Covid-19 led to some changes of plan from our original schedule for 2020!
February 2020 was not a good time to begin a project based on homeschooling through the medium of going out....
The original schedule went:
February - The Ice Age (West Midlands Safari Park)
March - The Ice Age/Old Stone Age (Cresswell Crags)
March - The Middle Stone Age (Starr Carr artefact @ University of Cambridge Museums)
April - The New Stone Age/Bronze Age (Stonehenge/Avebury area)
May - The Bronze Age (Flag Fen)
June - The Iron Age (Family Warrior Camp @ Butser Ancient Farm)
July/August - The Romans (Vindolandia Festival @ Hadrian's Wall area) and (Veralanium Museum St. Albans and Welwyn Roman Bath)
October - Recap and Anglo-Saxons (British Museum inc Sutton Hoo treasure) and (West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village)
but the revised post-covid schedule that we actually followed went:
February - The Ice Age (West Midlands Safari Park)
March - The Ice Age/Old Stone Age (Cresswell Crags)
July - New Stone Age (Neolithic)/Bronze Age/Iron Age/Romans (Avebury/Stonehenge/Uffington/Old Sarum/Fishbourne/Butser Ancient Farm)
August - Romans
September - Romans (Ermine St Guard at Stanwick Lakes/Wellingborough)
The differences were:
Flag Fen may have closed completely - Vivacity who run it have collapsed and at present it is very unclear what will happen about Peterborough Museum and Flag Fen. This is quite sucky as there aren't many Bronze Age everyday life sites about! Dover Museum in Kent does have a preserved boat but I have resisted going to Kent to see one when I know there are several close by in Cambridgeshire. Perhaps by the time you read this there will be an amazing new Bronze Age visitor centre in Cambridgeshire covering Must Farm and Flag Fen together.
The University of Cambridge museums were shut and are reopening slowly in the summer, but too late to really go back to the Starr Carr antler headpiece, we have moved on by now (we will visit it at some point as the museum is local to us, but not as part of this sequence).
I considered adding in Grimes Graves (stone age flint mine) but that will not be reopening in 2020.
I very regretfully cancelled our visit to Vindolandia as the Roman event we had been going to see was cancelled and it would have meant a long time on public transport in a recently-pandemic world for some roman ruins, when there are roman ruins a lot closer than that in Southern England which we can visit by car. If I was more able for long distance walking along the wall itself or we were planning to bring a car so we could visit all the various different forts it would still be a worthwhile archaeological trip, but that wasn't what we had arranged in this case.
Butser Ancient Farm reopened (part time) in July but the "Warrior Camp" sleepover/outdoor pursuits event on the site was cancelled.
I extended what was going to be a long weekend in Wiltshire doing stone circles to an entire Prehistory Week so we added in Uffington White Horse (which was originally going to be a possible drive-by view across the valley, not a stop with Wayland's Smithy included), Old Sarum and Fishbourne.
I was disappointed to lose Flag Fen as it is such a key site archaeologically and had boats and everyday life to complement the religious monuments. I was also disappointed to lose the immersion in physical tasks like fire-lighting/cooking on fires, sleeping out and crossing water in the Iron Age environment at Butser and the spectacle of the Roman legions at the big festival on Hadrian's Wall (even though we might get to see a few of the Ermine St Guard later in the year).
Comments