Saturday 4th November 2017
Members of the Embsay Churchyard project attended the
inaugural Council for British Archaeology – Yorkshire’s Autumn Showcase at the
weekend in York. This was the first time community heritage groups across
Yorkshire had been brought together to share their work, ideas and experiences.
It was a great success – our Sue gave an excellent presentation for Embsay –
despite each speaker only having 20 minutes, Sue packed a lot into her talk on
how we had used RTI to advance and develop our project into something really
exciting. She seems to have inspired others to start thinking about churchyard
heritage too – as we had a lot of visitors to our stand asking about RTI.
There were some interesting workshops which some of us
attended – such as Jon Kenny’s Project design and planning; a drone workshop;
and LIDAR session.
At the end of the day some very interesting “food for
thought” was put forward by archaeologist John Buglass, following up on the
issue of networking for local heritage groups. Several comments had been made
informally throughout the day that so many groups were beavering away and doing
such wonderful work, yet we seem unaware of each other’s expertise, findings
and potential to support each other and share experiences. It will be
interesting to see if anything comes of John Buglass’s encouragement for this
to be addressed. Let’s hope the autumn
showcase becomes an annual feature, and that more “professionals” and academics
are encouraged to come along and see what “amateur” heritage can achieve.
It was certainly an excellent opportunity to network with
groups that are operating even quite close to our own little “patch”.
Jane Lunnon
