Happy Birthday North Downs YAC!
The Young Archaeologists' Club, for children between 8 and 16 who love history and archaeology, has around 70 local branches in the UK. North Downs YAC is one of two branches in Kent (the other is based in Canterbury). Members come from a very wide area, as far afield as Surrey and East Sussex, as well as north, south and central Kent.
The branch was initiated 10 years ago, and although we can't compete with the venerable age of the KAS (which celebrated its 150th birthday recently), we feel very proud to have sustained such a successful group for a decade. The members who started with us in 2000 are now in their late teens and twenties; we still hear news of them from parents who bring their younger siblings to meetings today.
It takes ingenuity, commitment and real passion to come up with a new subject and activity every month. As our members grow up and move on we have repeated a few meetings for new arrivals, but generally there is something different each time. Providing a range of activities for such a wide age range can be tricky, but we work hard to get the balance right. We have staged mock battles at Oldbury hillfort, roamed inside Stonehenge with only the skylarks for company, excavated a windmill, a gunpowder mill, a Napoleonic fort and a medieval manor house, recreated numerous ancient artefacts, shot longbows, toured Flag Fen with Francis Pryor, and unearthed 500,000-year-old animal bone at Swalecliffe. We have been behind the scenes in Canterbury Cathedral to look at some of the rarest manuscripts in the country, have written hieroglyphs on papyrus and cuneiform on clay tablets, sat atop Mound One at Sutton Hoo, got covered in coal dust at Fowlmead searching the shale for fossils, and combed the woods for edible and medicinal plants. We take part in the Council for British Archaeology's Festival of Archaeology every year, holding a free children's activity event for the public, staffed by YAC parents, which now attracts more than 2000 people. Our parents are as wonderful as our children!
We are celebrating our birthday by sleeping on board HMS Cavalier (the only surviving WW2 destroyer) at Chatham Dockyard, with a family day out in the Dockyard during the day. Much of what we do would not be possible without the generous help of the KAS, who have consistently supported us over the years. We are grateful also to all the people who gave up their time for free to provide their expertise at meetings, and to past branch leaders who shared our vision.
Some of our older members have gone on to follow a career in the subject; all of our members are inspired to return each month and find out more about the past. 'Thank you' to the KAS, and to everyone involved - here's to the next ten years!
North Downs YAC Leaders