DIGGING DEEPER
The origins of Whitle
The Tudor Farming Interpretation Group was delighted to receive a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant for an exciting heritage project, Digging Deeper – The Origins of Whitle, a community archaeology project based at Under Whitle farm, Sheen. Commenting on the award all the way back in 2019, Hilary Butler, a member of the Tudor Farming Interpretation Group said; “We are delighted to have received this support thanks to National Lottery players for the chance to reveal the origins of Whitle and to record this special heritage for future generations. We are also grateful for funding from the Peak District National Park Communities Small Grant Scheme.”
Find us on social media:
We used three (or strictly speaking, four) different forms of survey: geophysics (resistivity, magnetometry); tape and offset; and LIDAR.
The excavations took place in June and July 2016. with the help of students from Buxton Community School and St Thomas More’s School, Buxton.
Volunteers worked with Dr. Simon Harris, a medieval historian, to investigate Whitle and its links to the surrounding area.
Once all the fieldwork was completed and the finds analysed we then moved to work out what it all meant.
During the open day in Sept we had over 70 visitors to the project and they were able to see the on-going excavation, displays on the work that had been done by specialists, talk to volunteers about their experiences during the project and see other archaeology on the holding.
For many of the visitors, their visit was the first time they had been to Under Whitle, and so we were able to offer guided tours to tell them more of the history and archaeology of this seemingly quiet part of the Dove Valley.
There was also the chance for visitors of all ages to try their hand at archaeology and one activity that proved very popular was pot washing!
