Community archaeological dig planned at Shaftesbury Park in Carrickfergus - video Dailymotion

The local community are being invited to take part in an archaeological dig at Shaftesbury Park in Carrickfergus this May.

Transcript

00:00 Hello, my name is Rory O'Whale. I'm an archaeologist with the Centre for Community Archaeology

00:05 at Queen's University Belfast and we're here today in Shatfri Park at Joymount in

00:10 Cork Fergus. The Centre for Community Archaeology was awarded a grant by the National Lottery

00:15 Heritage Fund to carry out a three-year community archaeology project called CAPNI, Community

00:21 Archaeology Project Northern Ireland. And one of those projects is working together

00:25 with the museum in Cork Fergus and the Cork Fergus and District Historical Society and

00:31 Mid and East Antrim Borough Council to carry out community excavation. And we're here today

00:39 to do a preliminary non-intrusive geophysical survey, which means we get to do essentially

00:45 underground radar below the ground to see if there's any archaeological monuments there.

00:51 And the reason we are in Shatfri Park is that we have a map here, first edition map from

00:56 the 1830s and it shows the location of a fort there. So Cork Fergus is a very historical

01:03 town, you're aware we have the town walls from the 17th century with the medieval castle,

01:07 we have St. Nicholas Church which is a mixture of medieval and 17th century. And in the 17th

01:14 century out here, this would have been the deer parks for the Chichesters, but it was

01:18 close to the medieval town as well. So we're not exactly sure what the monument shown on

01:23 this map is, this is the first edition, the 1830s. So our excavation, which we're hoping

01:28 to carry out in the second half of May, will investigate this monument and we're hoping

01:35 then to facilitate local people to work on the excavation. We're hoping that maybe we'll

01:41 have school children in the mornings and volunteers in the afternoon. And if people want to volunteer,

01:46 they can look at the Archaeology of Queen's Facebook site, there's a QR code and you can

01:51 log in and find out about volunteering there. Or you can contact the Centre for Community

01:56 Archaeology at cca@qub.ac.uk and find out about our CAPNI project which will be taking

02:05 place over the next three years. And we're very excited to be here, hoping to be here

02:10 in Cork Fergus in May.

02:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]