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