of piglets! We aren’t sure exactly when they will be born, but we should hopefully be welcoming them sometime before the end of January. If you would like to say hello to our new arrivals, be sure to make a winter visit in February or March before they grow too big! Why not join us for our Imbolc festival on February 4th?

Watch our exciting announcement as it happened on Facebook Live:

Seven Nights in a Saxon House

Thanks to Beatrice for writing this beautiful piece about her experience living in our Saxon house for a week. She joined us earlier in the summer as a student of archaeology from the University of Reading, and slept and ate in our new Saxon house dressed in authentic costume.Life in the Saxon hall has been an ultimately new experience, unlike any other previously encountered. Time spent there feels less stressed, no matter the activity and the simplicity of routine is relaxing. The central fire keeps the hall fully heated, even into the darker hours. After a day or so, a ‘lived in’ feeling develops, bringing a warmth unrelated to the fire or candles. Waking up in the morning to light streaming in through the ceiling vents is an amazing feeling, and its hard not to think back to hundreds of years ago, as our ancestors woke themselves in the same way.The house itself is beautiful, and it has been wonderful to be lucky enough to spend the time that I have in it. The clothing is surprisingly freeing, despite long skirts and leg wraps. This maybe comes from how comfortable they are to wear, and how adaptable and easily alterable they prove to be. Pride can be taken in appearance whilst simultaneously losing the concern over such things as body type, current fashions, and getting clothing dirty. Similarly, bare feet hold no issue and remain surprisingly clean due to a lack of modern pollutants. The ritual that comes from routinely placing similar clothing on, and combing and plaiting hair for the start of the day actually becomes calming, and surprisingly comforting.Whilst in the house I’ve eaten, and drunk, surprisingly well. A lack of processed foods lays way to stews and homemade breads. Fruit and nuts become snack food and act as a bulk on top of simple meals such as bread, cheese and honey. The fire gives off far less smoke than imagined, and it mostly rises well above head height. In the evenings, candles in brackets on the walls light the hall surprisingly well, and the atmosphere is amazing, no matter the number of people inside. Music enhances this, and even if just talking, or sat in silence, it feels different and special.It’s going to be odd leaving it all – dressing in modern clothing and no longer relying on the fire as the backbone to daily life. I think I will miss it: It is oddly easy to slip into life here, and having to venture back out of it feels like a strange and alien concept.

The Expanded Log Boat

Our favourite thing about the summer holiday isn’t just children’s trails and sunshine! Each year we welcome students from universities around the country, to take part in an experimental archaeology project for around five weeks. This year we have welcomed Ollie and Lewis from Cardiff University, who are working with our residential archaeologist Ryan to build an expanded log boat.The boat is based on a small Germanic vessel dating back to 400AD, excavated to the north of Stockholm in Sweden. Archaeologists think it would have seen use in the Viking Age. The boat they are building is based on the Björk boat, a replica recreation by Hanus Jensen and Rasmus Budde Jensen on display at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. Its bottom was an expanded lime tree with added boards of pine wood, its frame spruce wood, and the added boards were fastened with iron nails. From this experiment, the Jensens learnt that lime wood is likely to split when cut very thinly, as it is a soft wood.During this experiment, the team will be using authentic tools from the era such as axes and adzes, to find out if tool marks remain and/or change the log boat after its expansion. Feel free to visit them on their working site this summer, which is in between the Saxon house and the pig pen, and see how the boat is developing!

The Big Butterfly Count

Seeing as the farm is brimming with so much wildlife, we are always looking for opportunities to conserve it and protect its future. One of the ways in which we do this every year is to take part in the Big Butterfly Count with the charity Butterfly Conservation, which has taken place this year between 15th July to 7th August. With conservation always in need of extra funding, one of the best ways to help protect wildlife is through ‘citizen science’ – that’s where normal individuals like you and me help keep track of what wildlife there is and where, so that scientists can analyse the data and work out ways to increase those numbers.We attempted a count this morning but the sun wasn’t particularly encouraging and we didn’t find many… So this afternoon we went out again in full sunshine, and what a transformation! We spotted five gatekeepers, four red admirals, fifteen cabbage whites, one comma, four peacocks, one brimstone, one meadow brown and one large white. The area we chose is the old piggery – the pigs used to live there last year but now it is full of wildflowers and the odd pumpkin plant grown from the kitchen scraps we threw in for the pigs!If you would like to get involved with the count, visit www.bigbutterflycount.org and get spotting!Red AdmiralCabbage WhitePeacockComma

Goaty Celebrations

Last weekend we spent a wonderful day at the Weald & Downland Museum in Singleton, who were hosting their annual Rare & Traditional Breeds show to celebrate the nation’s most rare and beautiful breeds of livestock. This year we decided to enter one of our English goats called Sorrel, a year-old goatling who is both pretty and mischievous.We spent the morning watching an array of colourful animals strut around the show rings, including sheep, cows, pigs and pygmy goats. When it came to our turn, Sorrel behaved better than ever and impressed the judge so much that we won third place! We came home with a lovely green rosette and lots of goaty pride.Looking after our rare and traditional breeds is important to us at Butser, as anyone who has seen our four-horned Manx Loaghtans will know. They are an Iron Age breed dating back thousands of years, and have beautiful wool that is reflected in their name ‘Loaghtan’, meaning mousey-brown in Manx.One of our close friends Janet Brown is a goat breeder and regularly helps us with our own goat herd when we need expert advice. She won Best of Breed for her English goat, a breed of which there are only a handful in the UK. The English Goat Breeders’ Association was formed in the 1920s and is dedicated to the preservation of this special breed. Please have a look at their website here, as well as the Rare Breeds Survival Trust here.