| VISIT TO DOWN FARM by Josephine Pentney Nineteen members of the Fellowship assembled at Down Farm near Wimborne St Giles on Saturday 25 June for a guided tour of Martin Green’s private museum of archaeology and rural bygones. This turned out to be much more than just the museum visit which we had envisaged. Martin Green is a farmer who carries out excavations on his own farm, which happens to include some of the most significant prehistoric sites on Cranborne Chase, including barrows, henge monuments and part of the enigmatic Dorset Cursus - a Neolithic ritual alignment which runs for over six miles. Cranborne Chase is where General Pitt Rivers laid down the principles of modern excavation on his Rushmore estates. Hardy and Emma were entertained by the General and his wife at Rushmore House for a week in September 1895, and in the Life Hardy recalls the magical evening at the Larmer Tree gardens, where he danced with the General’s beautiful daughter Agnes Grove. |
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| Martin is an acclaimed amateur archaeologist who may be
said to have
inherited the Pitt Rivers mantle on Cranborne Chase; entirely self taught, he
left
school at 15 to work on the family cereal farm. By then he had already
collected many fossils, flint implements and sherds of Roman pottery from the
fields
and started his own private museum, now housed in a modest building which
began life as a chicken shed. He inherited the farm in 1979 but soon had to face
the problem of falling cereal prices. In 1988 he entered the EEC’s ‘set
aside’ scheme by which farmers were paid £80 an acre not to add further
to the EEC’s grain mountains. He decided to make his 260-acre farm into a wildlife haven and this has enabled him to concentrate on his real love, archaeology. |
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| We were taken on a walk around the farm while Martin explained the archaeology and natural history, with swallows and house martins swooping around us and the sound of skylarks far above. A buzzard was being mobbed by a crow; a pyramidal orchid could be seen by the farmyard. The change from cereals to grassland has resulted a healthy population of small mammals, which in turn has attracted barn owls, tawny owls, little owls, kestrels and buzzards to nest in the pine trees surrounding Fir Tree Field. Ground-nesting birds such as lapwing and skylark are now well-established on the farm and Martin hopes that one day stone curlews will nest there too. An extensive area planted with different species of poppies provided a blaze of colour in part of the field. | |||
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| Martin led us to a huge open shaft, 12 metres deep, which
we could peer into
by walking along (in small numbers only!) a slightly scary metal platform
spanning the pit. Auguring has revealed that there are at least a further 25
metres, which could not be excavated. This astounding feature originally
showed
as a dark green circular crop mark where the grass grew more luxuriantly and
Martin had hoped that it was a Neolithic flint mine. He now believes
that it
is a natural feature which formed following the collapse of an underground
cavern in the chalk. The upper deposits were filled with finds dating from the
Mesolithic to the Early Bronze Age and there can be no doubt that prehistoric man would have regarded this mysterious shaft as a sacred place, perhaps a gateway to the gods. |
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| Next we were taken to the recently-created pond, situated in an area where Martin has planted a mixture of traditional meadow wild flowers, and we were treated to the stunning display of corn marigold, corn cockle, cornflower, ox-eye daisy, field chamomile, poppy, knapweed and scabious growing in wonderful profusion. These flowers would all have been familiar to Hardy and provided a reminder of what we have lost through intensive farming since his day. On the walk back we spotted cocoons of various species of moth caterpillars feeding on the hedge of hawthorn bushes which Martin has planted. | |||
| The museum is a splendid example of an old-fashioned (in
the best sense) amateur museum, assembled with love and enthusiasm: there
are lots and lots of objects, unlike the modern museum which has just
a few artefacts cleverly lighted; and many of them can be picked up and
handled. There is probably the most comprehensive and well-labelled assemblage of flints which I have seen; also some Roman material and a fine collection of medieval metalwork. Then there is the display of rural bygones, including a wonderful collection of jars and bottles; and a geological section with a extensive display of ammonites and other fossils. |
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| The day finished with a sumptuous cream tea provided through the generous hospitality of Fred Hoskins and Gill Jackson at their home in Pimperne. A satisfying conclusion to a fascinating afternoon at Down Farm. | |||