Wargaming at Sutton Hoo

Wargaming chum and Dark Age enthusiast Andy works for the National Trust at Sutton Hoo and took advantage of this to bring his wargaming passion to the masses last weekend as part of the Festival of Archaeology (full disclosure: I also work for the NT - mostly from my spare room, not a lovely spot like Sutton Hoo).

He invited mutual friend James to stage one of the games and James invited me (as well as Pete and James' son) to come and help out.

This was the second year of running this - last year Covid prevented me from taking part!

This year however I was hale and hearty, the sun shone (blazed down to be truthful) and we had a wonderful couple of days refighting the Battle of the River Idle (Raedwald one of the participants is a candidate for the iconic Sutton Hoo burial) and introducing our hobby and a bit of history to a whole new bunch of people.

James couldn't resist trying to convert the re-enactors.

Andy had also arranged a very busy painting room where visitors could paint their own Saxon to take away with them. The ever generous Gripping Beast kindly supplied the models free of charge!

We weren't the only game in town - two other splendid games were on offer - another refight of the River Idle and a more generic Dark Ages raid.

The whole crew of gamers.

Of course I took the opportunity again to look around one of my favourite historic sites.

The new viewing tower gives you a great overview of the burial ground.

The wire sculptures mark where the prows of the ship would have been when it was buried.

Careful mowing helps you see the numerous graves.

A really brilliant couple of days - the visitors were all so enthusiastic and interested - we had some people come back from the previous year they'd liked it so much and we heard of at least one dad who spent the late evening ordering boxes of miniatures as soon as he got home.

It's already on the calendar for the same weekend next year - looking forward to it already.