Welsh Journals

importance of the archaeological sites within the modern landscape. All of the County and District planning departments in the Trust area now hold sets of archaeological maps showing every location where a 'rescue' reaction would be contemplated, or preservation urged, if the site came under threat of development. Both Clwyd-Powys and the Dyfed Trusts now use computers in this work, and the flow of information will become ever-freer through the capacity of these machines to re-order the stored information and print it out in any form (whether catalogue, list, map etc.) which is thought appropriate to a specific enquiry or a particular stage in the explanation or protection of the area's archaeology. Another form of protection and information-gathering was undertaken between 1977 and 1981 in a series of site-visits throughout Powys and parts of Clwyd. In northern Powys the work was done mainly in 1978, every known site being visited by members of a field team composed about equally of archaeological graduates and non-graduates, their salaries paid (as with many of the Trust's excavation staff over the years) by the Manpower Services Commission as part of their unemployment relief programme. The objects of the survey were not only to record the present condition of known sites and to assess threats from agencies such as encroaching arable cultivation, but also to record new sites known only to local people through their close familiarity with their own land; another objective was to enlist the interest and concern of local people and the farming community in the protection of archaeological sites from unnecessary or unwitting damage. By the end of the survey the number of archaeological sites — or possible sites- on the Trust's list for the area had been almost doubled, and the people under whose direct care the monuments fell had been told (in many cases for the first time) what they represented in terms of Montgomery's past. To be fully effective, of course, this kind of contact should be repeated on a regular, perhaps annual, basis. It is a matter of regret to the Trust that this has not proved possible. Perhaps the only solution lies in active local groups, loosely allied to the Trust but carrying out a continuous programme of monitoring and information-exchange in their spare time. Clearly the funds available to the Trust (whether from the M.S.C. or from the Welsh Office) will never allow this to be done on a full-time professional basis. Perhaps the proposed 'Friends of the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust', proposed by one of the guest-speakers at the 1983 Annual General Meeting in Machynlleth, could play a role here. As regards 'education' in a more formal sense, the Trust has for most of its life had to restrict itself to the spare-time efforts of its professional staff in occasional school visits and evening or lunchtime lectures. Field Officers whose job may take them for several months at a time to an excavation in a distant part of the Trust area cannot hope to run successful evening classes. Fortunately, this gap has recently been filled by the appointment of Dr. Christopher Arnold as extra-mural tutor in archaeology for the County of Powys, a far-sighted move by University College Aberystwyth in promoting the subject in one of the most thinly-populated parts of Wales. During the past eighteen months, too, the Trust's own contribution has been increased through the activities of an M.S.C.-funded Education Officer, originally Bruce Bennison, more recently Michael Dawson. Through this post the Trust has improved its output of information to the local and national press, undertaken a wider range of lectures and school visits, mounted travelling exhibitions throughout the Trust area, and continued the publication of 'popular' accounts of recent excavation-projects (for local sites there are now leaflets on excavations around the Upper Severn Valley, and on burial monuments on Long Mountain and elsewhere). A 12-page Review of Projects is also produced for the Annual General Meeting each year, to keep interested members of the public in touch with the Trust's activities. The current issue, for November 1983, can be