Events Diary and Reports

This page lists the POW Project's event dates, past and future, with links to reports of past events. Just click on the event to see the report!
There are also a number of more general articles first published in The Parish Magazine of Greater Whitbourne, and reproduced here by kind permission of the editors.

Past events are listed after the future events table.

Future events:

23rd - 28th October

Exhibition of Findings.  10-12noon and 2-4pm on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday,  Friday & Saturday. From 2pm onwards on Wednesday 25th October, with Cider & Wine Reception from 7.30pm. All this will be held in Whitbourne Church, and will include all the discoveries made during the course of the project - from the children's work on the First World War, archaeology, archive research into the occupants of the houses, buildings research which has identified traces of three medieval 'hall houses' within Tudor cottages, and field surveys using documents and modern geophysical techniques. A booklet describing a walk around the medieval village will be launched, and the video and oral history CDs will be played during the Exhibition. After this, the exhibition will move to the Bromyard Local History Centre.

Past events:

Tuesday 21st September 2004	Launch Meeting, at Whitbourne Village Hall. Report.
Tuesday 12th October 2004	Historical Walk, from Whitbourne Church. Report.
Saturday 16th October 2004	Tour of Hereford Record Office. Report.
Saturday 6th November 2004, 2-4.30pm	Field Walk, starting at Whitbourne Church. Report.
Saturdays 6th and  20th November 2004	Two-day course on palaeography - learning to read old handwriting.
Friday 19th November 2004, 7.45pm	"Whitbourne in the Middle Ages" - a talk given by Dr Keith Ray, County Archaeologist, in the Village Hall. Report.
Friday 14th January 2005	Survey training day, to learn surveying techniques, starting 10am in the church. Report.
Wednesday 19th January 2005	Finds Roadshow (a finds identification workshop) at the Village Hall. Bring along interesting things you have dug up in the garden! Report.
Thursday 27th January 2005	Field Survey Day - putting newly acquired skills into practice surveying the environs of Old Whitbourne.  Report.
Thursday 3rd February 2005	A day reserved for the school.
February 16th-18th (Wed - Fri) 2005	Three days surveying and carrying out geophysical studies on the orchard site.
Saturday 19th February 2005	Community Families Archaeology Day at the Village  Hall, with "Things to Do for All Ages".
Saturday 5th March	Survey Training Day.
Thursday 24th February 2005	Woodland Landscape Walk.
Friday 18th March 2005	Recording Survey at River-crossing Site.
Thursday 14th April 2005	AGM and meeting "Buboes, Boils and Black Rats" in the Village Hall.  Report. A full financial report is available from the hon. treasurer, Sir Nicholas Harington (01886 821 819).
Saturday 23rd April 2005	Test Pit training day.
Monday 25th April - Tuesday 3rd May 2005	Orchard Dig. Pictorial report.
Wednesday 27th April 2005	Whitbourne School children visited the Orchard Dig. Report & pictures. More Orchard Dig pictures.
1st & 2nd May 2005	Guided tours of the Orchard Dig.
Wednesday 25th May 2005	Illustrated talk by Tim Hoverd, County Archaelogy Team "Field Archaeology and the People of Old Whitbourne Project - The Story So Far".
Monday 20th to Friday 24th June 2005	Boat House Dig.
Thursday 14th July 2005	Illustrated talk about medieval pottery in Herefordshire, including material found so far in Whitbourne.
Saturday 30th July 2005	Historic Landscape Ramble with Tim Hoverd, from Whitbourne church.
Saturday 12th November 2005	Annual Herefordshire Archaeological Symposium. The main item for the afternoon was three talks on the POW project: Introduction & Social History; Buildings Results; Archaeology. At the Courtyard Theatre off Edgar Street, Hereford.
Tuesday 25th April 2006	Annual General Meeting at Whitbourne Village Hall, followed by an illustrated talk by Duncan James: "The House Detective Reveals His Methods".  The full accounts were available for inspection after 10th April 2006 by contacting the Treasurer, Sir Nicholas Harington on 01886 821 819.

General Articles

These were first published in The Parish Magazine of Greater Whitbourne.

