Training Excavation

Monday 16^th - Friday 27^th August 2010

9.00 am - 5.00 pm

Tutors: Mark Roberts, Richard Morris

The excavations will focus on discovering, recording and characterising traces of a long outbuilding that appears on maps from 1789 and disappears by the end of the 19th century.

The 1789 survey, the Tithe Map and first edition of the Ordnance Survey show a building that lay aslant across the south-western boundary of the site as it exists today. However, the maps disagree as to its exact position, while the line of the boundary has itself been adjusted, and none gives enough detail to suggest its function.

In August 2009 the Trust undertook a small exploratory excavation to locate the building, using methods and with results about which you can read in our reports page.

Work will resume in August 2010, with the aim of answering three questions: what kind of building was it, structurally? What was it for?  When did it come into existence?

The work is open to anyone over the age of 16 who would like to gain experience of archaeological excavation. Beginners are welcome.

As before, the dig will be led by Dr Mark Roberts (Institute of Archaeology UCL) and Professor Richard Morris.

Application form and details for university students and adults.

People of Blackden

Saturday 11^th September 2010
 10.30 am - 4.00 pm

Tutor: Richard Morris

This course will introduce you to interdisciplinary ways to reconstruct past lives.  We shall find connections between objects, text, image and landscape and learn how to trace the stories of people back to before the age of writing.

We shall see how written records about Toad Hall's past occupants – their wills, names, relationships, occupations, arguments - things that they made, used or wore, the fabric of the hall and evidence in the land itself all combine in ways that can illuminate their lives.

The day will culminate in disclosure of the scientific dating of Blackden's oldest-known occupant so far.