Meet Mike the Carpenter

Ever fancied trying your hand at traditional carpentry or woodwork?This summer we have a brand new range of woodcraft workshops at Butser Ancient Farm with tutor Mike Bennett, who helped build our Saxon workshop and the wickerman for this year’s Beltain festival. You can learn to carve a spoon, weave a split hazel basket, carve wooden patterns, sharpen tools and carve a bowl, all using traditional skills and hand tools.We still have a couple of spaces left for our workshop on 13-14 May to make a split hazel basket, as well as our workshops in June, July and August. What better way to learn something new within the beautiful surroundings of the South Downs National Park?Feel free to watch this video where we talk to Mike about his workshops and the joy of working with sustainable green wood:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o47dW3__OVAIf you’d like to book on, simply visit our website here: www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/adult-workshops

The Coppiced Wickerman

Meet the woodland team building our 30ft wickerman for Beltain 2017!Ken and Mike use traditional woodland management techniques like coppicing, which is an ancient skills that creates fantastic habitats for wildlife and provides a sustainable building material for us to use. Essentially, deciduous trees are grown in copses and their branches are lopped off for materials; the stumps are then left to grow in rotation to produce more wood for the future.The wickerman design for 2017 is yet to be revealed, so be sure to book your tickets for Saturday 29 April and watch it go up in flames! Take a look at the video below to meet the build team and learn more about traditional woodland management. You can also book onto one of our carpentry workshops with Michael Bennett (as seen in the video), with the chance to carve a spoon, bowl or weave a wicker basket.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tG2knXtnAA

New Gift Shop Revealed

We're delighted to reveal our sparkling new gift shop, which was refurbished at the end of March 2017! With generous funds from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development Europe, the shop has been brightened up with new units, lights and shelves, as well as a sink for the coffee machine and a new display area.We welcome thousands of visitors and schoolchildren every year, many of whom visit the shop to buy souvenirs, browse our bookshelves for historical titles, or simply enjoy a cup of coffee overlooking the farm. We have struggled with poor lighting and lack of storage, but with the new refit we are now able to properly welcome visitors and use gift shop profits to raise more money for our archaeological projects.The shop also includes a dedicated freezer for selling our rare breed meat, as well as an interpretation area to display artefacts and information on prehistory.The site is now open seven days a week for our summer season, and it's the perfect time to enjoy spring in the rolling hills of the South Downs National Park. This Easter we have a riddle trail for families to take part in, as well as our flock of newborn lambs who spend their days frolicking on the hill. See you soon!

With thanks to the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development Europe.

Special Delivery

We've just had a huge load of thatching straw delivered for the roof our new Danebury roundhouse! It was certainly a complicated task for the driver to position the lorry at our gate, but then he is used to delivering to tiny rural cottages in the middle of nowhere...The thatch will now be moved undercover to protect it from the drizzle, and we will soon start bundling it up and securing it to the roundhouse roof. We still hope to have the new roundhouse finished by Beltain, so come along and have a look before watching the wickerman burn to the ground! It's the perfect way to welcome in the summer months with our local community. Book your tickets here!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjGAY5bNZwg

Building the Wickerman

With only a few weeks to go until our spectacular Beltain festival on Saturday 29 April, our wickerman is beginning to take shape! The team have been out in the spring mists this morning, having made hazel hurdle pieces off site and brought them in to fix onto the body.Ken, Darren and Mike are all professional woodworkers, with a range of skills including hurdle making, wood carving and treewrighting - you may recognise Darren as the mastermind behind our Saxon longhouse. They all work in sustainable local woodlands, using coppiced hazel and British wood to make our fantastic wickerman.As always, the design will not be revealed until the night of Beltain, so book your tickets today to see the final sculpture and watch it burn to the ground! The Beltain festival is an ancient Celtic celebration that welcomes in the warm summer months, and the wickerman is a way to please the gods so they will bless us with a good harvest.See you there!

Farewell Piggies!

It seems only yesterday that our Christmas piglets were born, but they have already weaned themselves off the sows and are ready to find new homes. The first five were bought today by Park Community School, a fantastic education facility in Havant that has its own smallholding for students to learn all about growing vegetables, looking after animals, and taking responsibility for the food they eat.Our piglets will be looked after and fed by the students and staff, and at some point in the future their meat will be used in the school kitchen to feed the students - a welcome change from turkey twizzlers, which are both unhealthy and unethical. Not only will the good meat be used in the kitchen, but the organs and offal will also be sent to the science department, where they will be used in biology lessons to teach the students about anatomy - waste not, want not! It's a great way to teach the children to value the food they eat, and will ensure the pigs are greatly cared for, just like they are here.

Mary's Villa Blog: Sandblasting

This is a project update for our Roman Villa Renovation work - read more about it here!At half past eight on Monday morning a large white van, towing a solid little trailer, trundled through the five barred gate, past the curious goats, through the Iron Age enclosure to the Roman villa. An auspicious day in the history of our Roman villa began, as Phase 1 of the Roman Renovations, paid for by the generous donations of Butser fans and supporters in last year’s crowdfunding campaign, was launched.Last week, the site team and volunteers worked tirelessly to clear the villa, spending hours sorting, storing and sweeping to prepare the way for sandblasterer, John Grant. John, Director of Airstrip Ltd in Titchfield, and son Toby, quickly extracted entrails of pipes and nozzles from the van. Donning a spacelike helmet, John entered the villa.  A man on a mission. A flick of a switch, and the compressor on the trailer burst into life with a hungry roar. The sandblasting had begun!Throughout the day, dust poured from the windows of the villa and everyone kept their distance letting man and monster do their work. John methodically worked his magic on the beams and ceiling of each room, clearing off the flaking limewash paint to reveal golden wooden beams beneath. After a day’s hard work, John and Toby had cleaned all the wood they could reach and retired for the day.The ground team then moved in, armed with brooms to sweep up all the sand before any moisture crept in, which would create a gluey mess on the floor. First day done and two more sandblasting days to go to bring the ceilings and beams to a gleaming finish. Once the sandblasting has been completed, the villa will be accessible again until the beginning of June, when renovations begin in earnest.Watch this space for renovation updates! 

The best thing since sliced bread?

Staff and volunteers have recently been getting stuck into a new project at the farm. While most of our experiments are based on archaeological and scientific research from across the industry, sometimes we just want to use our skills to make something fun. So this month we have been making a bread oven, ready to use this summer to cook food and melt pizzas on balmy evenings!

This kind of oven has been used for thousands of years to cook food, and while we are following the basic design of an ancient oven, we’ve added a modern twist by using fire bricks, which can reach a high temperature without cracking.

First we built a layer of sand and clay, then a second layer of sand, clay and straw (cob mixture), both of which help insulate the oven in different ways and keep the food hot.

All that remains is to wait for the clay to dry over the next few months, and by summer we’ll be having pizza parties every day!