Selborne Priory - providing information

The work on Cambridge is finished - well, this stage of it.  And the next job in hand is continuing the analysis of the stones at Selborne Priory in Hampshire.

Selborne is more famous perhaps as the site of Gilbert White's A Natural History of Selborne, a much loved 19thC natural history book.   He was the rector of Selborne, a village in Hampshire, where the Priory was founded, about a mile from the village, in 1233.   It was an Augustinian Priory and rather unusually, was dissolved in the 15thC, somewhat before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16thC,.  This was because the land was "appropriated" (with papal approval) in 1484 by Magdalen College Oxford. 

Mark started this work some months ago when he visited the stones, which are kept at the Hampshire Museum to record them.  They were originally excavated from 1953 onwards and some records have been made.  However, the paper records of the mid 20thC, while very useful, are easier to search when they are in digital form.   As well as making drawings and taking photographs, Mark will create a digital archive, which can be searched in different ways, and which can be used to analyse the assemblage, by date or petrology or architectural feature, or style.  are finally being pieced together. 

The assemblage of stones is largely contemporary:  Selborne Priory was an Augustinian foundation, established in 1233 and the stones nearly all date from that period.  When the priory was excavated there were very few finds apart from the stones, many of which are highly fragmentary, the stones therefore have a very considerable importance in understanding the buildings and how they were used.  Currently Mark is making detailed drawings for a future publication of the Priory.   The work is being funded by a long-established archaeological society, which has the funds to carry out this sort of  work occasionally. 

All over the country there are assemblages of stones like this - which could, if the funding and the will were there, be published and form the basis of reconstruction drawings of the original buildings, which would help visitors understand the archaeological sites when they visit them.

The OS survey map is covered with marks indicating "tumulus" or "Motte" or "battle" or "Priory (site of)".  It would be wonderful if when one walked there to visit them there was an information board funded through English Heritage with Heritage Lottery Funding just to tell people what had been there once and what it might have looked like.  

Last week when visiting my father I saw the humps in the ground that we were always told was a "Mercian castle".  It was clearly some sort of defensive earthwork.  I realised how little I knew about Saxon defensive structures compared with post-Norman castles.   This earthwork is right next door to the local Asda.   It would be fantastic if Asda or the developers had taken on the task of getting the necessary information from the right person and providing an information board of some kind.   It was probably a really busy earthwork too - it's set just on the edge of the Thames floodplain, where the border with Wessex? would have been, a long way from the Mercian heartland and out on a limb.   One could never have imagined it would one day be stuck in a housing estate next to a supermarket.