A mysterious object in the woods

Tracy recently stumbled across this strange rusted object in the wood:

As you can see, it has a handle on one side, and what look like buckles to attach straps to. There used to be some kind of internal structure inside the cylinder, but it's too rusted to see what it might have been. On one end there's a nozzle with a screw thread. Any ideas what it might be?

Last week was mostly wind and rain, but the one sunny day, Wednesday, was a day we both had off work, so we had a beautiful day working in the woods.

The strange thing right now is that while the Ash and Sweet Chestnut have lost their leaves:

some of the Oak have barely started to change colour:

We reckon we're over half way through the main part of our work for this winter, although the edge trees may take a bit longer. In the photo below, you can see the main block of trees still to be coppiced, and if you look along the path, you can see the regrowth from last year's coppicing, so the end is actually in sight already!

Mike

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Woodland archaeology

A few weeks ago we had David Brown, of the South East Woodland Archaeology Forum, come and visit Sweep Wood and Chestnut Coppice (and other surrounding woods) to look at the archaeological features. There were numerous banks and ditches, but the really intriguing find was what we thought was a ditch running through Sweep Wood:
In fact, it's an ancient trackway, and where the road turns a corner (just out of sight in the above photo), it must have gone straight on in the past.

Tracy's also been busy with the metal detector, digging up various items such as this part from some agricultural machinery:
and also this mixing implement:
We're looking forward to find out more about the archaeology over the coming year, with David hopefully visiting again.

You can read articles from David in the SWOG newsletters, the October issue has some info on woodland trackways in it.

Mike

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SWOG meeting: planning and archaeology

Last Saturday we had another SWOG meeting, this time at the Woodland Enterprise Centre in Flimwell. Several regulars weren't able to come, but we still had over 30 people.
In the morning we heard from Nick Ide, a planning consultant for Batcheller Thacker.
He explained the labyrinth of planning and woodlands, and gave us insights into how planning officers think (he used to be one). I won't go into details here, but basically if you want to do some "development" (which can include pretty much anything), you first need to look at the local and area plans to see what the policy is, and make sure your proposed project fits in with them. If it does, it's more difficult for a planning officer to object.

After lunch, we heard from Lyn Palmer, an archaeologist working in the Weald area. She showed us some pictures made using LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging), which show up features such as old tracks, charcoal burning platforms, remains of forts and other interesting features. These are often invisible on the ground (until you know where to look for them) as the differences in the height of the ground are very subtle. You can read all about it in this PDF (1.6MB)

David Brown, of South East Woodland Archaeology Forum was next, and took a small group on a tour of some archaeological features of the woods at WEC. This is an old charcoal burning platform - you mostly spot them by their shape:
but also by the dark colour of the earth, from years of charcoal fines being mixed in there: Next up was a saw pit, which would have been used to saw the butts of large trees lengthways to make planks (it would have been much deeper when in use):
That's quite a large saw pit though, more commonly they are flatter, and therefore harder to spot:
Finally we visited the site of an old bloomery, where iron was smelted from ore dug out of the ground nearby.
In the stream were remains of the slag from the bloomery, which was very dense as it still contains quite a lot of iron:
The only thing we didn't see was a wood bank (boundary marker, or feature to keep animals out), because at this time of year the bracken has grown so much they're hard to find!

Mike

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