Tree-ring Dating At Plas Tirion, Llanwrst

Plaster overmantel with figures of War and Peace in teh Great Chamber of Plas Tirion
NPRN 27773   GTJ22363

As mentioned in last week’s Heritage of Wales blog , as part of their partnership work with the Dating Old Welsh Houses community-based history project, Royal Commission staff recently visited a cluster of historical houses nestling in the Conwy Valley. One of the finest examples of these houses is Plas Tirion, an early-seventeenth-century winged-mansion with wonderfully-preserved plasterwork dated 1626 and 1628. The house is currently being lovingly restored by Nat and Sophie Scharer of the Natural Building Centre. To the south-west of the house lies a cowshed which unexpectedly incorporates the earlier house. Here, a single archaic smoke-blackened cruck truss survives and was successfully sampled by the dendrochronologist, Dan Miles.


The visit has been captured on three short films made by Huw Jenkins, community reporter for BBC Radio Wales, and may be viewed by simply clicking the link below.

http://datingoldwelshhouses.blogspot.com/2012/01/plas-tirion.html

Subscribe to the Heritage of Wales News and sign up for the full feed RSS, just click this RRS button and subscribe!

Also find us on:
Twitter Hashtag: #RCAHMWales

Digital Past 2012 - PROGRAMME

Digital Past 2012
New technologies in heritage, interpretation & outreach
Weds 22nd-Thurs 23rd February 2012, Llandrindod Wells

PROGRAMME

Day 1 Wednesday 22nd February

CONFERENCE SESSION ONE (Main auditorium)
09.00 Registration: Tea and coffee on arrival
10.30 Welcome: Peter Wakelin (RCAHMW)
10.40 Opening address: Professor Huw Bowen (University of Swansea)
Chair: tbc
11.00 Sharing our Digital Past: Digital innovation at the Royal Commission Louise Barker & David Thomas (RCAHMW)
11.40 Digitally preserving a submerged Bronze Age city: The Pavlopetri Underwater Archaeology Project: Dr. Jon Henderson (Nottingham University)
12.20 The use of social media in heritage organisations: James Mott (ProjectBook)
13.00 Lunch

PARALLEL CONFERENCE SESSIONS

Heritage at Risk: Preservation by Record and Conservation strategies – papers. (Main auditorium) 

Chair: tbc 

14.00 Digital technology in commercial archaeology: Marcus Abbot (ArcHeritage) 

14.30 Setting standards: new guidelines on data capture, processing and archiving: James Hepher (Historic Scotland) 

15:00 Discovering the submerged landscapes off the Welsh coast – The West Coast Palaeolandscapes Project: Ken Murphy (Dyfed Archaeological Trust)

The Digital Marketplace – seminar. (First floor seminar room)
Chair: Tom Pert 

14.00 Social media: James Mott (Projectbook) & tbc 

14.40 Digital Inclusion: Does it work? Peter Austin (Ceredigion County Council) & Tom Hadfield (Visit Wales)

15.30 Tea, coffee & cakes

UNCONFERENCE SESSION (Main auditorium, board room & first floor seminar room)
Chairs: Toby Driver, Susan Fielding & Tom Pert
16.00 Unconference session (15 minute presentation slots available to be booked on the day, to run over 3 rooms)
17.45 Open house
18.15 Close

Evening conference dinner, The Metropole, for those paying to attend

Day 2 Thursday 23rd February

TRAINING SESSIONS AND WORKSHOPS

9.00 tea and coffee on arrival 

9.30 Workshops 

Handling LiDAR: Oliver Davis (RCAHMW) 

Terrestrial laser scanning: Paul Burrows (Leica Geo-Systems) 

Point cloud data: Creating accurate visualisations for heritage sites: CAST 

Uploading information to the Peoples Collection Wales: Sioned Rees-Jones (Culturenet Cymru) Archaeological Photography - New Techniques: Adam Stanford (Aerial-Cam) 

Others tbc

11.00 Tea, coffee and cakes

11.25 Depart for parallel conference sessions

PARALLEL CONFERENCE SESSIONS

The Digital Marketplace – papers. (Main auditorium) 

Chair: Tom Pert 

11.30 The App Furnace project: Jo Reid (Calvium Ltd) 

12.00 Placebooks; Community based e-trails: Dr Alan Chamberlain (Nottingham University) 

12.30 The importance of having the right infrastructures in place when dealing with new audiences and new technologies: Dominique Attwood & Sue Davies (Leeds Museums and Galleries)

OR

Heritage At Risk: Preservation by Record and Conservation strategies – seminar. (First floor seminar room)
Chair: tbc 

11.30 Setting standards I: James Hepher (Historic Scotland) & tbc 

12.10 Setting standards II: Marcus Abbott (ArcHeritage), Paul Bryan (English Heritage) & Neil Maylan (Glamorgan Gwent Archaeological Trust)

13.00 Lunch

CONFERENCE SESSION TWO (Main auditorium)
Chair: tbc
14.00 “Botafumeiro and Portico de la Gloria”; Virtual enhancement of the cultural heritage by interactive applications: Julián Flores (University of Santiago de Compostela)
14.40 Making the most of digital technologies on archaeological excavations: visualising the Roman legionary fortress at Caerleon: Dr. Peter Guest (Cardiff University)
15.20 Recent survey work at Stonehenge: Trevor Pearson & Paul Bryan (English Heritage)
16.00 Summing Up: Kate Roberts (Cadw)
16.20 Close

*******************************************************
DIGITAL PAST 2012 - Full Details
*******************************************************

Subscribe to the Heritage of Wales News and sign up for the full feed RSS, just click this RRS button and subscribe!

