Peterborough Heritage Festival 2016: the Vikings are coming!

… [prev] remarkable stories. There is a touring exhibition that is going around which tells the story about that and that will also be at the Festival, so there’s an opportunity over the weekend to go along and chat to some of the team who have been involved, and find out some of the information that has been discovered so far. So, in addition to the fun of the reenactment, which brings the period to life, there’s an opportunity to get involved and explore those very real human stories. A lot of societies and organisations come along over the Heritage Festival weekend if you’re interested in that side of things. The Peterborough and District Family HistorySociety bring along a mobile research facility, so if you’re interested in finding out more about local history or researching your family tree, there are people there who can advise you about how best to do that.

Are there other ways that visitors can get hands-on with history?
Yes! Quite literally, in fact; one of the exciting new things is real live archaeology on site… On the northwest side of the Cathedral there’s about an acre of ground between the Deanery and Wheel Yard. It’s really interesting because it’s not been substantially built over – at least, not for a long time. There hasn’t really been a significant amount of digging inside the Cathedral precincts because it’s full of listed buildings, scheduled ancient monuments or graves, and finding a patch of land within the historic precincts where we can dig is quite unusual, so we seized the opportunity to carry out some archaeology there. We also wanted to do something where people could come along and get involved, so during the ten days before the Heritage Festival there will be archaeology going on, facilitated by the Cambridge Archaeology Unit who will be excavating with schools and members of the general public. You can go online to register and get involved, and come along to dig one of five or six trenches which we’re putting into the ground there – or come along to one of the daily guided tours during the dig.

Listen, learn – and have fun!

Do you know what they might find..?
We’ve already done the geophysics using ground-penetrating radar – the sort of thing you see on Time Team that looks like a garden lawnmower, which can ‘see’ into the ground – and what we suspect we’ve got there is part of the defences of the Anglo- Saxon abbey. In other words the burgh wall – the ditch around the embankment and then a stone wall on top – which we know was roughly in that vicinity. So, what we’re hopefully doing for the very first time is excavating substantial remains of the Anglo- Saxon defences of the monastery – live! There are bits of the Anglo-Saxon abbey that survive underneath the Cathedral – there’s a sort of undercroft that was created by Victorian workmen when they were underpinning the tower in the 1880s, and they found part of the Anglo-Saxon church there. But that’s only a small section of the church – it’s also very hard to access, though we’re hoping to create a digitised version of it to go online eventually. But the advantage with the live archaeological dig is that we can have guided tours on site throughout the weekend, whilst they complete the last few days of the dig, so people can see what we’ve found and listen to the archaeologists explaining what it means. Plus, of course, we’ll hopefully be looking at the defences from the very period we’re recreating with the Viking attack. It might even go back as far as the Roman period; there is evidence of Roman stonework under the Cathedral and there is a suspicion that there was a Roman temple or monumental arch or something of that sort somewhere on his site. So, that’s really exciting. It’s not just about people dressing up and recreating something, it’s the real stuff…

This Festival is unique in that all the events recreated relate specifically to Peterborough. Why take that approach?
We deliberately programme it so that it reflects the story of the city. We’re very lucky in that we’ve got one of the richest stories of any city in the country, with 3,500 years of continuous human occupation here, so it’s great to be able to tell that story and bring it to life, to make local people more aware of their history and their heritage – but also to attract many more visitors to the city. Part of this is about putting Peterborough on the map, particularly in the run-up to 2018 when the Cathedral is 900 years old. At the Cathedral we’re already thinking about that, talking with our partners in the City Council and Vivacity, to Queensgate, Virgin East Coast trains, the other attractions in Peterborough and the business community about how we can best use the real unique selling point of Peterborough, which is its remarkable story.

We’ve seen in recent months all the Bronze Age finds that are coming out of Must Farm. We’ve got all these treasures in this area that we really don’t shout about enough, and the Heritage Festival is an ongoing way of helping to do that, and when we get to 2018 that will be a year of celebrations to help change people’s perceptions about Peterborough. Other events that tie in with our history can help do that, too. This year is the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and we’re also hoping to get a Norman knight to ride around the precincts at the Festival. But beyond that we’re working with English Heritage on another Hastings-themed event taking place in October, which they are calling ‘Harold’s Ride’.

Dominic Sewell – who did the joust at the Festival last year, and was one of the armoured knights who accompanied Richard III’s coffin when it travelled to Leicester for reburial – is planning to gather a number of his reenactment colleagues to ride from Stamford Bridge to Hastings to recreate Harold’s journey to that fateful battle. They’re stopping off at various places that we think they stopped at along the route, one of which, we’re pretty sure, was Peterborough. We know that Abbot Leofric, who was Abbot of Peterborough at the time, actually went with Harold. Unfortunately Leofric died en route and the rest of his entourage copped it at the battle, so the Battle of Hastings was not a good thing for the Abbey of Peterborough… So, hopefully they will be stopping here in October. That’s just another way in which this city has a remarkable story, and how that story can literally put it on the map. Pretty much most national events you can think of we have some kind of connection to.

The Heritage Festival Big Weekend In association with Perkins
2 & 3 July, 10am – 5pm
Cathedral Precincts, Cathedral Square, St John’s Square
Admission FREE 

www.vivacity-peterborough.com