Cosmeston 2009

Well, 1st public event of the season and once again we found ourselves in the medieval village of Cosmeston.  Without a doubt, the venue that remains one of the most popular we ever attend.
Unlike the previous two years ago, hardly a drop of rain.  Instead the enemy of the ancient re-enactor...sun!!  Once again our greatest challenge was avoiding sunburn, a task that not all managed to avoid despite factor 50, big hats and the shelter of the trireme sail...one of the more useful of the winter projects!
The Hoplite Association has always tried to keep moving, driving forward the ideas and recreations, with an eye on getting as good a representation as we can and this year is no different. The big thing for 2009 seems to be the ‘trireme’ project. So at Cosmeston we erected a rather impressive ‘lazy’ tent with the sail.. all courtesy of Ash. Without doubt creating the largest camp setup we have ever had.

Around that we managed the usual displays of bronze casting, woodworking, games, weaving, arms and armour, with the added discussions around money, the first outing of our Greek ‘clock’ and the ever popular ‘kiddie drill’.

As ever, the visitors spent a lot of time around the camp and it seems that, yet again, there is more interest in membership and we anticipate another increase in our happy little band in the near future.

Being a group that operates in a rather specialist area of re-enacting we never expect to grow to an enormous size as a group, but small can be beautiful and all members share a desire to get things as right as we can and it is with this attitude that we can drive our hobby forward.

We were the first dedicated Greek group, we solved the mystery of the linothorax for re-enacting, we have worked through the construct of footwear, the nature of phalanx drill and tackled the overarm/underarm dory debate and demonstrated the impracticality of a ‘thumb forward, overarm grip. We have engineered the wider commercial availability of shields through our friends at Daniyal in India and have also developed a range of authentic helmet designs through them as well, which will be commercially available soon. We are also working on ridged spearhears, greaves and a number of other projects too.