Yet more finds from the amazing Alverstone Dig continue to emerge. We have just been given a small collection of flint lithics (bits of stone to you and I) struck from hand tools in the dim and distant past. These are now a part of the Alverstone Archive with island 2000 and will be a very useful addition to the material to be studied by experts from around the country over the next 18 months as they try to unravel this extraordinary story.
Sunday dawned bright and blue despite the rotten forecast from the day before and an intrepid band had soon assembled down on Small Hope Beach for the 3rd annual SandmanSnowman event. The great thing about that bit of the Shanklin esplanade is that there are so many people out and about anyway and sure enough we soon had some game passers-by joining in. There were carrots and coal and lashings of hot chocolate, all the necessary ingredients for an excellent day and sure enough wonderful creations soon began to sprout from the sand. Take a look at the Flickr gallery to see them all:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandmansnowman/
Hello everyone and sorry we’ve been a bit slow in greeting the New Year but here we are again. Things are of course pretty tough economically the world over just now and it’s no different for us. The next 3 months will be pretty tough but we’ll be as busy as ever delivering projects as we restructure ourselves to better fit more straightened times.
We’re just about to begin some major wetland works in the Alverstone Marshes SSSI to continue to manage the exciting progress of drier parts of the site from nettle bed to reed bed. We’ll also be finishing off the winter’s work at Bohemia Bog by scraping off old slumped soil from what might be a good bit of the original bog just beneath. Even now in the dead of winter there are bits of that amazing bog flora visible. Here you can see the red of sundews showing through. Of course 2009 is the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and there will be celebrations and events the world over. Interestingly Darwin worked on a study of insectivorous plants including sundews (there is a story that some of his samples may even have come from the Island but it seems more likely that he used the New Forest) and we’ll be marking this with special walks at Bohemia later in the year.
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