Roman around

A possible project near Dorchester, where MD club members found some R/B artefacts. DDCAG may be able to do some geophiz work here and see if there are any hidden buildings on the site as well as the extant round barrows, of which there are many. More news later.

SOS - Save Our Sites!

The South Dorset Ridgeway Landscape Partnership held a morning introduction to monitoring and recording ‘at risk’ monuments in our landscape today.

Many of our monuments are being de-scheduled by Historic England at the moment, which means that it is important that volunteers go out and monitor the state of our many round and long barrows, hillforts and stone circles for example and record any problems. This may include animal burrows, natural erosion, stock erosion (through grazing or just trampling) or anything that has an impact on the monument.

The project is running until July 2018 and the SDRLP are looking to have the first six month results starting now and hope that monitoring can continue after that with extra funding. All the paperwork needed to do the recording will be sent to us, including maps.

It is suggested that DDCAG could take on an area and monitor it over the six months and this area will be sent to me very soon, so if anyone wants to be put on a rota please get in touch. We can then have a meeting of the volunteers and go through the process and paperwork. This is an important project for us to be involved in, especially for those that cannot or don’t want to dig. The only criteria are to be able to walk in the landscape and not mind getting a bit muddy!