Shropshire snow

Another long-delayed addition to the blog, due to another very busy month - both at work and home. The last two weeks have been very cold, and we have had snow on the ground for most of that time. This was the scene in the back garden this morning: about four or five inches of snow have built up over the last couple of days.



The chickens (see the post below) were finally adopted and now have their own blog; in fact most blogging activity has been taking place on that site in recent weeks, which will also give you a good idea of the weather. To summarise: it has ranged from extreme frost and -15 degrees through to heavy snow and 0 degrees. Here are some cold-looking chickens having a warm meal.



In the middle of all this I have continued to battle up to York to finish off my stint of teaching on the MA in Historical Archaeology. Thankfully - apart from some marking - that is now all finished; the last few months particularly have proved quite tiring, although the current bunch of students are the best yet. Now I can begin to focus more fully on my PhD, which has been on the back burner a bit as a result of the teaching workload.

Work at Nexus continues to be bright and cheerful. At some point over Christmas I shall update the project pages; suffice to say in this post that there is a lot going on and much of it extremely exciting. One major and very interesting project has been recording the historic farm complex at Chillington Hall: this rather substantial and very early 'model farm' is full of surprises. As well as the early and elaborate dovecote, it also contains a complete 19th century malthouse and lots of graffitti. Here is a wonderful double rainbow over the farmyard on a blustery day in mid-November.



A short summary of the work was published in The Archaeologist, and the project was also shortlisted for the Georgian Group 2010 award in the Restoration of a Georgian Landscape category. Other projects have been less glamorous but nevertheless interesting including work in Telford, Derbyshire and Cheshire.

Finally I am very pleased to have cleared my publication backlog (at least for the time being). Trying to get drawings done six years ago on software that no longer exists into a coherent form has been trying. However early next year should see a paper in Post-Medieval Archaeology on shipbuilding in Bermuda, and a paper in the Historic Environment journal on archaeology, community and identity.

Now just lots of finishing off to do before Christmas!