Friday Meeting Dates 2012

We have now booked the rooms we use in the Potteries Museum for 21 Friday evenings in 2012. Financial constraints do not allow us to meet every Friday, so look at this page (also accessed via the Opening Dates menu link on the left) to see when we are open.

New Lecture Programme: Spring 2012

Our Lecture Programme, covering the first four months of the new year, is now available, and you can see it here. There are four very interesting lectures. The first will be on Friday 13th January and it will be given by Debbie Klemperer. The title is "The Anglo-Saxon Midlands". For more information and for the titles and dates of the other three lectures, follow the Lectures link in the menu to the left

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Next SOTMAS meeting - update!

There was to have been a meeting on Friday 9th December 2011, but unfortunately we had to cancel this as the theatre group currently performing a show in the museum theatre needed to use the rooms. So we will next be open for the first lecture in the New Year, on Friday 13th January 2012.

The next opportunity to take part in post-excavation work will be on Friday 27th January. There is still much post-excavation work to be done so we hope to see plenty of willing helpers there!

On behalf of the SOTMAS Committee, we would like to wish all our members and visitors to this site a very Happy Christmas and New Year!

A Season of Surveying...

This season we have carried out geophysical surveys on several sites. Some of these have been new to us, and others were sites we have worked on before.

At a talk last October on the subject of The Bridestones, a Neolithic Burial Chamber on the Staffordshire/Cheshire border near Congleton, we were asked if we could carry out a geophysical survey of the monument. Inspired by the thought that we may be able to help resolve controversies which have exercised antiquarians and historians over the years regarding the original arrangement of the stones, we approached English Heritage to see if they would allow us to carry out a survey on the site.

English Heritage granted us a licence which gave us, for a limited period, the right to carry out non-intrusive surveys at The Bridestones. They also offered to lend us a magnetometer for the purpose, and to give us some training.

So, in July, an English Heritage staff member brought a Geoscan RM36 fluxgate magnetometer to Cox Bank Farm, where he showed us how to use it.

Before using the instrument at The Bridestones, we carried out trials at Tollgate Farm, Hammerwich, Colton and Hungry Bentley (a deserted medieval village). We needed a licence from English Heritage for this latter survey, as well.

Then we did the survey at The Bridestones.

We also carried out resistivity surveys at these sites.

For more pictures, results and discussion of what we did or did not find out at these sites, follow the links above, or find them via the "Fieldwork and Trips" link in the main menu. If there is no link above, then I haven't uploaded or updated the relevant page yet. I'll provide links as I do the updates.

27th November 2011

... and a little bit of digging