Saturday 4^th 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