Also find us on:
Twitter Hashtag: #RCAHMWales

Dating Old Welsh Houses Using Dendrochronology

Plas Tirion, Llanwrst, one of the houses tree-ring dated this week.
NPRN 27773    GTJ22359

Earlier this week, Royal Commission staff visited the Conwy valley, to work with Margaret Dunn, the director of the Dating Old Welsh Houses project  in evaluating the final batch of houses, which will now be tree-ring dated by Dr Dan Miles and Dr Martin Bridge from the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory. Working in partnership with the Royal Commission, Dating Old Welsh Houses is a community-based history project focused on dating historic houses in the counties of North-west Wales and then compiling their house histories. In the last three years over sixty houses have been successfully dated by the partnership project and revealed some remarkable results. Contrary to the traditional view that North Wales was an architectural backwater in terms of houses, the results of the project show that the characteristic Snowdonian house took shape in the early sixteenth-century much earlier than previously believed. The work of this project was featured on Wednesday, 25 January by BBC Radio Wales on the Roy Noble programme by their community-reporter, Huw Jenkins. This interview will now be available for the next week on the BBC iPlayer. To learn more about the work of the partnership project, click on the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b019m7bm and fast-forward to 1 hour and 48 minutes into the programme. Many of the results are already available in the National Monuments Record and on Coflein.


PLAS TIRION

• Site Details
• Online Images (8)
• Associated Collection Records (9)

Coflein - Discovering Our Past Online
Coflein is the online database for the National Monuments Record of Wales (NMRW), the national collection of information about the historic environment of Wales. 



Subscribe to the Heritage of Wales News and sign up for the full feed RSS, just click this RRS button and subscribe!

Also find us on:
Twitter Hashtag: #RCAHMWales

Cadw Chapels Collection - Newly Catalogued

Bethania Welsh Baptist Chapel, Bethania Road, Maesteg

Cadw Chapels Collection: Ref. No. CCC02
This group comprises a set of 53 measured drawings of chapels in Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan, copied by Cadw for its Chapels project. The original drawings were made by students of the Welsh School of architecture (WSA): with whom copyright resides.

Covering dates:  1979


Bethania Welsh Baptist Chapel, Bethania Road, Maesteg:

• Site Details
• Online Images (38)
• Associated Collection Records (48)

Coflein - Discovering Our Past Online
Coflein is the online database for the National Monuments Record of Wales (NMRW), the national collection of information about the historic environment of Wales. 

Subscribe to the Heritage of Wales News and sign up for the full feed RSS, just click this RRS button and subscribe!

Also find us on:
Twitter Hashtag: #RCAHMWales

Survey of Pembrokeshire Slate Quarries

The Rosebush and Bellstone slate quarries from the air. The buildings being surveyed are visible alongside the road running right to left across the picture.
Catalogue Number C422589 Image DI2006_1692

Investigators Sue Fielding and Spencer Smith have been undertaking survey work at the Rosebush and Bellstone Slate quarries, near the village of Rosebush, Pembrokeshire. Working in conjunction with the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and the quarry owner, the surviving buildings and structures are being recorded in order to monitor their condition. As well as providing an important resource for the National Park staff to aid them in the conservation of the site, the work will also feature in a book on the Archaeology of the Slate Industry of Wales being produced by the Royal Commission.

Site Details

• Site Details
• Associated Sites (2)
• Online Images (3)
• Associated Collection Records (7)

Subscribe to the Heritage of Wales News and sign up for the full feed RSS, just click this RRS button and subscribe!

Also find us on:
Twitter Hashtag: #RCAHMWales

Terry James Aerial Photographic Collection - Newly Catalogued

Terry James Aerial Photographic Collection: Ref. No. TJA
10 files of black and white negatives, and contact sheets, relating to aerial photographs taken by Terry James, Dyfed Archaeological Trust, of sites in Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire.
The archive is catalogued by site for single site surveys, or by photograph date for more mixed view groups.

Covering dates: 1978-1986
Subscribe to the Heritage of Wales News and sign up for the full feed RSS, just click this RRS button and subscribe!

Also find us on:
Twitter Hashtag: #RCAHMWales

Sign Up - Friends of the Royal Commission New On-line Form

Friends of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

Friends of the Royal Commission on-line form

Joining the Friends of the Royal Commission just got easier with an on-line form.

Please sign up or forward the information to any friends who may be interested in joining.

Further reading:
The Friends of the Royal Commission


Subscribe to the Heritage of Wales News and sign up for the full feed RSS, just click this RRS button and subscribe!

Also find us on:
Twitter Hashtag: #RCAHMWales