Naquada

Yesterday we went to the Iron Age and Roman settlement of Calleva Atrebatum, located in the north of Hampshire in the parish of Silchester, roughly midway between the modern towns of Basingstoke and Reading.

Silchester is unique because, unlike most large Roman towns in Britain, it was completely abandoned. The defensive walls are still surviving, in some places still more than 4 metres high.

Within the walls there seems, at first, to be nothing but fields, a church and a single house, once a farm. In fact you can see (from the ground and the sky) the clearly defined outlines of the houses in the fields

The ‘Town Life’ project is a research and teaching excavation of one part of the large Roman town at Silchester run by Reading University. The site’s open to the public during the excavations, but twice a year they run an open day.

The number of finds they uncover daily is amazing, the below shows what they uncovered during the morning we were there.

Oyster shells, Pots, Slate, bones, and the best bit about the open day is that you can pick up and handle all the finds and be talked through them by the archeology team.

One really amazing find was a broken (but pretty much complete) floor tile.

You can see in the above photo the wet slate was left drying outside, and at some point a roman walked over it in his hobnailed boot. You can see the clear foot print in the center right of the tile. Then a fox walked through it (bottom right of the tile), a cat then crossed the slate (top left of the roman foot print) and a dog walked over it (just below the big toe of the foot print)

Right in the top left you’ll see some semi circular drag marks, these are the makers finger prints as he dragged his fingers through the clay.

The amount of CBM (ceramic building material) is huge, and unless its particularly diagnostic (like the floor tile above) it tends to be discarded by the team, huge spoil piles of CBM lay round the site, and on open days you can leave with some if you’d like. I made off with two pieces of roman floor tile dating anywhere from about AD 43 to the fifth century when its widely believed Calleva Atrebatum was abandoned.

Digging closes next week, but starts its six week session again next year..

We put more food out tonight, and it seems that the starting time for feeding for our hedgehogs starts about 10pm.

Tonight we saw the first black shape darting down the patio towards the food. After about 5 minutes he darted off as a larger hedgehog headed in for food.

According to ‘abouthedgehogs.com’ your lucky to have one, let alone 2, or 3 or 4 as it seems in our case.

The smaller hedgehog hid behind the strawberry pot while the larger one fed on the food and took some of the water we’ve put out.

After a while the second one wandered off, as yet another even smaller dark shape headed down the patio towards the saucers of food.

At this rate we’re going to have the fattest hedgehogs in the neighbourhood!!

Well, after discussions with the vet it seems that the new hedgehog isnt quite ready for rehoming yet, so our resident ones going to have to wait for a bit before he gets a new friend.

Although we have a massive garden, each hedgehog can roam up to 10 gardens, not quite sure on what size of garden you base that but it means that we’re going to have to count and control the number of spikey vistors to make sure we dont over populate!

It also seems that Custard Creams (surprise surprise) are not staple food for hedgehogs, somewhat like beer and cigarettes I guess!!

So we’ve invested in a catering size bag of Spikes Dinner. Spikes dinner is a specially made alternative to cat food (the correct stuff to feed your garden hedgehog!). It comes in a nice dried form that means it lasts longer and doesnt have that gross gone off meat smell of your house hold cat dinner!

Not to forget the fox, We also got a bag of fox and badger food (Since I’m guessing custard creams are good for them either!)

We’ll see if theres an uproar tonight when we swap biscuits for pellets!!!

Last week we took a sick hedgehog down to the local animal rescue vet, unfortuantly it died a few days later. We know we have hedgehogs in our garden (along with a fox) so we decided to put out some Custard Cream Biscuits out for them, since we’re reliabily told that the hedgehogs love them (probably need to check that one with the animal people but..!)

It seems they do, Tuesday night we put out 5 and they were gone the next morning. last night we put out another 4 and sat and waited.

Around midnight the little guy wandered up again and started munching his way through the biscuits.. He didnt seem bothered by us and sat eating for about 30 minutes..

I’m about to go and check with the animal center on another sick hedgehog they have that we may be able to rehome in the garden and check on the custard cream nutrition content!!!

Today starts 2 weeks of complete disconnection from the mothership

No email, no phone, no pda, nothing…

Its going to give me time to start sorting out all the things I just haven’t done, all the things I mean to do, and all the things I should do..

Ok, when does the outside rambling type person meet the geeky GPS type of person?? When you start GEOcaching…

Geocaching is new kind of pass time for GPS users who kind of want to use their GPS for something more than finding the local chip shop.

The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on websites. thankfully it doesnt seem to be ‘just’ a American thing… there are caches over here in the UK too!!

So how does it work? Well in simple terms, you get a GPS position from a website like GeoCaching.com and go hunt the cache. Once found, a cache may provide you with a wide variety of rewards. All the finder is asked to do is if they get something, they should try to leave something for the cache.

So what’s the big deal? You have the coordinates so you know where it is. Seems pretty easy. Apparently it is deceptively easy. It’s one thing to see where an item is, it’s a totally different story to actually get there.

(more…)

I used to fly Hot Air Balloons, this is me taking ‘flying blind’ up over hungerford a few years ago

Until you’ve taken a balloon up, you dont fully appreciate just how quiet it is up at over 2000 feet and above. and just how good the views get..

and just how deadly quiet it is..

Tonight I hunted through old photos, and ended up scanning quite a few..

Its great looking back over things you’ve almost forgotten..

Top of the world ready to snowboard down… Mat, Jim, Greg and Me.. great huh ??

It snowed heavily today… which made me think about what we were planning for the summer..

Knock down our old bar-b-q and replace it with a 100cm diameter Mexican Fire pit

Mayantex sell these little puppies for

Well back home at last… Had a great week and a bit in Boston at the Ascential Kickoff 2004.. but its great to be home..

Jet Lag and pure exhaustion means I’m not going to post anything really, but there were a few highlights of the week. One was two awards I was given (which I’ll post a bit on later) but the main highlight had to be the ride on Jean-Claudes Segway that we was given as an award…

if you havent got on one, and you get the chance, hop on.. they are really just SO cool…