Last Friday school children and students took part in an archaeological investigation on Salisbury Plain to discover remains from the First World War.
The students, from Winton College and Glenmore School in Bournemouth, are taking part in the Jon Egging Trust’s Blue Skies programme which aims to inspire young people to help them reach their full potential. This group of JET participants started the programme last year and have already taken part in the excavation of an Iron Age feasting midden on the Plain.
Under guidance from the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, Operation Nightingale soldiers and Wessex Archaeology, the JET students performed a fieldwalking survey and recovered surface material from the site of a WWI army training camp. The star find of the survey was a military uniform button, spotted by one of the keen-eyed JET students.
The training camp in question was used mainly by New Zealand forces, who carved a kiwi bird into the chalk of the hill that overlooks the camp, which makes it very appropriate that our investigation took place on ANZAC Day (April 25th). To commemorate this anniversary the JET participants visited the military cemetery at Tidworth to pay respect to the ANZAC forces buried there.
