that said: the only good flint-knapper is a dead one.
This was my disheartening cue to turn in, and a moment later I was clumping through the unseen yielding forms that now lay between the roundhouse entrance and my haybale. A stumbling foot on a sleeper's arm, a blindly probing hand on a young face, much yelping and whispered apologies and there I was at last on my relocated bed of straw.
Prone in the snuffling, shuffling blackness, I could hear John still at it out by the fire; having failed to awaken Wayne's inner historian, he now appealed directly to his outer accountant. There were snatches of grim marketingspeak ('it's all about building a brand'), and a stark primer in how to milk the undiscerning cash cow that was the visiting school party: 'Each kid comes in with six or seven quid, right, and their parents don't expect to see any of that again. You can get some old coins knocked up for next to nothing – kids love those. Build up your school contacts and you can pull in three, three and a half grand a month, easy.'
My final day began by the campfire with a wooden bowl of porridge and the difficult aroma of onion skins, boiling in a cauldron to make dye. Karen played a prominent instructional role in what was to be a day of more delicate, perhaps more feminine, period skills. Yet more intensive, too: 'In the Iron Age, no one sat around doing nothing,' she reminded us, unaware that I had spent large chunks of the previous three days doing precisely that.
After an hour or two in the cauldron, yellowed skeins of spun wool were hauled out to dry in the hot sun, then painstakingly woven into wristbands on a fiddly handloom that the men weren't allowed near. Instead, we twisted and tapped lengths of brass wire into distant approximations of decorative cloak-brooches.
As we bent and banged and wove, Karen asked my fellow Iron Age newbies what had drawn them to Cinderbury; I could sense that she herself was curious to discover the appeal of this unfashionable and unglamorous period. Yet it had been plain even to me that their willingness to sit by this fire in Reeboks suggested none harboured a passion for authentic reenactment, and many of their questions ('So was the Bronze Age before or after the Iron Age?') betrayed a cheery ignorance of ancient history in general. There were mutters about an interest in traditional crafts, and the posh dad spoke of a distant though still inspirational encounter with primitive societies in Burma. But the common theme that emerged was a refreshingly simple impulse to get away from it all, one so assertive it had overpowered the chortling contempt of friends and family. 'Everyone thinks I'm mad,' smiled the late arrival, draping smelly, wet yarn across a log, 'driving five hours to sleep on the floor with strangers in a place with no running water.' The examiner had faced workplace jeers ('Give my love to the Flintstones!'), and the absent wife/mother of the father-and-son team had responded to the news with a dumbstruck gawp.
It was almost as if they'd been drawn here against their will by some dormant part of their ancient consciousness, one that had briefly broken through what – on the timescale of human evolution and social conditioning – was after all just a recently applied veneer of urban sophistication. And that didn't just go for the adults: I'd thought our youngest villager seemed unutterably bored until she looked up from her lapful of unspun wool and announced, 'I wish I could always be in the olden days.'
As the sun rose higher, it became ever more challenging to concentrate on the finickety tasks at hand. After a couple of hours, having fashioned a passable ringhead bodkin (oh, look it up), I moved on to a very brief career as a fletcher. I was endeavouring to split and trim my third and final goose feather into something that might conceivably improve the accuracy of an arrow, rather than just remodel it as an anorexic Gonk troll, when John issued a very strange
This was my disheartening cue to turn in, and a moment later I was clumping through the unseen yielding forms that now lay between the roundhouse entrance and my haybale. A stumbling foot on a sleeper's arm, a blindly probing hand on a young face, much yelping and whispered apologies and there I was at last on my relocated bed of straw.
Prone in the snuffling, shuffling blackness, I could hear John still at it out by the fire; having failed to awaken Wayne's inner historian, he now appealed directly to his outer accountant. There were snatches of grim marketingspeak ('it's all about building a brand'), and a stark primer in how to milk the undiscerning cash cow that was the visiting school party: 'Each kid comes in with six or seven quid, right, and their parents don't expect to see any of that again. You can get some old coins knocked up for next to nothing – kids love those. Build up your school contacts and you can pull in three, three and a half grand a month, easy.'
My final day began by the campfire with a wooden bowl of porridge and the difficult aroma of onion skins, boiling in a cauldron to make dye. Karen played a prominent instructional role in what was to be a day of more delicate, perhaps more feminine, period skills. Yet more intensive, too: 'In the Iron Age, no one sat around doing nothing,' she reminded us, unaware that I had spent large chunks of the previous three days doing precisely that.
After an hour or two in the cauldron, yellowed skeins of spun wool were hauled out to dry in the hot sun, then painstakingly woven into wristbands on a fiddly handloom that the men weren't allowed near. Instead, we twisted and tapped lengths of brass wire into distant approximations of decorative cloak-brooches.
As we bent and banged and wove, Karen asked my fellow Iron Age newbies what had drawn them to Cinderbury; I could sense that she herself was curious to discover the appeal of this unfashionable and unglamorous period. Yet it had been plain even to me that their willingness to sit by this fire in Reeboks suggested none harboured a passion for authentic reenactment, and many of their questions ('So was the Bronze Age before or after the Iron Age?') betrayed a cheery ignorance of ancient history in general. There were mutters about an interest in traditional crafts, and the posh dad spoke of a distant though still inspirational encounter with primitive societies in Burma. But the common theme that emerged was a refreshingly simple impulse to get away from it all, one so assertive it had overpowered the chortling contempt of friends and family. 'Everyone thinks I'm mad,' smiled the late arrival, draping smelly, wet yarn across a log, 'driving five hours to sleep on the floor with strangers in a place with no running water.' The examiner had faced workplace jeers ('Give my love to the Flintstones!'), and the absent wife/mother of the father-and-son team had responded to the news with a dumbstruck gawp.
It was almost as if they'd been drawn here against their will by some dormant part of their ancient consciousness, one that had briefly broken through what – on the timescale of human evolution and social conditioning – was after all just a recently applied veneer of urban sophistication. And that didn't just go for the adults: I'd thought our youngest villager seemed unutterably bored until she looked up from her lapful of unspun wool and announced, 'I wish I could always be in the olden days.'
As the sun rose higher, it became ever more challenging to concentrate on the finickety tasks at hand. After a couple of hours, having fashioned a passable ringhead bodkin (oh, look it up), I moved on to a very brief career as a fletcher. I was endeavouring to split and trim my third and final goose feather into something that might conceivably improve the accuracy of an arrow, rather than just remodel it as an anorexic Gonk troll, when John issued a very strange
Similar Books
