Hey Blog! This time I’m talking about a meet I did quite a while ago which encompassed two things I care about the most – Archaeology and Scouts!
The Derbyshire Scout Archaeology Badge is new. It was set up a couple of years ago by Morgause Lomas, a former Scout with a passion for archaeology and a realization no badge existed for it. For archaeology bods enthusiasts like me, this is amazing, as I had previously suggested to my own Scout troop the idea of doing a session on it and they had thought it would be a bit difficult to do in the evenings! Finally there is an opportunity where you can learn about archaeology and be doing Scouts at the same time. But the badge would be no use without Scouts rating and suggesting activities and content for it; so the team set up the Youth Committee, to have just that extra bit of information to give just that extra bit of success. As my mum is Resource Coordinator, I have a sneaky inside view to how things are going, and therefore knew that they were setting up this. I signed up, and surprisingly not many other people did, so I got onto the panel. If you do live in Derbyshire, are in Scouting, and interested in archaeology, then you would be welcome to sign up; ask your scout leader for more information and the link to the application.
There were four of us at the first meeting, which took place at Cresswell Crags, on the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border. This is, or was, an important site in Ice Age Europe, as it was the Stone Age version of a motorway services when the ice was retreating back north. Hunters could stop off and rest in relative safety from the cold in the gorge, and the caves provided an amazing shelter too. The one trouble was these humans weren’t the only ones wanting a place in the caves – the Hyenas had got there first. And having a pack of large dog/wolf/cat/big bone-crunchers just a short passageway down behind you was not a good plan. This meant the caves were more frequently inhabited later, when most of the big carnivores had gone. This is the place with the oldest art in the UK; a magnificent collection of finds, enough to make any museum proud; and some apotropaic marks, informally known as “witch marks”; it’s a superb site with lots more than you would give it credit for!
Our first activity was to go into the caves to get to know them, and learn more about what was happening in the past. I have previously been to the one with the art, on the “dark side” of the gorge, as it’s known to employees from Derbyshire (the dark side, which is shadier, is the Nottinghamshire side), but this time we went to a light side cave, one where some Hyenas lived, as their bones have been found there. This cave, along with most of the others, was modified in the 19th Century (thanks, Victorians…) which gave a passage down into an inner cavern – basically they blasted it out with gunpowder. They did this to a couple of other caves too, once to store their boats in a pre-existent cave. In this one, we learnt about the tools and lifestyles from the past. Then, we went back to the visitor centre and picked up a box of skins, real and fake, and some poles. The point was to construct a shelter.
I know how to do square lashings, so it didn’t take long to construct several right-angled arches. Then we had the genius idea of putting two of the tied poles on top of two other tied poles, at a right angle, and forming a four poled tipi. We copied this, and next I realised that the two small tipis could be connected by the final pole across them as a roof beam, before covering everything. It was just long enough! We draped the whole thing in the leather and made a beautiful shelter, but possibly not waterproof…
There are said to be 16 caves around the gorge, but we could only find 15 caves on our walk round. Maybe that’s because we counted only the ones with grills on, and one and a half for caves that joined up inside, or maybe we just didn’t find the last. Either way, it was a brilliant session, and I hope to continue to participate in more youth committee meetings in the future!