A second excavation season at Buckler’s Hard, a private ship- building hub on the River Beaulieu, 12 miles (20km) south of Southampton in the New Forest, has fully revealed the wooden slipway where 55 ships for the Royal Navy –…
What role did science play in the emergence of the United States of America? Matthew Symonds spoke to Elissavet Ntoulia about scientific knowledge and its practical applications as a nation was born.
In the second part of our series, Graham Goodlad reviews the organisation, tactics, and weaponry of the two armies.
In the first part of our new series, Graham Goodlad explores the Jacobite movement’s early attempts to overthrow Britain’s ruling Protestant monarchy.
Onwards and upwards a timeline tracing the developing fortunes and many incarnations of America's air force in the 2oth century.
While this summer’s drought conditions have had a dramatic effect on many aspects of our environment, one upside of the recent hot and dry conditions has been the discovery of long-forgotten or completely unknown archaeological sites. This was the case…
Last autumn’s excavations at Culloden Battlefield, near Inverness, had already rewritten our knowledge of how the engagement unfolded (see CA 430), but further insights continue to emerge, including the discovery of an unexploded mortar shell, which further highlights the conflict’s…
Barely a pistol shot from my house on the Isle of Skye is Flora MacDonald’s grave. I’ve had reason to study her, the ‘Preserver of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’ (Bonnie Prince Charlie) as her monument tells me, because an Englishman…
Reviewing the best military history exhibitions, with Christopher Warner.
Excavations on Culloden Battlefield, near Inverness, this past October have recovered more than 100 projectiles in an area of the site that had not previously yielded any archaeological discoveries. The battle – the last to take place on British soil…
Detailed archaeological analysis and archival research has revealed the identity of a mysterious ship whose timbers were recently exposed on an Orkney beach. Carly Hilts spoke to Ben Saunders to learn more.
REVIEW BY RP To those who regularly stroll the streets of London, the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor might be a familiar sight, even if the architect’s name is not. Perhaps overshadowed by contemporaries such as Sir Christopher Wren and Sir…
In the second part of our series on Britain’s rise as a naval power, Graham Goodlad explains how supremacy at sea became closely linked with the 18th-century career of Admiral Edward Vernon.
In this image, a diver surveys one of the five cannon found during an archaeological exploration in Dry Tortugas National Park, off the south-west coast of Florida. The cannon played a crucial role in confirming that a nearby wreck, first…
In the first part of a new occasional series, Graham Goodlad profiles Robert Blake, the republican ‘general at sea’ who laid the foundations of sea power after the Civil Wars.
This unusual object was recently found in a garden near Boldre in the New Forest. While its function was a bit of a mystery when the finder first brought it to the Finds Liaison Officer to be recorded, it was…
The oil paintings are the work of Scottish painter Richard Waitt (d.1732), and were commissioned in 1713 by Alexander, the Laird of Grant.
In this photograph, a diver explores the wreck of Södermanland, an 18th-century Swedish ship of the line now resting in the waters off Karlskrona, on the country’s southern coast. Built in Stockholm and launched in 1749, the 42-metre ship could…
During archaeological works beneath the floor of Bath Abbey between 2018 and 2020 (see CA 348), Wessex Archaeology recovered a stunning piece of an 18th-century bas relief marble sculpture. It was one of approximately 4,000 fragments removed from the Abbey’s…
‘This clear evidence for the survival of Culloden Parks shows us that the story of the Battle of Culloden is still unfolding'
Located in the centre of the Netherlands, Vianen saw two wars in the 18th century, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and later the Flanders campaign of 1793-1795.
As the Society of Antiquaries of London launches a new affiliate membership, increasing access to its library and museum collections for the general public, Carly Hilts visited Burlington House to learn more about three centuries of antiquarian activity, and its very eclectic holdings.
When Henrietta Howard (née Hobart) built her Thames-side country house in Twickenham in the 1720s, it represented so much more than a fashionable escape from the bustle of court life: it was a refuge from her abusive marriage, and a sign of hard-won independence. With the house and its grounds now restored to their Georgian glory, and the site reopening to the public, Carly Hilts visited to find out more.
The death of which monarch led to the accession of George I?
The statues of five elephants surrounding this part of the cemetery have led to the belief that these and other circus animals are buried here along with the human victims of the Hammond circus train disaster of 22 June 1918.
How many enslaved Africans are estimated to have been forcibly transported to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries?
David Porter on Military History's doomed inventions.
For a visitor to a late 18th-century country seat, the most striking feature of the landscape, apart from the house, would have been the lake. For that reason, it is all the more surprising these bodies of water have had such little attention from garden historians and archaeologists. Perhaps that is because it is assumed that they are natural, and that the house site was chosen to overlook the water, whereas the opposite is usually the case, as Chris Catling now reports.
The 1722 Waggonway Project has discovered three phases of early wooden railway in East Lothian
Jeremy Black analyses the military and political significance of the Jacobite Risings that punctuated British history between 1689 and 1746.
Overshadowed by Culloden the following year – the battle that finally terminated the century-old Jacobite cause – Prestonpans is little known. Chris Bambery researches the story.
As the National Maritime Museum opens its new Nelson gallery, MHM Editor Neil Faulkner analyses the admiral’s legend.