• PLAGUED WITH QUESTIONS (Published May 2005)
  
  Thursday, April 14th, saw our Village Hall well-attended for the Annual General Meeting of the POWP. That part of the meeting concerned with the financing of the project was expeditiously dealt with by Sir Nicholas Harington, and  the Election of Officers by Dr Kate Lack. The existing Committee was unanimously re-instated and Lawrence Haddock was co-opted, a move welcomed by those who have been doing the hard graft of planning and organising. Something of the nature of this time-consuming work was brought out by Ann Roberts in her overview of the year's activities.
  
  We heard, for example, of  plodding through frozen and muddy fields as villagers, archaeologists, and the video-film recorder looked at "bumps and humps" in orchards and farms. Short, appetite-whetting reports were given about those parts of the project examining the oral history, the individual buildings, and the village archives. Especially heartening was learning the extent of involvement of the children in the school. Ann pointed to a host of events planned for the Spring and Summer. Clearly, the project has captured the imagination and active participation of our village.
  
  Before the welcome refreshments, Kate gave us a fascinating account of how, in 1349, the Plague, the infamous Black Death, ravaged mainland Europe before eventually invading this sceptred isle. In the absence of direct historical evidence, she showed, from Diocesan and Parish records, how we might infer the impact of the Plague upon the population size and working practices of villages such as ours. Life was never to be the same again when the ghastly horrors of the epidemic had exhausted the people and the land.
  Michael Tobin
• (Published June 2005)
  This was a picture page – three pictures illustrating the archaeologists and excavators at work in Churchfields with the children of Whitbourne school looking on. 
  
  The picture captions were as follows:
  “Children of Whitbourne School had a chance to see just what the archaeologists and hardworking excavators had been getting up to in Churchfields.  The children watched as the first stages of digs in three large sites in the orchard revealed fascinating traces of 18th century industrial occupation.”
  “Archaeologist Clem Lovell explains from deep in one of the garden pits, how the different levels of excavation can tell us something about the history of the site.”
  “Digging deeper into the orchard sites, interesting discoveries were made telling us about the soil during medieval times.  Churchfields obviously has a very interesting history.”
• RABBIT, RABBIT…. (Published July 2005)
  
  The other day I was interviewed by Sandy Marchant who is collecting and collating memories of an earlier Whitbourne for the Oral History Project.  Being born about the start of World War II, my early memories are of the austere times of the 1940s.  At that time I did not realise the importance of rabbits to the Village.
  
  Farmers complained bitterly about the loss of crops caused by the plentiful supply of bunnies.  Sporting shoots or hunts with dogs were totally ineffective in control of the pest.  Small boys were allowed into the cornfields being cut by horse-drawn binders in order to use their rabbit sticks on the menace.
  
  However for the agricultural labourers and smallholders rabbit was a significant part of diet and an important supplementary source of income.  The common custom was to buy the right to catch the rabbits on a farm.  The main technique of capture was snaring with ‘rabbit wires’; this was backed up with the use of ferrets all day on a winter Saturday.  Shooting was not employed because of the expense of cartridges and the taste of lead shot!  Dogs were for help in locating animals underground, but not for chasing.  Apart from being very inefficient many dogs were last seen chasing a rabbit over the horizon.
  
  So at an early age most children of the village learned to catch, paunch and skin the critters.  Sunday lunch was often roast rabbit, sadly over-cooked in the side-oven of an open fire.  It was not all destruction and death, though.  To my utter amazement the boys from Westminster School evacuated to The Court kept tame rabbits in a run in our garden.  To be honest it may have been just a good excuse for getting away from the adult supervisors in order to have a quiet cigarette.
  
  Eventually the inevitable happened.  Myxamatosis was deliberately spread through the rabbit population.  The sorry sight of dying rabbits at the roadside, blind, with bulging heads and in deep distress brought a halt to an ancient way of life.  I have not eaten a rabbit since.
  Dai Jones
• GREAT BALLS OF FIRE (Published August 2005)
  
  Great excitement at the archaeological dig last month down by the river.  Two round balls.  Only it turned out they weren't musket balls after all, but clay marbles - possibly used as bottle stoppers.  Which may support the idea that there was an Inn of some kind by the ferry crossing, but is not quite the same as musket balls. (If you go down Boat Lane to the pumping station, and then carry on down the path, the site they were digging is on the right just before you reach the river.)
  
