Balti curry
Does ‘balti’, the Birmingham-created curry named after the steel bowl in which the dish is cooked and served, count as part of the UK’s intangible heritage?
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Seeing red
Rising high above the floor of the Taff Valley, north of Cardiff, the conical towers of Castell Coch are a familiar sight to travellers driving along the A470. The Victorian architect William Burges designed the castle for the 3rd Marquess of Bute between 1875 and 1881, resulting in a masterpiece of High Victorian romanticism.
Migration, mobility, and a Mesolithic refuge
A study of human remains from two cemeteries in Bulgaria, all buried with distinctively ‘Gothic’ jewellery, brooches, and belt buckles, suggests that the ancient Goths were ethnically diverse and not a single homogeneous community.
History of the National Trust
It is said that reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body, so as well as trying (but not always succeeding) to keep the body trim by going for a short run every day, Sherds also (more successfully) sets aside time to spend with a book in the evening.
Who cares for places of worship?
Under the rather ponderous headline ‘Revealing Misunderstandings about Stewardship of Our Ancient Churches’, Historic England has just published the results of its survey into public awareness of the crisis facing the nation’s places of worship. The results show that people are blithely unaware that many are at risk of closure and sale.
Pestilence and population shifts
The discovery of a mass grave in the Jordanian city of Jerash (ancient Gerasa) has provided evidence of the impact on the population of the Justinian Plague. A newly published study of the burial site has revealed that at least 230 individuals were hastily buried on top of each other, rather than in individual graves, within the city’s abandoned hippodrome
Places of Worship Renewal Fund
Organisations in the heritage sector welcomed January’s news that the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport was going to invest £1.5 billion in capital funding for the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors in England (the other three home nations have yet to say whether they will be making similar investments)
Adapting ceremonies and festivals
Diarmaid MacCulloch, the eminently readable author of numerous books on ecclesiastical history, gave his bestselling work on the history of Christianity the provocative subtitle ‘The first three thousand years’, making the point that there is much in Christian ritual and iconography that is drawn from pre-Christian practice.
Retreading old trails
A comprehensive road system underpinned the exceptional degree of mobility and trade that characterised the Roman Empire, and much of the modern road system in Europe and the Mediterranean region is built on top of Roman constructions. Roman roads are also among the earliest relics of antiquity to be studied and mapped.
Students reading decline
A sign that Sherds saw in a bookshop recently claimed that ‘reading is cheaper than therapy’, but universities in the UK are reporting the opposite: that students suffer stress when asked to read.
Bird-beaked masks
During the Black Death of 1347 to 1352, doctors wore bird-beaked masks filled with various herbs that were designed to protect the wearer from breathing poisoned air – or so we have been led to believe.
Redrawing the family tree
Human beings may have suddenly doubled their age thanks to some recent research on a group of fossilised skulls from China, known as Yunxian 1 and 2. Previously classified as Homo erectus, they have now been designated as belonging to the Denisovan group, based on skull shape.
Strollology, Hedonia and Eudaimonia
Can you guess which of the following is a genuine university discipline: Strollology, Hedonia and Eudaimonia, or Happiness Studies? The answer is all of them.
Folklore to the rescue of eels
Folk memory, songs, place names, and oral histories are being deployed by the Somerset Eel Recovery Project (SERP) in its work to bring this critically endangered species back to the Somerset Levels. Those stories and songs are a reminder that the Levels once teemed with eels.
Monumental voyages
Discovered as recently as 1989, the Neolithic settlement submerged beneath the waters of Lake Bracciano, at La Marmotta, near Rome, Italy, has yielded rich evidence of life 7,000 years ago. New analysis of the five boats found at the site suggest that they could have been used for the sea voyages that led to the spread of Neolithic practices to the islands of the Mediterranean.
Ian Nairn’s Morris Minor
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of a special edition of the prestigious Architectural Review. The June 1955 supplement was devoted to a now-famous single essay called ‘Outrage’, Ian Nairn’s critique of the ways in which Britain’s towns and cities were being rebuilt from the rubble and ruins of the Second World War.
The UK’s first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp
Most of us associate prisoner-of-war camps with 20th-century conflicts, but an archaeological evaluation undertaken in July 2009 by Channel 4’s Time Team revealed that the first specially constructed camp dates to the late 18th century, when it was used for incarcerating thousands of enemy prisoners taken during the Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815.
Sharing cultural heritage
In its annual ‘watchlist’ of threatened heritage sites, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) has cast its gaze beyond our own planet and declared that the surface of the Moon represents a vulnerable cultural landscape.
The UK’s first crematorium
Sherds was intrigued to encounter two interesting items recently that have to do with the treatment of human remains. (Anyone who is grieving or has suffered a recent bereavement might like to skip over these reports.)
Retro Zoomers
Looking for signs of hope that heritage and culture will be safe in the hands of future generations, Sherds spotted a number of media reports recently that claimed to know the minds of young people. Recent surveys have stated that Zoomers (Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012) are currently into churchgoing, barn dancing, and buying telescopes.
Transport, technology, and trade
Parallel tracks have been found in fossilised mud at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA, and interpreted as the marks left by a travois: a timber frame used by Native Americans for transporting goods. Particularly associated with Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains region of North America, a travois is made by joining two long poles and a third shorter one to create an A-shaped frame.
Planning reforms
The Westminster Government has published its revised National Planning Policy Framework amid a flurry of boosterish phrases about ‘backing builders not blockers’, ‘unleashing billions in economic growth’, and introducing ‘seismic reforms to help builders get shovels in the ground quicker’.
Seventy years of tiddlywinks
Sherds adopts a very broad definition of ‘heritage’, so no apologies for beginning this month’s column by drawing attention to the 70th anniversary of the establishment of tiddlywinks as a competitive university-based sport.