Last weekend saw me travel to Leckhampton just outside Cheltenham I was there as I was visiting one of my old school friends over the weekend and he had organised an open day on the 29th August at Leckhampton Hill which is the site of an Iron Age Hillfort and asked if I wanted to come along to take part.

As part of the day they were offering people the opportunity to take part in an archaeological geophysical survey (anyone who has watched Time Team will know what I am talking about) and there were guided walks of the hillfort and the industrial archeology of Leckhampton Hill.

Luckily the weather held and as you can see from the about photo I was able to get a space on one of the sessions held during the day on the geophysical survey team, the session was split and the people from Site Scan (Archaeological) Ltd were pretty informative and ensured that everyone taking part was aware of how the equipment was used (and they also spent a fair amount of time telling everyone how much the equipment cost) and we were given the chance to use this equipment both to set out grids and to carry out the survey.

It was certainly an eye opening session and you really get to understand that archeology is not as exciting as Indiana Jones and that a lot of preparation work is needed before people go digging about in ground.

The guided walk taking in some of the industrial archeology of the hill was interesting and it was hard to believe how much the area had changed in what is a relatively short period of time. I did miss out on seeing a local landmark known as the Devils Chimney but by that time it had been a long day and I was glad to leave the hill and get back to my car. The journey back to my friends house was longer than it should have been after taking a small detour (about 30miles) in the wrong direction!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.