Warrior Camps

Over the summer we, once again, ran a series of Warrior Camps at the farm and are pleased to announce that the new recruits passed their warrior training with flying colours!!

Each day involved a series of outdoor adventures at the farm, inspired by the old; making and cooking over a fire, building a raft, hunting for clues, constructing a shelter and much more!

Our Warrior Camp 1 was aimed at children aged 8-14 and our more advanced Warrior Camp 2, for those aged 10 - 14, involved a chance to stay overnight at the farm! All under the expert tutorage of Keith Page MBE and David Norris.

We’ll be running more warrior camps next year so keep an eye on our website for the date and ticket release!

Wildlife Watch - The Striped Lychnis moth at Butser

Dark Mullein Flowers

Over the years Butser Ancient farm has become a site of great environmental importance. Situated amongst forests and fields, with our ancient farming methods and wild hedgerows we have attracted various wildlife and rare species. One of these rare species being the Striped Lychnis moth which has increased in number greatly over the past few years in particular due to our Dark Mullein, a tall wild flowering perennial plant, with yellow flowers and purple stamen. The striking caterpillars feed on the yellow flowers and can be found throughout July and August.  The fully grown larvae crawl off and find a safe place to pupate in the ground nearby and emerge the following spring. 7 Striped Lychnis larvae were found at Butser Ancient Farm in 2017 and there were 78 in July 2018 so let’s see if we can keep this upward trend going!

If you have a passion for wildlife and want to encourage Striped Lychid moths into your garden follow these tips!

1. Do not cut Dark Mullein plants between May and September.

2. Leave unmanaged areas for wild flowers to flourish

3. Disturb the soil periodically or cut areas in the winter to stop them getting overgrown.

4. Shake seed out from the old flowers in the autumn or winter.

Striped Lychnis Moth caterpillar

If you live locally to the site you could collect seed with permission and grow it in your garden, visit the Butterfly Conservation website  or contact Fiona at Butterfly Conservation for more advice;  fhaynes@butterfly-conservation.org

Mosaic project update!

Week 8  of the Butser Sparsholt Mosaic project - an update from projects coordinator Trevor Creighton.

We are two months into the Butser Mosaic project and everything is going well and gathering pace. As we move into week 9 we should have ‘squared the circle’ by completing the decorative corner patterns around our central, circular designs. These four…. let’s call them ‘corner pieces’ (although, as they are around a circle, that’s a bit dodgy)…. consist of two separate ‘motifs’. One we’ll call a lotus and the other a scallop shell.The two motifs are diagonally opposite each other in the original mosaic. One recent head-scratcher was figuring out which one goes on the left and which the right as you walk into the room. There are a few photographs of the orientation of the mosaic in the original excavation but, on close inspection, a couple of these appear to have been reversed when printed into the reference books! Fortunately, we were able to reference the monograph – the book, published by the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society – authored by David E. Johnston and Johnathan Dicks. This features beautiful illustrations by David Neal, including a plan of the villa with the orientation of our mosaic. Interestingly, David Neal, along with Stephen Cosh, produced a four-volume survey of Romano-British mosaics with hand-painted copies of the majority of known examples. One key reason for doing this was the inadequacy of photography to accurately record detail…. now we know why.

We have also had two new recruits join the team: Linden and Richard, both keen field archaeologists. Now they get to experience what it’s like to lay the things they dig up!

Once our scallops and lotuses are complete we will have laid around 4 square metres of mosaic. We have done a few back of the envelope calculations: about 35,000 tesserae laid and 500 kg of mortar mixed by hand and laid (ouch). The next phase is to move on to the 4-strand guilloche. Here’s a photo of the mock-up version…. only 2 square metres of that to lay!

Here's a video showing our progress!

Summer of Science and Sorcery draws to a close

As our Summer of Science and Sorcery draws to a close we're looking back on all the fun, crafts, demonstrations and experiments that have happened this summer across the farm.Here are a few photos from our themed activity days to share, we'll add more as they come in!Awesome Earth - July 31st 2018

Fearsome Fire!

It's been great fun at the farm this summer as we explore ancient crafts, skills and knowledge through our Summer of Science and Sorcery.Heres a few photos from our Fearsome Fire day last week - we had blacksmithing, fire-lighting, charcoal drawing, bead making, cooking and more!Thanks to Eleanor Sopwith for the fantastic photos! Next Tuesday we'll be celebrating powerful plants with a range of activities from 10 till 4. Normal admission applies.

Summer activities are hotting up!

As we prepare for our Fearsome Fire day as part of our Summer of Science and Sorcery here's a look back at the activities this summer so far.The holidays kicked off with our Festival of Archaeology on the  24th July with a day full of demonstrations, crafts, digging, finds identification and more. We had a brilliant day in the sunshine with lovely crowds joining us to find out more about Butser and archaeology. Here's a selection of our favorite photos from the day...

 

Mosaic project update week 3/4

Trevor Creighton, projects co-ordinator gives a further update on the mosaic progress;The mosaic is moving along beautifully. In week 3 we completed the wave pattern and a dry layout of the ‘swastika meander’ – the next pattern in the design.The swastika is an incredibly widely distributed symbol, across time and the globe. It appears in Bronze Age art, in Hindu, Buddhist and Jane religious representations and in Greco-Roman art (among many others). It is almost everywhere a positive symbol. It was only in the 20th Century that it became associated with the horrors of Nazism.The meander is a more straightforward pattern to lay (yay!) and we have been able to make quick progress. If you would like to see a little movie that reviews our progress over the past 4 weeks click on the link above in the heading strap – ‘Butser Mosaic – The Movie’Here’s a photograph of the progress to date…We've been making a timelapse of our progress so far; if only it were this fast in reality!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUSRvalo_4sWe also have a dedicated Butser mosaic blog here where you can follow our progress. 

Mosaic project update

Trevor Creighton, projects co-ordinator gives an update on the progress of our mosaic project...We have taken some big strides in week 2. In the picture below you can see Emily, Maria and Jess hard at work finishing off the ‘second feature’ in our mosaic: concentric rings of black, white and red tesserae encircling the central ‘flower’ motif. It grows and grows!The job is still rather painstaking but we hope it will speed up as we go. One sticking point – literally – has been the mortar we have been using to bed our tesserae in – and ‘stick’ the thing to the floor! We are about to start working with a revised mortar, much closer to the ‘Roman’ original and based on quicklime. It’s not as strong as the mortar we have been using but, hopefully, it’s a lot easier to work with.A huge thank you must, again, go to all of the people involved in the project. A special thanks to Arthur for making the timber formers we are using to hold the mortar in place as it sets.