At the Old Abbey Buildings, this evening, local historians and dignitaries gathered to celebrate the first 100 Entries of Abingdon People and Buildings on the town history portal.

The Mayor of Abingdon-on-Thames, Helen Pighills, cut the cake, and Manfred Brod told us how the project had been initiated,  researched and edited by members of Abingdon Area Archaeological and Historical Society.

Many people helped in the project. Pictured are Michael Harrison, who takes a lot of the photographs, and Ruth Weinberg who cooked the ABP 100 cake.

Ruth will also be doing a talk for Heritage Open Days at St Nicolas Church ‘Victorian Abingdon in pictures‘  on Thursday 10th September at 12:30.

If you can’t make that then there is another talk  ‘Albert Park – The Development of a Victorian Suburb‘ by Jackie Smith on  Friday 11th September at 19:30. Both are free as are all Heritage Open Days events.

All articles are peer reviewed before they are published on the web – to ensure they are well researched, and read well. The first 100 articles contain Historic Buildings from Abbey Gateway to 48 West St Helen Street, and Abingdon People from The Ackling Family to William Thomas Garrett Woodforde.

Find out more at abingdon.gov.uk/partners/history.

We are away on our summer holiday. As this is our thirtieth wedding anniversary we have travelled further than usual.

There have been reminders of Abingdon, 3,359 miles away.

Old Speckled Hen beer has reached Kingston, a Canadian city located on Lake Ontario. British loyalists retreated here from the independent United States of America during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). They helped defend Canada from USA attempts to expand the States northwards in the war that followed in 1812.

However Canadians have not taken to “Old Speckled Hen” as well as might be expected and three years on, from the inauguration of this pub, the beer, that originated in Abingdon is no longer available on draft, only in cans.

We will be back home in a few days, where A and J are holding the fort. Then a very busy week as Heritage Day is on 12th Sept, something I help organise, and there are events before and after. See abingdonheritage.co.uk. By the way if anybody has pictures of Victorian ancestors, who lived in Abingdon, please get them copied in the library where we are starting a collection.

For the last few weeks there has been scaffolding up in the front of Abingdon Baptist Church.

The blue and white front, of this Grade II listed building, has been repainted with a classical stone colour. A glass main door will be added.

The church (as in the members and not the building) are still fund raising for further improvements to the building.

There will be an all day symposium on Saturday 18th July 2015 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on ‘Abingdon and its Prehistoric Earthworks’.

The final lecture by Dr Zena Kamash will be about discoveries at Spring Road Cemetery. The pictures above shows the site in 2000 during excavation, and in 2015 with the new Garden of Remembrance.

The cemetery was created from agricultural land in 1940, and during the early years so many ancient graves were being disturbed to create new graves that it was decided to do some proper excavations before all the evidence got lost.

The Abingdon Area Archaeological and Historical, in conjunction with the Ashmolean Museum, is making a contribution to the National Festival of Archaeology 2015 by holding this one day free event in the Headley Lecture Theatre, Ashmolean Museum.

The Full Programme:
10:15 Dr. Gill Hey: Introduction
10:30 George Lambrick: The Drayton Cursus and other Monuments in the Development of Prehistoric Ceremonial and Funerary Complexes in the Upper Thames Valley.
11.30 Dr. Frances Healy: A Brief Life: placing the Abingdon Causewayed Enclosure in Time.
12.30 Lunch Break.
Time to look round a display of finds in the Ashmolean reserve collections from Barrow Hills, the Abingdon Causewayed Enclosure and other sites of relevance to Abingdon.
14.00 Dr. Alistair Barclay: Barrow Hills Excavation: thirty years on.
15.00 Dr. Zena Kamash: Excavations at Spring Road Cemetery, a Bronze Age Pit Circle and other discoveries.