Friday 11 July 2014

Nottinghamshire biggest FREE Community Acrhaeology Dig, The Robin Hood's Village Volunteer Dig, Edwinstowe July 14th-25th

Mercian Archaeological Services CIC are delighted to announce that the Robin Hood's Village Volunteer Dig is starting on Monday 14th July in Edwinstowe.

http://www.mercian-as.co.uk/robinhood.html

The project is shaping up to be the largest FREE Community Excavation ever to have taken place in Nottinghamshire in terms of public involvement; with over 100 individual volunteers and villagers signed up to take part over 13 days of archaeological excavation to celebrate the Festival of British Archaeology. We have people from all over the country coming to dig- and even people from as far afield as Australia are attending.

Alongside this we have two groups of Adults with Learning disabilities joining us during the fortnight, the local Beavers group will be coming to dig, and also the Newark and District Young Archaeology Club will be with us during the middle weekend. There are also plans to involve the local schools, care homes and adult education groups.

We are also fortunate to have the Member of Parliament for Newark and Sherwood, Mark Spencer MP, and Robin Hood (aka Ezekial Bone http://www.ezekialbone.com/robinhood ) joining us to open the dig on Monday morning!

We are very grateful to Edwinstowe Local History Society, particularly Margaret Woodhead, and Colin and DI Roker.

Also Robert Woodhead Ltd  http://www.negroup.co.uk/component/content/article/9-offers/95-welcome-robert-woodhead  for kindly welcoming us to their site and letting us use their facilities at Edwinstowe House,

Also we would like to say a big thank you to Patrick Candler and Ian Major of the Sherwood Forest Trust for letting us borrow parts of their offices... we might see Ian digging, and Patrick has agreed to come along to the opening on Monday morning. http://sherwoodforest.org.uk/

Throughout the dig we will be publishing photographs and updates so you can stay up to date with what is happening via our facebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/sherwoodforesthistory  to 5,132 followers and via our Mercian faceboook page  https://www.facebook.com/Mercianarch  to 1,155 followers.

We can also be found on twitter   https://twitter.com/ArcHistSherwood and   https://twitter.com/MercianArch

and via the project page at   http://www.mercian-as.co.uk/robinhood.html and  the Sherwood Forest Archaeology Project Page at www.sherwoodforestarchaeology.com

The project is being funded through the generous support of the community including online at  http://www.gofundme.com/sherwoodforest
all money raised goes to support the project so that people can continue to benefit from FREE access to Community Archaeology in the Heart of Sherwood Forest!

This is a new way of funding Community Archaeology in Nottinghamshire- with no expense to the tax payer!

This is part of Mercian's attempt to create a sustainable future for Community Archaeology in Nottinghamshire and Sherwood Forest.

Community support for Community Projects... The Future of Sherwood's Past!