On Saturday 4 May 1471 the ‘Wars of the Roses’ came to a head at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. The Yorkist army commanded by Edward IV and his brother, the future Richard III, chased down and defeated the Lancastrian army of Queen…
Restoring Boden Fogou Volunteers from the Meneage Archaeology Group have restored part of a passageway in an Iron Age fogou, which was rediscovered near Boden in west Cornwall in 2003 (see CA 414 for more about excavations on the site…
New research suggests that one of Stonehenge’s famous megaliths may have come from the very north of the UK. The Altar Stone is a six-tonne sandstone slab that currently lies in the middle of the famous stone circle. It was…
Since March 2020 I have criss-crossed the United Kingdom, examining its history through the eyes of Current Archaeology. I have now visited every county in every country, but I have just a few geographical loose ends to tie off, including, this month, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
Your thoughts on issues raised by CA.
There were nine sailmakers in West Coker at the start of the 19th century, and the bleaching fields around the Somerset village were white with canvas sheets laid out in the sun. ‘Coker canvas’ became the generic name for the…
• Stonehenge and the moon: exploring a Neolithic monument’s lunar links
• Rediscovering Sheffield castle: from stronghold to ‘Steel City’
• Birdoswald and beyond: excavating a civilian settlement on Hadrian’s Wall
• Investigating underground in Iron Age Cornwall
• Orchards in England: a fruitful wander through the agriculture of the past
• Illuminating Anglesea: echoes of a later prehistoric ritualised landscape
REVIEW BY CHRISTOPHER CATLING Rather than inventing a landscape, Anne Buffoni has set this gripping adventure story within places that can be visited in the Cotswolds. Usefully, she includes itineraries at the end of the book to encourage readers to…
Cutting-edge scientific research indicates that a stone at the centre of Stonehenge may have travelled hundreds of miles from north-east Scotland to Salisbury Plain. Carly Hilts reports.
A prehistoric cemetery excavated at Winterborne Kingston, near Bere Regis in Dorset, is providing evidence of how locals adapted during the aftermath of the Roman invasion. Among the grave goods, excavated by students from Bournemouth University and a team of…
Dozens of Anglo-Saxon burials have been uncovered on the site of the Old Bell Hotel, which is located next to Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire. Some 24 articulated skeletons and the disarticulated remains of 22 more individuals were excavated by Cotswold…
• Tracing tiles: exploring the industry that built Roman Cirencester and beyond
• Viking surprises from Ipswich: tracing bone- and antler-working
• New insights into Anglo-Saxon Leicestershire
• Time Team trace Modbury’s Civil War story
• Secrets from the sky: exploring monumental discoveries from Neolithic Ireland
Stonehenge is famous for its association with the sun, and particularly with the summer and winter solstices – but did the movement of the moon also influence its design? Carly Hilts spoke to Dr Amanda Chadburn and Dr Heather Sebire about an ongoing project exploring the impact of a once-in-a-generation lunar event.
Your thoughts on issues raised by CA.
I concluded last month’s column just east of Avebury at the Sanctuary, a Neolithic and Bronze Age site that is also the start and end point of the Ridgeway, an 87-mile route rich in archaeology that runs between there and Ivinghoe Beacon across Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire
A long-running community excavation in rural west Cornwall has been exploring an enigmatic network of Iron Age tunnels, as well as Bronze Age and Romano-British features, for more than 15 years. Carly Hilts spoke to James Gossip on site this summer.
A new display drawing on the Museum of Cornish Life’s extensive archaeological collections was recently unveiled. Laura Miucci introduces its key themes and highlights her favourite finds.
Two medieval slabs have been raised from Studland Bay by a team of maritime archaeologists from Bournemouth University. The slabs had been lying at a depth of 7m before they were raised in a two-hour operation, led by Diving and…
Oxford Cotswold Archaeology (OCA) archaeologists working on the A417 Missing Link improvement scheme in Gloucestershire have uncovered a Roman mutatio (literally ‘change’; the Latin term for a horse-changing station) among 12,000 years of archaeological material being brought to light under…
TAYLOR DOWNING reviews the latest film releases.
David Porter on Military History's doomed inventions.
A community excavation in the small village of Minety has found a Roman tile kiln, which marked its products with a series of stamped letters. As the investigation, led by Cotswold Archaeology, revealed, this industry was of more than just local importance – and with another season of digging set to take place this summer, Neil Holbrook and Peter Warry report on the story so far.
One of the newest episodes released by Time Team focuses on a test-pitting investigation in the back gardens of Modbury. Carly Hilts explores the Civil War story that was uncovered over the course of three days, as well as echoes of international connections.
After last month’s scramble through Stonehenge, this month I turn north to amble around Avebury. I know I am not the only one to hold this site in high affection.
• Must Farm revisited: an extraordinary insight into everyday Bronze Age life
• Stonehenge: a monumental walk
• Excavations over the White Cliffs of Dover: uncovering a WWII story
• Personalising the anonymous dead from medieval cemeteries
The people of Cornwall are so proud of their great engineer, Richard Trevithick, that when the Cornish Engines Preservation Committee and the Cornish Waterwheel Preservation Society decided to merge in 1971, they named the new organisation the Trevithick Society (Kowethas…
The skeleton of an Iron Age woman found in Winterborne Kingston, Dorset, has revealed rare material evidence of possible human sacrifice from this period. The site has been extensively excavated by Bournemouth University teams for more than 15 years, owing…
Aweek of excavations at Chapel Porth, near St Agnes, has revealed the walls of the original medieval building, among other interesting finds. The work was carried out with the National Trust and local volunteers as part of Cornwall National Landscape’s…
From the Preseli Hills of Wales to the site of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain is 120 miles as the crow flies. That is quite some distance for the young farmers of Neolithic Wales to transport the bluestones that make up the inner circle at the Wiltshire monument. During April 2024, Professor Keith Ray of Cardiff University took two weeks to walk from west Wales to Stonehenge, accompanied by a series of archaeologists and anthropologists (a different one or two each day) to look at the landscape and consider the challenges facing the stone-bearers. Among them were CA’s editor Carly Hilts and Chris Catling, who now reports.
Professor Keith Ray completed his 222-mile journey from the Preseli Hills to Stonehenge on Sunday 21 April. Carly Hilts joined him for the final few miles of his adventure.
For more than a decade, Adam Stanford and English Heritage have periodically recorded the parch marks that appear at Stonehenge in the summer, when conditions are right. Until recently this involved oblique low-level aerial photography via mast, kite, or drone.…
In my columns to date I have barely mentioned Stonehenge. This is deliberate: for all that I worship archaeology, I am an atheist about this most famous of sites.
Radiocarbon dating at Woodhenge has revealed that it was built at almost exactly the same time as the circle at neighbouring Stonehenge. This exciting new data shows that Stonehenge was not a one-off in its original landscape. Woodhenge lies just…
REVIEW BY STEPHEN RIPPON ‘Landscape history’ is often written as a chronological story, of which there are innumerable examples at the scale of individual parishes and counties. This innovative study is refreshingly different, both in its more thematic approach and…
REVIEW BY TONY WILMOTT This volume describes the archaeology of some four centuries of the life of a rural farm/villa of modest wealth. It is also accompanied by a highly accessible GIS resource at The settlement developed from an…
With Amesbury’s recently opened History Centre celebrating six months of operations, Carly Hilts learned more about its displays and plans for the site’s future from Andrew Doig, one of its trustees.