Multimedia -

This is my Multimedia page and here I will be featuring podcasts, videos I have produced and photos of past & present performances / historical interpretations I am involved with. If you’d like to be a part of this site, you can join my “Friends of Iron Age Guru” and post too!

Will B+W

Hole in the roof week 2

hearth and home

fish traps

Sharpening-my-knife-Week-3

Old-Smokey-on-a-good-day.

Henllys-97-Week-1

firemaking

Completin-diary

In 1997, I was given the opportunity to volunteer to live in one of the Iron Age Roundhouses at Castell Henllys, Pembrokshire National Park in Wales, UK.

The aim of the exercise was for the archaeologist in charge to see how the house and area around the house changed before, during and after human occupation over 14-20 days.

It was a valuable experience for me because I appreciated a few things which aren’t obvious until you do them.

The Iron Age People must have used Charcoal as their main source of fuel rather than wood The first week of cooking on, living in and sleeping in an environment which had smoke filling up the top-cone and settling at a ceiling approx 7 feet from the floor had a negative impact on my voice and eyes. Burning charcoal for the second week gave a clean environment with no chance of carbon monoxide build up due to the free flow of air through the eaves.
Their midden heap must have either been huge or they fed their waste to their animals.
The site shouldn’t be thought of as just a fortess, but also a working farm. I believe the larger most recent addition to the site, the “Chieftain’s” house was in fact the barn where the kept animals over the winter, with a hearth in the centre for boiling the contents of the midden with nettles and a little milk for the pigs.
The importance of human contact. Unlike the Iron Age, I was living alone and isolated. When my Iron Age Reenactor mates arrived on the second weekend, I spoke non stop for 2 hours. All was going well until I tried cooking using the Bronze Cauldron. Then 24 hours of Gastroenteritis finished my sojourn a few days early. Perhaps I simply didn’t have an Iron Age Stomach!

If you want to find out more about my living history experiment you can download my ebook now ! Physical books ship from UK.

Little book of iron age living ebook

Iron Age Impressions

Send me your Iron Age impressions, everyone welcome. I am working on a kit guide which will help reenactors and teachers recreate accurate Iron Age gear.