a big thank you to the Trust’s great team of volunteers!

This (1st-7th June) is the annual Volunteers’ Week, and organisations which are supported by the work of volunteers are celebrating their volunteers throughout the week. The celebrations include events, thank-you messages on Twitter and featuring blogs or blog posts by volunteers on the organisations’ web-sites.

The Trust has a team of dedicated volunteers who come to Roman Circus House once or even twice every week to help us. Our volunteers make a huge contribution to our work and to our building and the circus centre. One group of volunteers processes large quantities of pottery and other archaeological material in the processing room. The other group is renovating the building and also maintains the gardens. Our volunteers also undertake other important work for us, such as bulk digitising of transparencies for use in the circus centre displays or digitising our paper publications for publishing on the internet as a free open resource. Other volunteers polish the original brass fixtures and fittings of the 1937 NAAFI where we are based, give guided tours of the circus site and centre or work on displays in the circus centre, including making our Roman circus super-model by hand. We are also, currently, being helped by some local members of NADFAS (the National Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies).

Some of our volunteers have been helping us for over 30 years, while our youngest current volunteer is only 15 and comes to help us after school on Fridays. Trust director Philip says: ‘Our volunteers are all brilliant and we are extremely grateful to them for all their hard work. They make a huge contribution to the Trust.’

To all our dedicated current volunteers, the Trust says a big THANK YOU, and that means you! – Brenda, Catherine, Chris, Ed, Gemma, Gillian, Hannah, Hilary, Jane, Margaret, Maureen, Neil, Paulette, Peter, Richard, Ros, Shirley, Shirley and Wendy. We are also grateful to all our past and pending volunteers and to everyone who supports and helps the Trust.

If you would like to join our team of volunteers, then please contact Trust director Philip by ‘phone or email (contact details at www.thecolchesterarchaeologist.co.uk/?page_id=284 ).

This week, we have been Tweeting thanks to and photo.s of our volunteers, and we have posted extracts from the Roman circus and chariot-race chapters in Ben-Hur in three parts on this web-site, at 1, 2 and 3. The images show the photo.s which we Tweeted this week, of some of the volunteers who were working here at Roman Circus House on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, snapped in the yard and in the processing room.

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