Iron Age Board Meetings?

The BFER board are used to having slightly unusual quarterly meetings, visiting nature gardens and ponds, schools and museums but an Iron Age Roundhouse? That’s unusual, even for us!

But, this August, we just had to pay a visit to the Roundhouse at West Stow Country Park because it is very, very nearly finished! The last time we saw it was when it was still having daub pressed into its walls (we know, because we spent a day helping) but West Stow invited a master thatcher to come and teach them, and their team of volunteers, how to thatch the roof and it’s almost done.

It was wonderful to stand inside the enclosed building and hear the stories of the journey West Stow’s volunteers have been on whilst building this space. Many of the group have been there right from the start, learning how to scorch the wooden posts to preserve them, weaving the wattle walls, pressing their fingerprints into the daub and, now, placing and cutting the thatch. There were a number of tokens hung from the very top of the dome, left like signatures by the people who built this roundhouse. One volunteer even buried a time capsule within the clay on the walls!

We are looking forward to seeing the Roundhouse in common use at the Park, allowing West Stow to celebrate the people who lived in site, even before the Anglo-Saxons were so famously there!