Nine members of PAHS attended the Hampshire Field Club Landscape Section’s Conference and AGM at Peter Symonds College, Winchester on Saturday 7 November. Organised jointly with Petersfield Area Historical Society and Buriton Local History Group, the subject for the day was “Petersfield: Changing Landscapes in and around a Hampshire Market Town.”With 65 people in attendance, the first speaker was George Anelay, a professional archaeologist and Project Director of the Petersfield Museum’s project People of the Heath. George focused on “Understanding and conserving Petersfield’s pre-historic barrows” with particular reference to the current four-year excavations and the up-to-date finds and theories.
The next two sessions were taken by Society members Bill Gosney and Nick Swan who spoke firstly on ”Petersfield from the Norman invasion to the Civil War” and then on “The Transport Revolution and the Growth of Petersfield”.
The final session of the day was from Doug Jones of Buriton Local History Group on “Geology and Landscapes in Buriton: effects on a rural parish.”
This is the first time that our Society has been involved in a project with the Hampshire Field Club and we were delighted to learn from their Chairman, Mike Broderick, that it had been well received with one of their members reportedly saying that our "presentation of Petersfield’s past was one of the best he had heard.”
It is planned to follow up the conference in the summer of 2016 with a visit and two walks around Petersfield featuring “The General History of the Town” and “Petersfield in World War One”. We look forward to meeting with them again.
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