Rob and I are getting a little old and creaky, so (as with at the Abbey Festival) we went up a week early and set up (the organisers of the show are marvellous people and very accommodating) - this way the (adult) kids can help us load up 2 utes and 2 trailers the Saturday before the show, then come up with us on the Sunday and set up the shells of the tent and lift anything heavy out of the trailers for us; then Rob and I pootle around for a couple of days setting the rest of the encampment up and the rest of the group arrives later in the week and set up the insides of their tents (rugs, wall hangings, beds etcetera).
September here is usually still fairly cool (12º-26ºC on average) but we had an unseasonal heatwave and the Monday after we set up the tents got to 37º! and all we could do was sit in the shade and drink water and grumble about the bloody weather LOL, although we did make friends with the birds - poor little sods were wandering around with their beaks open so I filled a bowl with water and put it out for them and it was very well received :-) We spent the next couple of days setting up small things, testing out new lamps, being amazed that the tents hardly moved when the wind picked up to about 30kph with 50 kph gusts (but I think we will eventually get some storm ropes in the kit).
I fully intended to take a lot of photos of the encampment this time, and I did take quite a few before the event but once the public arrived I was too busy running workshops and it completely slipped my mind (again >.<)... so these are of the 'quiet' time before the show :-)
Abbeystowe gets some spectacular dawns; I'm not usually an early riser except when we're camping - I think the 5 minute walk to the toilets might have something to do with it - usually I'd go back to bed but after that walk I'm quite awake LOL (which is not a bad thing on event days when the public will be arriving in a couple of hours and the encampment is a mess).
The first tent to get sorted out was, of course, the kitchen tent - the centre of all activity and source of coffee ;-) A kitchen tent per se is not strictly period (although we can document most of the contents); one of our older tent roofs became leaky and while this isn't a problem with a grass floor, water dripping onto rugs and feather beds and small children was an issue so the roof was replaced. We didn't want to throw out the leaky roof, and I think that in the period we're reenacting a tent roof, however old, would have been re-purposed because fabric was hellishly expensive... so I cut a smoke-hole in the top (modelled on innumerable huts, hovels, and long-house structures), made nice new walls for the new tent roof and kept the old (slightly scungey) ones for the kitchen tent, carved poles for it and we now have a 6m x 3m area for cooking and being warm :-)
The fire tray that sits in the centre of it isn't historically accurate either - it's what we call 'in keeping with the period', something that'll not look out of place and disturb the 'medieval ambience' or something like that; none of the places we do events like having their grassed areas marked up by fires, so we all have our fires about 40cm about the ground and the style and method of fireplace varies from encampment to encampment.
However, we can cook when it's raining, and thee tent is roughly divided in half by the fireplace - a cooking area on one side and a sitting are on the other, which of a night gets lined with blankets so the children can bed down; this allows their parents a bit of time off to go and visit other encampments and have a drink or two while knowing that their small folk are warm and supervised :-)
Setting up any of the tents takes a while - there's a lot of small bits and pieces that make the encampment look lived-in and 'real' - I don't really go with the minimalist approach favoured by some of a tent, a rug, a bed, a table and a jug and please-believe-I'm-living-here-for-a-few-days LOL... but it does take time to set up, and we do have rather a lot of tents:
From the left: (hardly visible but there) the sunshade we put up for the public to use, Sam's tent (5 people), Ellie's tent (4 people), my tent (2), the kitchen, a woodchopping area, Nat's tent (1 person), the kids' tent (sort of a playroom) and the pavilion.
(Gratuitous early morning misty pic)
The event was lovely - Festival, in comparison, is bustle-y and hectic, which you'd expect with 10,000 people on the ground each day - but HA was, as people kept commenting, 'cruise-y' and there was time to chat with people and it didn't matter much if workshops did go over time because we ended up chatting about other techniques and there was a general feeling of relaxation :-) Some of the patrons had come to HA because they'd been to Festival and loved it, others were completely new to the whole historical re-enactment thing and were enjoying the experience immensely, and the general consensus seems to have been that everyone had a great time :-)
Footnote - the stuffed cabbage went over very well and every scrap was eaten and could I make 2 next time - and it's been christened 'ogre-head'; and Lyra loved her sewing box and spent the weekend embroidering a Thing for a young friend of hers ;-).
For reasons explained about I don't have any pics of the actual event, so may I direct you to the History Alive facebook page.
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