Hey Blog! This time I’m telling you about Activation, the Scouts opportunity which I joined in June to assist with activities for younger Scouts!
Once a year, a field in Derbyshire is taken over for the weekend. No, this isn’t a Glastonbury rip off – this is a Scouts activity. All the county teams – the climbing team, the caving team, the biking team, the sailing team, etc – turn up for the weekend to give the children a taster of the activity. This is the place I tried sailing and found I really enjoyed it, back in 2019 – and subsequently went on to get a lot more involved. The Archaeology team is a new addition to Activation – only starting two years ago – but has already become popular. It seems the Cubs and Scouts quite enjoy it – and if how I reacted to the sailing has anything in common with how they react to archaeology, then we’re going to have several more archaeologically interested Scouts in a few years!
Because the field is pretty much just a field, there isn’t much of archaeological interest in the ground. Therefore, digging is kind of pointless. Instead, we do practical activities, such as building a roundhouse, or making prehistoric jewellery. Or what I was helping with this year – Roman signalling. It’s a bit like semaphore, which I really should memorise, but perhaps easier to understand – there is simply a 5-by-5 grid, which has an arrangement of letters in it, and by arraying ten flags in a particular grouping, you can signal a letter. A, at the beginning of the alphabet, is first in the table, so is 1.1 – you need one flag in each group. B, as the second letter, is 1.2 – one flag in the first group and two in the second. Those who are mathematically minded will have noticed that since it’s a 5-by-5 grid, you can’t fit all the letters in – there are 26 letters in the alphabet, not 25. The Romans solved this problem by having an alphabet with only 24 letters in – I and J were written with the same character until quite late in history, about the 16th century; and U and V were likewise written the same. I don’t know what they did with the extra space in the grid – maybe it was a punctuation mark or something. Those who are spatially aware will have noticed that you can swap the numbers around – to try and signal K, the first letter of my name, you need 2 flags in one group and 5 in the other. But if you got them the wrong way round, you’d be spelling W – and my name does not begin with a W! So if you try this at home, think before sending (a good idea in all communication) and ensure the flag groups are the right way round so the other team you’re signalling to knows which is which!
Activation has four groups per activity per day, with about 20 Cubs/Scouts in each. I only helped with the Cubs, who all came on the Saturday, and because we had two activities waiting, we divided the 20 into two groups, so the activities were easier to run. This meant I only had to deal with 10 Cubs at a time – and while I can effectively communicate with 20 Beavers I know at once, when I don’t know the children, the smaller size is helpful. I started by introducing what I’ve already said above, and then we started signalling. While the individual words/letters we signalled changed over the day, we generally started by signalling initials, before moving on to a word that meant something – the number of activities at this year’s Activation, for instance. Unfortunately, since we didn’t have a full hour with each half-group, no group had the full practice and therefore we only managed a word or two with each new set. Still, I think almost everyone enjoyed it, and hopefully we’ll be able to use the activity at another event and maybe get a few more signals sent. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to send a long message? To signal this post, you’d need a day and more!
The other activity for the cubs was making mini ballistae. These catapults were developed by the Greeks, and their use lasted until the invention of the quicker longbows and then cannons made them obsolete. Still, they were extremely effective – some inventors even designed a repeating ballista which had a loading compartment and operated on one rachet that would draw, load and fire all at once. Effectively, the first machine gun! Ours were not as advanced, being made of lollipop & cocktail sticks and pieces of string rather than large beams and enormous cables. However, I think they too were much appreciated.
I did not attend on Sunday, but by all accounts the Scouts attending had a great time. They were making larger trebuchets, though by larger I mean about a foot or two tall. Not like the properly big one, about two or three metres tall that Dad and I tried to make but have put aside for now to make space for a larger project. Perhaps next year, there’ll be space for a really massive one and we can have something that will fire a large ball the mile or so downhill to the local lake. Maybe. After all, who knows what I’ll get up to for Activation next year?!