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Ireland’s new UNESCO World Heritage Site
Northern Ireland has gained a second UNESCO World Heritage Site, after the Gracehill Moravian Church Settlement in County Antrim was awarded the status in July. The site is the best-preserved example of such a settlement in the UK, and the only one built on the island of Ireland. It joins the Giant’s Causeway, which was awarded World Heritage status in 1986. The news comes as Scotland’s Flow Country becomes the first peatland to gain UNESCO World Heritage status, adding yet another site to the UK’s growing list of locations recognised under the organisation (see CA 379): now numbering 35 sites.
Traces of Thomas Becket
A car park in Northampton, currently being turned into a heritage park, has yielded pieces of ironstone that may have formed part of the castle in which Thomas Becket was tried for contempt of royal authority in 1164. Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) have been excavating the site, and discovered the ironstone in a mix of brick and modern pottery alongside trenches dug in the 1960s. The castle, which was abandoned after the English Civil War, was destroyed to make way for a railway line into Northampton in the 19th century.
Wordsworth ship scheduled
The Earl of Abergavenny, a wrecked East India Company ship, has been scheduled by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), as advised by Historic England. Captained by John Wordsworth, brother of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, the wreck was one of the 36 1,460-ton ships that formed a special class of the East India Company’s merchant fleet. It sank off the coast of Weymouth in 1805, with John Wordsworth and 250 passengers and crew members losing their lives. The new protected status of the site means that, while it can still be explored by divers, its contents must be left in situ.
Text: Rebecca Preedy
