Grapes, Goats, & a Stone Age Shrine
12 August 2024
Hello!
The sun is out, the sheep are bleating, and baby goat Nutmeg is frolicking around in the pen. As we write this, we’re sheltering in the shade as visitors explore our ancient buildings. This is the life!
In this update… We take care of a poorly mummy goat, visit a local vineyard, go on time-travelling adventures with our visitors, create a Stone Age shrine, and more!
We visited a vineyard!
Something might be brewing at Butser… Wait, no, you don’t brew wine. Hang on…
This month, we sent gardener Immie and volunteer Will on a field trip to local Hambledon Vineyard, to learn all about viniculture, vine care, and the processes behind producing wine.
If you think ‘ancient wine’, you probably think of the Romans first. In fact, the oldest surviving liquid wine is from a Roman necropolis, and dates to the 1st century CE. But did you know there’s evidence of wine being created in Georgia as early as 6000 BCE?
Modern wine is quite different to ancient wine, as you might expect, but that’s mostly down to preferences and fashions changing through the ages. Hambledon Vineyard uses modern versions of ancient Roman amphorae in their winemaking — and the similarities are striking.
Immie and Will came back buzzing from their trip, and we don’t think that was all down to the wine tasting 😂 We’re really keen to experiment more with food (garum anyone? 🐟), and there’s some exciting plans afoot for some vines of our own… Watch this space!
Summertime fun with our visitors
It’s the summer holidays! That means we’re open all day every day, and full of extra activities, demonstrations, and archaeology.
This summer, we’re inviting our younger visitors to get hands on and become accredited time travellers by proving their skills through the ages to fill out their Time Passport. With different activities on each day, there’s tons to get involved with!
Kids with completed Time Passports are in with a chance to win a free family ticket to our magical Midwinter Quest in December, where we’ll be celebrating winter folklore and offering an antidote to commercialised Christmas.
We’re also offering our first-ever discount on annual passes, with 20% off across the board ’till the end of August — so if you’re planning on visiting more than once in the next 12 months, it’s now cheaper to get a pass than to pay for entrance twice!
Wyke Down update
We’re continuing to thatch our new Stone Age roundhouse — it’s a big job, but going fast with all this beautiful weather! More excitingly, though, we’re preparing to create the walls of this building with chalk.
Incredibly we actually know quite a lot about what this building’s walls looked like, because some bits of them actually survived — which is extremely rare for this period. Some of those surviving fragments held the impressions of the wattle material, and we’ve been working with experts at the University of Cambridge to analyse the ‘recipe’ used to create the walls.
This analysis has shown that the walls were chalk-rich, and used a lime-rich plaster — which tells us that people were heating chalk at high temperatures for long periods to create that lime, a technique often thought of as too complex for the Stone Age. Well, we have the evidence to prove that’s wrong!
You already know we think this building was pretty special, and the walls have just confirmed that too. Lime plaster is often used as a base for painting — so maybe the walls were decorated?
As a homage to that specialness, we created a shrine inside the building and invited our visitors to create chalk artworks to add to it. It’s become something of a community art project, and at the end of the summer we’ll be repurposing these gorgeous well-wishes into part of the build 💚
Answering your questions!
There’s nothing we love more than getting into the nitty gritty of the past, whether that’s diving into how ancient people preserved food or questioning whether our ancestors wore underpants. We’ve been really enjoying making our new Quickfire Questions series, and hope you like it too!
As well as pants and food, so far we’ve explored why roundhouses don’t have chimneys, and when dogs became pets. Coming up soon we’ll also be looking into what exactly experimental archaeology is, whether the Anglo-Saxons were settlers or invaders, and why we have crooked teeth when our ancestors didn’t.
We’ve got so many topics we’re excited to cover with this series, from children’s toys in the ancient past to the first musical instruments, it’s hard to choose what to make next! So, we’re asking you: what are your questions you’d like answered? Let us know, and we’ll do our best to make you a video!
Taking care of mum
With the birth of Nutmeg the new baby goat, we now have three generations of endangered English goat at Butser — baby Nutmeg, mum Sorrel, and grandma Bella. Plus Branwyn the mischievous aunt, of course!
After Nutmeg was born, Sorrel unfortunately became very unwell, and we had to raise Nutmeg ourselves to give Sorrel the best chance of recovery. For a really distressing few days we weren’t sure if Sorrel would even make it, but to eveyone’s immense relief she pulled through. Baby Nutmeg is now back with her, and the two have been rekindling their relationship, but we’re not out of the woods yet.
Unfortunately Sorrel has become ill again, fighting a nasty case of mastitis. We’re with her every step of the way, keeping her hydrated and bribing her with banana skins so she takes her medicine, and we’re hoping she’s able to make a full recovery.
But even if she does, it’s become very clear that Nutmeg will be her last baby. It’s a bittersweet moment — like her baby, Sorrel was born at Butser (see how tiny she was!), and we’ve loved her all her life. Along with Bella and Branwyn, our goats were three of only around 70 breeding female English goats left in the UK — and with all of them no longer having kids, that number has just gone down even further. It’s so important we help keep this lovely, gentle breed alive, and we’re so grateful for all our girls’ kids over the years 💚
That about does us for this update, though there’s plenty more on the horizon… As ever, thank you so much for your support, for being part of the Butser family and coming with us on this journey!
