Hmph

[bunn]

I have definitely spent MORE than enough time this week, pretending to be a human being.  MORE than enough.   The illusion is, frankly, wearing thin. 

I did a hedge survey course today.  2 injured out of 18 course attendees during a short walk along a muddy lane, 1 of them needing X-rays seems like some sort of record.   Clumsy sods these human beings. 

There was free food!  Including excellent carrot cake!   And I learned to identify hedge bedstraw, and how to tell a spindle tree when it's not fruiting.   I feel I learned less about landscape archaeology, as mostly that section was strong on  'stuff we can't be sure about'.  But that is a form of learning of a sort. 

Comments

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Okay. Here's my suggestion.

Take one large 21 ton excavator with flat-toothed ditching bucket. Park alongside hedge/bank, hack a big hole in it (say 2m in extent, extending into the middle of the bank, record internal strata and hopefully get some charcoal from underneath the wall/hedge which can be dated and which will hopefully give you a medieval (or earlier!) date.

Oops. I think that'd go down like a lead balloon, since it's definitely in the sledgehammer to crack a nut category of archaeological investigation.

ANYONE would fall for the free cake lark, surely. I mean, I'd even be tempted to jet down from here by the lure of free cake...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

LOL. If I come across anyone who happens to be cutting through a hedgebank to make a new gate (requires exactly the ingredients you have suggested) I shall bear this advice in mind!

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised they haven't tried doing it this way before. And on a regular basis. If you can get RC dates from the core of the wall itself and the old ground surface beneath it, then you're onto a winner. Especially if you repeat the exercise in a variety of locations.

Gosh. I feel another Ph.D. coming on... On second thoughts, perhaps not...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Possibly they have? I only have a 1-day course to go on, I have no idea how much was left out. I'm just going on having observed in my perambulatings that sometimes, big new gate-holes appear!

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it seems unlikely. It will all depend whether your local council flags up developments on these features as worthy of archaeological mitigation. I'm not that au fait with the archaeological planning regs in Englandshire (they're slightly different, though not alarmingly so), but I would guess that inserting new gates would be seen as permitted development: most agricultural things don't usually need planning permission.