(About three millennia later.)

I posted almost exactly three years ago about my first visit to Avalon Archeology‘s site at the Avalon Marshes Centre. (The Avalon Marshes themselves are very extensive, including, as I have just seen from the map, my own home. The areas used to be known as the Somerset Levels, which, for geomorphological reasons, are strictly just a strip at the western edge of the county, between the sea and roughly the M5.) Since then I had been following progress via their blog site.

At that visit, the roundhouse had been in its very early stages. Even complete, in the Iron Age these houses only lasted some ten years or so anyway. This ‘modern’ one had been neglected, with other works taking priority, and the volunteers taking part every Wednesday in this experimental archeology project had had to start again, and on a somewhat different design. (As Richard Brunning said, if this one lasted more than ten years, their experimental archeology had gone wrong!)

Fortunately last Saturday the weather was quite unlike that of my previous visit, when it had been very cold indeed: the sun was shining and I was actually overdressed. I was there for the official opening of the project’s second* version of the Iron Age roundhouse, by a celebrity from BBC Radio Somerset. I was handed this very well-thumbed guide to the site when I arrived, but in the event did not look at it much at all. However the cover usefully serves to show what is to be seen there: the roundhouse, the dining room of a Roman villa, a Viking trading ship, a Saxon nobleman’s longhall, and an excavation hut. All, bar the ship and the hut, were created by volunteer enthusiasts, experimenting, under South West Heritage Trust supervision, with various construction techniques and materials, to find out what might have been used originally.

I arrived 20 minutes or so before the official opening time, so went inside the Roman dining hall, keen to see in particular the finished mosaic floor.

I did sit on the couch, intending to read the booklet, but soon got chatting, most serendipitously, with a woman there already. She turned out to be on the committee of the Glastonbury Antiquarian Society (a local history society, with its roots in the 19th century) from which I had not heard for a very long time, while still paying my sub by standing order. I now realise that I had changed my email, the old one dying the moment I had changed. I think she was even more delighted than I was that we had met, because she recognised my email as one of two that had kept bouncing!

The crowds were gathering to watch the opening. The Viking ship had acquired a mast since I was there last.

A woman was inviting any onlooker to make a pinch pot, into which soil and a bean would be planted, to take home. I declined.

After a few short speeches, the celebrity, Charlie I think his name was, hacked the rope asunder. This following picture looks posed, but is not. I thought I had caught the precise micro-second when his (French, mediaeval!) axe hit the rope, but I was a smidgeon out. And for once I regretted the sun. The light was too bright to get the necessary blurriness to capture the movement. (I know, I could have thought in advance about camera settings, …)

An earlier version of this gathering of some of the volunteers and others involved in the project did not have one single woman in it!

I think this woman was spinning wool.

In two of the last three photos, there are people in the background to the right taking not the slightest interest in these proceedings, but taking an intense interest in the trees in front of them. I went over to find out why. They were, they told me, hoping to see a brambling known to be in the vicinity, and a couple of redpolls.

It was time to explore the roundhouse.

Outside was an ancient axe enthusiast. He had made several experimental ones, and and had concluded that the almost unchanged axe design over the millennia was one of the oldest and most successful in the history of toolmaking. In response to my question, he said that there was no evidence that axe heads had ever been made of bone, but they had turned out to be extremely sharp – if not long-lasting!

This was just lying against the roundhouse. I asked him what it was. He said it was his attempted replica of the back pack beside the Iceman, Ötsi, by whom I remember being fascinated when he was discovered in 1991.

We were invited unto the Saxon longhall to hear a story. Some of us accepted.

I looked round the building afterwards and found that, unsurprisingly, the hall had many more accoutrements than before, all made by the volunteers.

Finally I went into the tin shack, sorry Excavation Hut, believed to be the oldest such in the world, and spent a few minutes there looking at a video about one of the local lake villages. The principal ones are Glastonbury and Meare.

Another pleasant way of passing a morning.

* ‘second attempt’. There had actually been previous roundhouses on the site. When I arrived in Somerset, nearly 15 years ago, I had passed the dilapidated constructions and wondered what they were. I have since learned about the Peat Moors Centre, closed in 2009.