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.

A Wild Goosefoot Chase

We have some rather exciting news for all the archaeobotanists out there! A few weeks ago we invited someone from the Species Recovery Trust to use our site for an intriguing plant-based experiment. A small patch of greenery outside our Neolithic longhouse is being used as an experimental area for growing Upright Goosefoot (Chenopodium urbicum), a plant that has existed in Britain since farming began when both the seeds and leaves were eaten. Its last known site was at a medieval farmstead in Essex, where it was last seen in 1995.Thanks to the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens, these plants are now growing fabulously in our Neolithic area! It’s all part of the Ancient Plants Project part-funded by Natural England, and is aiming to restore Upright Goosefoot and Darnel (an extinct grass of Roman origin) back to a network of working Iron Age and Roman sites across the UK.