Winter morning on The Carrs

This is why I love The Carrs so much. Morning mist, a sleepy flock of Teal plinking away in the distance on the Hertford Cut, hoar frost on the ground and chacking Fieldfares on the fields down the lane to Flixton Bridge. Several thousand molehills down there too. They love the soft, deep peaty soil of The Carrs. This is neutral fen peat, not the acid blanket bog of the uplands.

Frosty dawn over Flixton Carr, 22/01/16

It is a while since I last went down to Flixton Bridge. The lane was bumpy as ever, indicative of the slumping land surface of the peat. The Hertford was quite full but flowing freely. I checked out the fields containing Flixton Island (site of digs in 2014) and No Name Hill, the prehistoric islands in what was then Mesolithic Lake Flixton. A flock of Lapwing rose from wet pasture to the east and flapped in a slow circuit over my head. I tried repeatedly to count them but the shifting shape and direction of the flock presented a challenge. I estimated about 90 plovers in total. Come the spring Lapwing disperse to the breeding grounds on the Moors , the Wolds and across the patchwork of arable and pastoral land in The Vale of Pickering. Their fortunes are not looking too rosy at the moment, (see Hoping for a Lapwing Spring where I discussed this topic before on this blog.)

 

Star Carr hits Social Media

The setting of Star Carr near Seamer, Scarborough in the Vale of Pickering, taken from Flixton Brow, Feb 2016

It was with trembling excitement over the past week that learned of a new and very welcome milestone in the Star Carr archaeology project. In fact two milestones. The first, last Thursday afternoon when a colleague informed me that Star Carr was on Facebook. (Type in to the search box MesolithicStarCarr.) The second came after the weekend when a twitter account for the project was revealed. At this news my pulse was actually racing.

Now I’ve long suspected that the StarCarr.com site was under-visited not to mention clunky and infrequently updated. (Here I have to be careful as I am responsible myself for long hiatuses in blog posts and upgrades to this site.) I have also felt that whenever there was some momentous research announcement or an event to publicise I struggled with the absence of any official social media presence for Star Carr, feeling barely satisfied to stick a hashtag in front of #StarCarr in the hope of reaching the enormous audience out there with an appetite for knowledge about this remarkable Mesolithic landscape.
Anyway, I need fret no more that @CarrsWetland and this wordpress blog is a poor stand-in evangelist for the archaeological phenomenon that is Star Carr. Enjoy, Like, Follow, Share away. I’m looking forward to doing lots of that in the coming weeks and months as the University of York spread the message about the Prehistoric site near Scarborough, its unique setting in North Yorkshire’s Vale of Pickering and the astonishing window it offers on Stone Age life in North-West Europe.