Our cover feature represents a powerful and poignant project which is helping to illuminate the often overlooked lives of ‘pauper apprentices’, children and young people aged 7-20 who were taken from urban workhouses and sent to labour away their often short lives in rural textile mills and farms. Research centred on cemetery evidence from Fewston in North Yorkshire is now bringing their experiences to light once more.

Another story that deserves to be better known is that of the Giant’s Ring, a late Neolithic henge monument near Belfast that represents the largest prehistoric ceremonial enclosure on the whole island of Ireland. The site was explored by archaeologists between 1990 and 2000, but the full excavation report has only recently been published.

Our next feature showcases an ambitious aerial survey project focused on almost 200 square kilometres of the South Downs National Park, which has documented how people have interacted with this landscape from the Neolithic period to the Cold War. 

Historical human interactions with their surroundings don’t come much more dramatic than the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, and our penultimate article reveals how fortification of the Roman frontier sparked very different settlement patterns to the north and south of the new boundary.

Finally, we bring you an update on a burial that first featured in CA 339. This was the grave of an early medieval woman, discovered near Conington in Cambridgeshire during road improvement works on the A14. Unusually, she had been interred face-down, and now analysis of this enigmatic individual’s remains has allowed archaeologists to piece together clues about her life.