  However there was a battle of Whitbourne, albeit a rather small one. At some point in the civil war the Parliamentarians stormed the Royalist Whitbourne Court. Or was it the other way round? 
  
  I'm not a historian at all, but I made the mistake of expressing interest in the play that is planned as part of the POW project.  Before I knew where I was I was landed with the job of writing it - or a first draft anyway - and a battle is just what we need to stop things getting too boring.   Even if we can't remember whose side was which.
  When you think about it, I wonder if all the soldiers knew which side they were on anyway, or what they were supposed to be fighting for?  Any more than the Roman legionaries knew where they were going, or the Tommies in World War One understood what had got them into a war?
  
  And what did the women think about it all?  What did they think about the Doomsday book? Or the campaign to stop bear-baiting?  What were all these old black and white houses like when they were absolutely brand spanking new?  And what about the servants in the big houses?  Where did they meet and what did they get up to when their mistresses' backs were turned?
  
  Dry old history doesn't turn me on at all, but real people - well that's quite another thing.  I'm finding it fascinating.
  Paul Lack
• WHAT A LOTTA WATTLE! (Published September 2005)
  
  Duncan James is an insight historic buildings researcher and is working his way around some old properties in Whitbourne.  As ours was built 1650 - 1675 it was no surprise to have a knock on the door one Sunday morning in March. 
  Duncan was clad in motorbike gear and had an interesting motorbike parked in the drive so we thought he must be ok!
  His task was to study the construction of the building.  He examined our beams and wattle and daub, found carpenter's marks from the original assembly, found saw marks that showed whether the timber had been pit sawn or trestle sawn all to help identify when the building was erected.  He soon spotted a non original old beam we had put in to hold a floor up with and told us the cottage had originally been a two bay cottage.
  We told him of the extensions we had built over the years and of the hand me down story about a previous occupier taking his pig up stairs and then cutting off the bottom of the stairs to stop the water rising up during a flood.
  Then there was the time, with the help of friends, we dug out the old floor of tiles laid on chalk and replaced everything with concrete and a damp course and then chained sawed the bottom of the beams so we could stop hitting our heads!
  We found Duncan's visit very informative and look forward to his write up on The Old Properties of Whitbourne in due course.
  Jerry & Wendy Cummins
• RAY OF LIGHT ON THE PAST (Published October 2005)
  
  “What did we find?” was the title of the talk given by Dr. Keith Ray, the County Archaeologist, at the Village Hall on the 8th September.
  “Not what we were looking for,” was the answer.
  The archaeologists had examined five level areas on a bank at the edge of the orchard in front of Churchfields and thought they might be the sites of medieval houses, perhaps deserted after the Black Death. The four trenches dug across them uncovered a top layer with a lot of charcoal and bits of brick in it but no signs of medieval houses. The conclusion was that bricks had been fired on the platforms in the 18th or early 19th centuries, when many houses were improved by having brick walls added. Names like Brick Field or Kiln Field near a village often showed where bricks had been made for local use, but this was the first such site actually excavated in the County.
  One of the trenches was extended to the line of an old hedge and ditch running down the orchard. Three feet below ground level a previous ditch was found, cut into the clay subsoil.
  In the silt that had filled it was a tiny piece of pottery. Tiny, but it could be dated to around 1300. The ditch must be earlier, perhaps even Saxon. It had been dug as a boundary between strips or furlongs, when the fields of Whitbourne were laid out for cultivation. Three feet of plough soil had built up over it but the old hedge and ditch still preserved its original line.
  The second main dig took place on the site of the Boat Inn, on the bank of the Teme beyond the water treatment works. The inn had been knocked down about a hundred years ago, but when had it been built? This is still a mystery. It had been demolished so thoroughly that all that could be found was a patch of cobbled yard and the soak-away that drained it.
  Test pits, a metre square, dug in the gardens of houses along Bottom Lane were more productive. Fragments of medieval pottery, rough and unglazed, showed that there were peasant dwellings on the sites of the present 16th and 17th century houses and a few bits of glazed and decorated pottery suggested that the Bishop and his retinue were in residence at  the Court.  The garden of the Ring of Bells produced lots of clay pipe, not surprising if it was a pub. Dr. Ray said that the shape and size of one pipe bowl, no bigger than a thimble, could be dated to about 1620, when tobacco was an expensive luxury, so at least one villager could afford a smoke.
  No spectacular discoveries then, but all those who have taken part in the excavations, digging, wheeling barrows, scraping with trowels, sieving sticky clay, washing finds and, hardest of all, filling in again, felt that they had not laboured in vain. Significant evidence of Whitbourne’s past had been found - and there are still more test pits to be dug, without Clem, alas, and her magic pink boots!
  Andrew Kneen
• OLD WHITBOURNE LIVES ON (Published November 2005)
  
