Ground Penetrating Radar

The Project team want to say a very big thanks to Geomatrix and to their owner Chris Leech.

The company (Geomatrix Earth Science Ltd) offers one of the largest hire pools of near surface geophysical instrumentation in Europe. They are exclusive sales representatives for many of the leading geophysical instrument and software manufacturers. Their instruments are world renowned for their emphasis on providing high data quality and instrument reliability in the most arduous of field conditions (which now includes former battlefields).

Geomatrix are loaning us GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) equipment to help us survey the British line, and to have a look at Jon's German position, that we started to excavate last year.

We welcome Geomatrix as the first Corporate Sponsor of the Plugstreet Project and welcome their contribution to our on-going research into both the battlefield itself and into the use of geophysics on this sort of site.

We hope to be able to post results of the survey soon, so you can see their amazing kit in action.

http://www.geomatrix.co.uk/index.htm

Back to the Bustard

Last week Peter AKA The Colonel came down to Salisbury Plain to work some more of his geophysical magic. He undertook three days of magnetometer survey over part of the trench system dug and used by Anzac 3 Division during their training ahead of their deployment to France and, ultimately, to Messines. Among the exercise was the blowing, capture and refortification of a mine. Admittedly the mine was much smaller than the Ultimo Mine but they seem to have refortified it in just the same way as we saw in Dan's trench last summer.

As sson as Peter has sent me his results I will post them here! Interestingly they show again that this is the technique to use when looking for buried trenches. "Mag" certainly seems quicker and more productive than resistivity.

What this survey means is that we have an accurate plot of the remains and can target some more excavation to see if we can get more comparative data between Belgium and the training ground here in UK.

Watch this space!