The Gefrin Trust

Just when you thought you had seen every significant thing on the Web to do with Yeavering, up comes something remarkable. This is the first that I have heard of the Gefrin Trust, the current owner of the site of Gatburgh.

It is all down to a chance encounter between archaeologist Roger Miket and an estate agent in Wooler, the latter casually stating that a piece of land with an interesting bit of history behind it had come on the market. The upshot was that he raised the money to buy the site and has since set up the Gefrin Trust to manage the site. The Trust is a registered company and a charity.

The company logo is interesting - they have taken the head of Ceredig's staff (well, technically the head of his father's staff, but they looked very similar) and transformed the front of it into a modern graphic. A lot of logos of this sort lose the power of the original but this works very well - it just goes to show how stylised the original was!

The website has some interesting resources, including a pdf of Hope-Taylor's monograph and an interesting piece aimed at kids (pun intended) called "What the Goats Saw" This is an account of the history of the site from a goat's eye view. No Grufflings get mentioned.

The board of the Trust includes a good mix of scholars (Rosemary Cramp!) and the local area - Northumberland National Park, the County Council and the Glendale Gateway Trust.

I recall using some of Roger Miket's material as a source of very detailed information on Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and other sites which provided some background material for my dissertation on place-names in Northumberland. Roger's data included OS references and so it was very easy to georeference the locations and present them as a distribution map.

I would like to wish Roger and his associates the very best in their endeavours at Gefrin. It is good to know that such an important site is in good hands!

Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons

Going (slightly) off topic, I have just watched one of the best programmes I have ever seen on Anglo-Saxon art presented with passion and knowledge by Dr. Janina Ramirez on BBC4, a criminal slot for such an excellent piece. It is airing (presumably) as part of the BBC's current Norman Season (see what they did! Those rotten Normans overturning centuries of artistic development!).

I was disappointed by her simplification of the Anglo-Saxons following Rome, the rest of the country following native Christianity when it was the fact that the two had to co-exist for a time in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that brought about the decision to change. She was of course right in identifying the figure of St Cuthbert as the figure around whom the two traditions could mix and grow (even if he may have been obedient rather than enthusiastic about the change).

I was slightly intrigued by why her boots seemed to play such a star role in the programme though, as they wended their way in close up through St Paul's in Jarrow, across the turf at Lindisfarne Priory and through the halls of the British Library and the British Museum.

That aside, I learned a few new opinions, saw some objects I had never seen before and finally got to see the hall that Regia Anglorum were building in Kent back when I was a member.