Day 9!

TGIF! Well that would be if it wasn't such a busy day!! With a film crew on the farm and having to take part in an interview as well as make props for their film as well as continue work on The Eurybia project it was a good job that we had help in the form of volunteers from Help for Heroes Recovery Center, Tedworth House.

The volunteers from Help for Heroes Recovery Center, Tedworth House, Wiltshire listening to an introduction talk by project leader and master boat builder Ryan Watts.

 The volunteers from Help for Heroes Recovery Center, Tedworth House, Wiltshire, will be working on their own boat during the duration of the project, The Epimetheus. This is a smaller boat than its sister The Eurybia but explores a new and exciting method of prehistoric log boat building.

When following the process of log boat building in prehistory the selection of the tree to be used as the parent log has always been seen to be of high importance. Pictures often show 'religious' men accompanying the boat builders into the woods to choose the biggest, straightest tree to fell in order to build their boat. This would be no easy feat when looking at the tools that were available to prehistoric man. The Epimetheus will challenge this popular theory about log selection.

A volunteer from Help for Heroes Recovery Center, Tedworth House, Wiltshire looses his head in the base of The Epimetheus.

The parent log for The Epimetheus was felled due to a cauliflower fungus growing at its base. This makes the tree rot from the inside out. The tree in question was felled due to health and safety reasons but if left to its own devices the tree would have come down in the next big storm. The rot inside is nice and soft and can be easily removed making the hollowing of the log a lot easier than a tree without the rot. Archaeological evidence shows that prehistoric man could place watertight transoms at the base of their log boats to stop the water flowing in. We hope to demonstrate that it was not always necessary to choose a healthy tree but could utilise naturally fallen trees and reduce their work load.

The volunteers from Help for Heroes made wedges from hazel rods to remove the rot from the log and also had a chance to work on The Eurybia, removing the days burning from the parent log.

Removing the heart rot from The Epimetheus's parent log with a sharpened hazel stick.

Removing char from The Eurybia using an Oyster shell, a method well documented in ethnographic sources.

   It was a very productive day and great fun was had by volunteers at the farm and the volunteers from Help for Heroes. They made good progress on The Epimetheus and will be back soon to carry on their work.