IF you’ve ever wondered just what is educational about sleeping in a Viking long-house or firing up a Roman forge, consider this: “For some of the children who come here it’s their first experience of seeing a real flame, or of discovering that eggs come from chickens,” says Luke Winter, the ATC’s director.

“Out of every 30 or so children who visit, four or five have never seen a flame. Others have no idea that meat, such as bacon, comes from pigs.”

Still more will never have wielded an axe, built a fire, used a chisel, thatched a roof, felled a tree or drawn water from a well via a pump and then watched it flow along an aqueduct. And it’s a dead cert they won’t have spent a night in a Viking long-house, smoke curling to the roof, playing with wooden toys or listening to a story-teller declaim the poem Beowulf.

But here they can do all that, learning about themselves as well as how their ancestors may have lived upon this land at Damerham, near Cranborne village, which is generally considered the birthplace of modern archaeology.

“We educate predominantly children but it’s really all age groups. It’s a hands-on education centre, we focus on history, particularly ancient history although much of what we do concerns traditional rural skills, sustainability and seasonality,” says Luke. “We say we’re ancient technology but everything we do is appropriate and applicable to the modern world.”

Some people, he says, reckon the ATC is lost in the past but: “The stuff the children do when they come here is directly relevant to the way the world is going now.”

Everything that needs doing is completed by volunteers or by children in visiting groups.

“If we need materials we go to the woods and gather them or we go and cut reeds,” says Luke.

Schools and young people’s clubs visit but the centre also takes on youngsters from the county’s learning centres, many of whom who have become completely disengaged with conventional education.

One young volunteer who, says Luke, toiled away to help prepare land for the new roundhouse, talks excitedly about his latest X-Box game, then just as interestedly about Maiden Castle, that ancient earthwork down near Dorchester. One suspects he might not have done this before coming to the ATC and there are other youngsters for whom it has probably been a lifeline.

Even the well-educated have huge gaps in their knowledge, says Luke, who wanted to be an archaeologist from the age of six.

“I think schools show them pictures of somewhere like this and can mistake that for the actual experience, which is not the same thing,” he says.

He’s right. Look at pictures and you miss out on the sounds; the clang of a thatcher’s spade as he knocks the reeds into the structure, or the baa-ing of the sheep that roam the site, or call of a chaffinch in a thornbush. You also miss out on the smell of the place; smoke, earth and wood in the longhouse, burnt charcoal in the Roman forge and the faint – but not unpleasant – whiff of dung.

Young visitors will grind corn to bake bread, churn butter and prepare vegetables for their evening stew and sleep on sheepskins on platforms in the long-house. They find this hard work and it helps them to appreciate the modern conveniences they will return to – although the long-house does possess clean and modern loos and washbasins. Young visitors have helped fell trees and even raised the oak and sweet-chestnut structure for the forge building.

Over his years at the centre, Luke has experienced an uptick of interest in the ancient world.

“The advent of Time Team has made a massive difference, people are aware of the techniques and the fact that you can construct things and it’s made the past and archaeology more accessible for the public,” he says.

On the back of this interest the centre has grown, too. It’s not open to the public on a daily basis, but does run a year-round programme of open and volunteer weekends and days which have become very popular.

On one occasion 1,600 people turned up so it’s no surprise they scooped the 2011 Sandford Award, recognising it as the place which made the most outstanding contribution to heritage education and learning within the historic environment.

Visitors can take part in Stone Age Walks on March 30, 31 and April 4, traversing the landscape from Avebury, through Stonehenge, Old Sarum and towards the ATC and on April 14 and 15 they are holding a stone-age weekend for families to meet the stone-age travellers and participate in rope-making, cave-painting, fire-making, structure-building, flint-knapping and monolith pulling, in the manner of Stonehenge.

The summer sees a programme of Vikingly activity including sword fighting –with wooden swords – but pillaging is off-limits for the day. And you can attend courses on hedge-laying, coppicing, blacksmithing and make your own longbow.

It is, says Luke, “A rare opportunity to step back into our distant past.”