In the 1980s SOAG’s founder, Cynthia Graham Kerr, researched the buildings and landscape of Exlade Street, near Woodcote. SOAG and The Oxfordshire Woodland Group took up where Cynthia left off, leading a new multipart project, which included: searching for lost buildings; understanding how local timber buildings were constructed; and studying how the local woodlands were exploited for these purposes, in particular how extant sawpits were used to convert timbers.
From 2016 to 2019, the Oxfordshire Woodland Group undertook the construction of a Woodland Cruck Frame barn using traditional techniques and using hand sawn and hewn timber from the local woodland.
For more information on the barn construction see editions of SOAG Messenger from March 2016 to April 2019, or contact: kenhume@soagarch.org.uk.
The Goring Heath Landscape study demonstrated the South Oxfordshire woodland landscape is covered with a profusion of small pits in woodland locations. The pits were either typically 2ft or 4ft deep. The shallow pits are likely to be hewing pits where logs were squared ready for building purposes and the deeper pits for scie-sawing to produce halved timber building components, floor joists, rafters & planks, etc. The use of a pit is illustrated in the sketch below, with replica tools shown in the photograph.
As part of the Landscape study, a saw pit was surveyed and partially excavated in 2020 to confirm its original cross section profile before any sloughing, woodland duff and/or rubbish deposition took place.
The first step was to clean out accumulated flytipped household rubbish from inside the saw pit. This revealed a profusion of cans, milk and beer bottles and other assorted pottery (chinaware) and clothing all of which appeared to relate to the “New Age Traveller” era. The milk bottles were from Clifford Dairies (Reading) which ceased trading in 1993. The pit was then in a state suitable for performing a measured laser survey which was undertaken to produce a 150 point x 50cm grid profile. The profile was imported into an AutoCAD system to produce a 3D computer model of the sawpit which was used to calculate the original amount of spoil removed and heaped on the downhill side of the pit enabling speculation about the likely width and depth of a vertical sided sawpit.
