Late Arrivals

At long last the ewes have started lambing. They were due to start lambing on the 8th February and usually there would have been a few early starters but not this year.

Hopefully now they will be in full swing. If only the weather was a bit warmer then the grass would be growing and the ewes could be turned out onto lush green pasture, but as it is at the moment they will need to stay indoors for a few days longer than normal. This will make the lambs stronger and able to keep themselves warmer during the cold nights. If you want to come and see what happens in the lambing sheds we have arranged our lambing day again this year. Tractor and trailer rides will be leaving the village hall in Overbury on the 11th April 2010, between 10 am and 3pm. Adults will need to pay £5 but all the children get in for free. Billy and Michaela will be serving up delicious Overbury lamb Casserole in the village hall from about 12. Get there early before it all goes! Check out the farm website http://www.overburyfarms.co.uk for up to date details. I look forward to seeing you all there!

X-Ray Spectacular

Darren has very kindly sent me the Geo-Physics resulting scans for a couple of the fields on the farm. The field shown here has got some very interesting features and it was the first field that Gordon dug trenches in earlier in the week. The black and white line through the middle of the fields is a crop mark, shown up in aerial photographs over the years. Adjacent to this on the right is the bunded area uses as a coral (see other blog) The line is actually a trackway. The geo-fizz info is shown by the red and blue areas to the right of the trackway and show the actual ditches and mounds of earth and lots of small pits and other features. It is great to see that these areas are still in tact after years of farming practises and we're now looking forward as to how we can protect them for future generations.

On Your Mark's, Get Set........Dig

Monday morning saw the return of the Worcester Archaeology Team to continue the assessment for the COSMIC trial. Gordon was pressed into service on the frosty ground to dig a series of trenches over known archaeology. We know where the archaeology is from aerial photographs, finds and latterly through soil scanning. The scanning could pick out all sorts of trackways, bund's and ditches, very interesting stuff, honestly it was. The team on the ground, lead by Darren, soon swooped in, after Gordon had made the delicate slices with the CAT bucket and armed with trowels, shovels, hoes and plastic bags they started cleaning the scrape and assessing the slight changes in soil colour indicating where these pre-Roman features were once a hive of activity.

On this site we found an old ditch and bank used as a livestock coral to keep the stock contained within and the wild predators out. Adjacent to this feature was a small pit where iron-age man would have dug the soil to find gravel, which would have been washed off and used as floor material in the nearby mud huts. These pits would then have been filled in with the loose material and other items of waste. Another site uncovered a trackway high up on Bredon Hill, a route that people, oxen and carts would have used as they crossed from settlement to settlement. More digging is anticipated either when the soil dries out a little or we get more frosty weather.

A lovely sunset from the top of Bredon Hill taken a few weeks ago showing the lone ash.