  Several people have asked me in the last few days what the plans are now for the People of Old Whitbourne Project.
  
  Well, now that the weather is less clement, the digging has come to an end and the holes are all filled in again. This one at Kennetts was one of the very last:
  
  The finds have gone off to be sorted and identified, and the archaeological report will then be written - we hope to have it soon after Christmas.
  
  Meanwhile, the House Surveys are all done, and the last few interviews are being made for the Oral History.  Two more reports will be coming to us soon from those two 'experts'. I hope they can give us some idea of what they have found, in future editions of the parish magazine.
  
  So the only part of the research that is still going on is the Archive Project - a group of a dozen people are slowly putting together the social histories of twelve houses in the research area, and spreading out over most of the rest of the parish as the families moved about or changed jobs. Some time around Easter we hope to have a good amount of material for this, going back in some cases to the middle of Elizabeth I's reign.
  
  When all the information is gathered, we will be producing a leaflet summarising the choice bits of the project, and putting on a display which will show off much more of what we have found.   And of course there will be a play next year - not telling quite the same story as the exhibition, but nevertheless taking a look at the lives of the People of Old Whitbourne.
  Kate Lack
• NEW IDEAS FOR “OLD” PROJECT? (Published December 2005)
  
  Over the past year much has been achieved under the auspices of the POW project 
  and there is still some work to do -  the Drama event, an Exhibition and  making a leaflet so people know what has been discovered.  These activities will be happening in the first half of 2006.  By the early summer we will nearly have completed the original project and spent all the grant that we received. (As last year, the full accounts will be available at the AGM)
   
  People are beginning to ask "What next?", "Is it going to continue?" and similar questions.  Well, the answer is up to you and what you want to do.  The project group can apply for a further grant, but it must be for different areas of interest ie we cannot just continue with the same  ideas.  We are led to believe that funds are available for the next 18 -24 months and then the Local Heritage Initiative scheme is to be wound up. It would be a great shame to miss the boat by not applying for a further grant to enhance the work already done. But this can only happen if people are still interested, and able to give time to the project.
   
  We are therefore looking for ideas from you as to what you would like to do to further the People of Old Whitbourne project.  It has been suggested that we should bring the work into the 21st century and examine Whitbourne as it is now eg surveying/charting current buildings, land use, population etc   Alternatively we could go further back in history and delve into the Iron Age or stay Medieval and extend the Project to the Bishops palace or to outlying habitats.
   
  We will need to start the process of applying for the new grant in January/February; but before we do so we need to be sure that there is interest and support from the people of Whitbourne. Please let us have your views/ideas as to whether we should continue with
  the Project and what avenues you think we (you) should pursue.
   
  Please contact Kate Lack, (01886) 821978 or Ann Roberts, 821 063, with your views.
  
  Kate Lack
• HOUSE DETECTIVE (Published April 2006)
  
  Over the last twelve months, a stranger (from another part of Herefordshire) has been peering at the beams and joints of some of Whitbourne's old houses. He has snooped in cellars and loitered in lofts. He says he has come up with some amazing and important discoveries, and will be giving a full report before the People of Old Whitbourne Project ends this autumn.
  
  He has also kindly agreed to reveal the secrets of his trade, in an illustrated talk after our AGM: What clues does he look for? How do you know exactly when a house was built? What were these stitting rooms, dining rooms and kitchens used for, hundreds of years ago? How did the People of Old Whitbourne live, in days gone by? Find out at the illustrated talk following the AGM on Tuesday 25th April at the Village Hall.