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!