Monday 14 April 2014

14 April 2014, Barnsley Pals Project, Day 1

Today saw the sun shine and Elmet arrive at Silverwood Scout camp for the first day of our surveying project that will attempt to delineate the training area of the Barnsley Pals in the First World War. The modern day scout camp is home to what was known as Newhall Camp, which housed the men of the 13th and 14th (Service) Battalions of the Yorks and Lancs Regiment. The men were drawn locally from Barnsley and stayed at the camp from late 1914 through to May 1915. This project is an attempt to locate hut bases and pillars for huts that may still remain in the ground using resistivity, we will also be cleaning the existing ablutions blocks and recording them archaeologically.
We had a good turn out from volunteers and needed to get the site gridded out ready for the geophysical survey.

The site was flagged up at 20 metre intervals by using the Pythagoras theorem to get right angles from a straight baseline. Fortunately we had a few students who had already done this work before, so that speeded up the process.


Soon, the entire site was covered in little red flags!


We had most of the site flagged out by the middle of the afternoon, so Christine demonstrated how to use the resistivity array to the volunteers.


Then they were given a go on the machine, under close supervision.

But they were soon up and running themselves!


So, we've had a great start to the first day, the sun shone all day and we even began the survey! If you are interested in joining in over the next two weeks, please contact us via email: info@elmetarchaeology.co.uk

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