St Sebastians 2018
St Sebastian’s was a special event this year. It marked the 10th anniversary of Ed and Elizabeth running this on their property. As such Ed had made some extra special site tokens, individual pottery cups, for the attendees.
As always there was a game running over the weekend. The prize this year was a crossbow. This was eventually won by William de Cameron.
The main event at St Sebastian’s is the archery tournament.
This year it was broken down into 3 categories, all shot at the same time.
Mid-Winter Coronation 2017
Within the SCA there are a number of Kingdoms, each ruled by a King and Queen. Every 6 months a new King and Queen are appointed by a heavy combat tournament, with the winner becoming the next Monarch along with his or her consort.
Within Lochac these tournaments take place in May and November. The in July and January the new King and Queen are crowned.
This year the Midwinter coronation was held in the Canton of Cluain, at the beautiful Hamilton Gardens.
St Catherines Faire and the Bal d' Argent 2016
The weekend of the 5th and 6th November was Ildhafn’s annual St Catherines Faire. Normally this event runs in December but this year it was in early November. As part of the event, Ildhafn hosted the Bal d’Argent. This is the annual ball of the guild of the Silver Rondel, Lochac’s official dance guild. This meant that most of the weekend was devoted to music and dance practice, with the main ball being on the Saturday night, This was exciting for us as we have been dancing with the SCA for almost 3 years now and we have been hosting the Ildhafn music group for over a year.
Labour Weekend 2016
As we have been doing lots with the SCA here we haven’t done much actual living history camping where you have no modern conveniences. This weekend will be different. Master Ed Braythwayte of the SCA is once again hosting a camp at his property but this year he has deemed that the house is off limits, except for the toilet. There is access to fresh water as well but aside from that everything will be stored, prepared, cooked or worked on in camp. There will be no modern tools, like gas cookers or torches. so it is back to open fires and candle light
St Johns 2015
Over the weekend of the 10th – 12th July we attended the annual Cluain event of St Johns.
This is anSCA camp held in the Waikato region. While normally we would take our tent and camp we decided to make use of the bunk rooms available at the site, and it was very fortunate that we did as temperatures over the weekend dropped to around -2. Fortunately both the main hall and bunk rooms were nice and warm once the heaters got started.
Camp Fires
Within our camp environment fire is one of the most import things. It is used for cooking on, to help keep us warm, to dry wet clothing, to provide light and as a communal gathering place.
When ever possible we have a cooking fire of some sort. If we are allowed we dig a fire pit, where we aren’t we have a raised fire tray. Typically the fire is kept going though out the camp and chopping wood, checking, raking and stoking the fire is a continuous thing.
Lanterns
In the past we have used fairly modern looking lanterns with tea lights or small votive candles. While these have worked well enough they don’t look right anymore and are slowly being replaced by more period looking lamps.
Originally we were going to replace them with horn lanterns. This posed a couple of problems. Firstly trying to buy them in NZ is proving difficult so we would have to order in from overseas, this has implication with NZ MAF as there is animal product involved. Secondly making our own meant sourcing horn and learning to split it down and flatten it. We have been able to get 1 horn lantern while we were at the re-enactors market in the UK.