Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society

Hello,

Since December the 10th things have progressed somewhat, but not as much as we would have hoped.

For St. Mary's Church, Cuckney, Ground Penetrating Radar & Excavation Permission - we have completed the Diocesan Advice Application and it is being considered at the Parochial Church Council meeting today (20th Jan.).

We are still awaiting a final communication from the Welbeck Estates Company Ltd. regarding permissions.

The search for funding continues ... no private concerns / councils have yet come through with any money, which is disappointing. On Thursday 9th January, we met English Heritage in Nottingham for an hour to discuss funding.

We have since had a letter from them regarding the expectations that they need to be fulfilled to qualify for funding, with an emphasis on Community involvement. We are in the process of trying to demonstrate that we have / can satisfy their criteria. However, of course, some of the criteria cannot be met without funding being made available.

It is therefore to be hoped that an initial £10,000 is made available, although our proposed start date of the 1st of March at St. Mary's, now looks in jeopardy.

We now have all the Caroes (architects) plans and their 28 page supporting document re. the 1951 excavation. These were purchased from English Heritage in December and we have paid £73 for these. These diagrams of the proposed 1951 excavation are different and of much better quality than those we possessed previously, so they were worth purchasing.

For safekeeping, we have now had these (mainly A0 & A1 sized) documents  put into jpeg & pdf formats (costing another £59). This has taken up nearly half of the funds we currently have (only £300). Mercian (archaeologists) are also owed various expenses which they have been good enough to defer for now.

We have made a final push to convince a potential major sponsor that we represent better value for money than conventional advertising.They will review our documents in early February.

Did you know that our funding requirement of £60,000 equates to a mere 1.5 minutes of ABC1 ITV advertising to a small audience of only 1 million viewers ?

The Mansfield CHAD have been in touch recently, but we wish to provide more definite news in our next article. This also applies to the deferred setting of a date for our 3rd meeting at Cuckney Village Hall.

All ideas and funding welcome .................