Some people may be aware that over the last year we have been working on a new publication. A new book - 30 years of SHARP. It is now complete and is being sent of to the printers in time for this season. A similar book was being planned in 2019/2020 for the 25th anniversary of SHARP, however COVID-19 got in the way and then the time passed us by. So this year work started on this new publication with the aim of launching it as part of our 30th anniversary. The book takes a

As we have been busy with the toilet block build, we have had lots of people ask questions about our new composting toilets; how they will work and why we have made the decisions we have when building them? The doors are added and the toilets are nearly ready to go! One of the reasons the toilets have traditionally been at the end of the track is because there is direct access to the sewer network in that area. This has worked for many years and while the costs of hiring toil

The committee have decided to try something a bit different this year. Traditionally the AGM would be held during the season where a week was selected based on what team were available, but this didn’t always suit some SHARP members. It was also a lot to manage on top of running a season and the addition of allowing people to take part via zoom made it very complicated to run. Furthermore an AGM mid-season made it more difficult for transitioning over committee members as cha

It has been a busy year on site and if you have been keeping track of our blogs you will notice that there will be a big change in our visitor centre. We started by stripping the container down to the frame, even replacing the floor vinyl, and over the last few months lots of building work has taken place. Stripped down for a fresh start. Inside there is a consistent base with plenty of storage for various SHARP things including cupboards for health and safety materials, scho

WARNING: the following article contains images and text related to human remains The SHARP Human Remains Team has had a trip up to Norfolk this May to get things ready for the 2026 season. We have got our skeletons and lectures ready to run our Human Remains Course (week 2), and prepared lots of jobs for our Human Remains volunteers (weeks 2-3). We are working through data checks of the Early Medieval skeletons so we have as much information about them as possible. We wil

CONTENT WARNING: this post contains photographs of human bone fragments During an excavation in Saggy Horse Field in 2019, a cremation urn and associated votive pottery were found. This is the second cremation burial excavated by SHARP, after excavating “the body in the oven” in 2006, an individual who was buried in the oven of a Roman grain drier with flue system. Map of Sedgeford cremation burials A cremation is the act of burning a human body as a way of treating the dea

CONTENT WARNING: this post contains photographs of human bones In the 2025 season, the human remains team spent several weeks in The Church of St Mary the Virgin in Sedgeford. We ran our annual week-long “Introduction to Human Remains” course, as well as two weeks of human remains volunteers. During the course, we cover basic skeletal anatomy, and how to assess human remains to determine an individual’s age at death, sex, height, and any illnesses or injuries they may hav

Despite the obvious interest in the car park trench and all the finds/exciting discoveries being made there, the malting site trench was never disserted. Some weeks we even managed to have more volunteers than we expected, going to show that archaeology is not all about finds. With a good core set of regular volunteers each week, keen to work on the amazing features we made huge progress and have increased yet again our understanding of the site. This blog will summarise th

It was an excellent year for Enviro. This was the first season in a brand-new home, the wooden Enviro cabin with a special sign above the door. The cabin had been built specially for us in the closed season and it was greatly appreciated having this good working environment. There was a ready stream of willing volunteers and they cleared a record amount of samples. In the 2024 season, we had 246 litres of samples come in. This year, we received over 1,000 and kept the work up

We are excited to announce that we have received funding from the Farming in Protected Landscape Programme (FiPL) to renovate our information centre into a Heritage Education Centre. They have 100% funded the project, which means we won’t have to crowdfund to top it up, although SHARP will need to cover some of the costs of infrastructure around the build. This funding will allow us to completely strip out the cabin and create from scratch a much more inviting and informative