Guess what this is. Yes, obviously it's a stick, but what is it for? What if I were to tell you that it's a Magic Wand? Once you'd stopped laughing hysterically you might be surprised to learn that that's exactly what it is (probably). It comes from the extraordinary Alverstone Dig - a vast archaeological discovery we accidentally made whilst creating a big pond for wildlife down in the Yar Valley in 2005. We had unwittingly uncovered a beautiful Roman road overlying a set of Iron Age timber walkways and overlain in turn by Saxon tracks, making Alverstone one of the most important wetland archaeological finds in the country. In amongst it all our team found coins, nails, spears and axes, knives and buckles, deer bones and teeth, ancient hazel-nuts nibbled by ancient dormice - all of this between 2500 and 1500 years old! We're still working with experts on the painstaking analysis of all the bits - the timber, pottery, metal, glass and bone, and to try to understand what it was that made Alverstone such an extraordinarily busy and important place for so many hundreds of years.
Quite a few of the knives and spear heads that we found from the site had seemingly been bent or broken before being thrown into the marshes around the causeways and it is this that has got folks thinking about the ceremonial and religious significance of the site. So when a curious pointed wooden stick, about 40cms long and with diamond patterns cut into it, appeared in the Saxon layers of the dig collected minds naturally began to conjure with the wonderful idea of a wand. And so I sit here writing this with the box of artefacts from the dig beside me thinking that in it lies an object that might last have been brandished by some bearded and gloriously raving druid on a dark and stormy night in old Alverstone. Somehow it makes most of my other work seem rather dry. I know what you're thinking: 'Has he tried it out?' Yes, of course I have. And has it worked? Well that would be telling, but you might want to look out for the rather nice new fleet of Island 2000 Bentleys here and there about the Island. (As if we'd actually wish for anything so mundane when we could have wings, or invisibility, or both!)