In the world of fly fishing, trout dominate the headlines, but in the past grayling were considered to be the equal of trout for sporting appeal – hence Izaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653) describes them alongside each other in…
Recent research at the Karnak temple complex near Luxor, Egypt, is offering new insights into the site’s origins and the development of the surrounding landscape over its 3,000 years of use. The famous religious site has been subject to excavations…
REVIEW BY ROB IXER This is a peculiar hybrid of a book. It is a pretty good generalised account of British ‘historical geology’, namely a description of the occurrence of all the rocks given in stratigraphical order from the earliest…
REVIEW BY SOPHIA CHAPPLE Richard Oram presents a thorough and digestible environmental history of medieval Scotland in his new book A Land Won from Waste. Covering AD 400-1400, this is one of three in a wider series spanning from AD…
REVIEW BY SOPHIA CHAPPLE In Where Men No More May Reap or Sow, Richard Oram analyses five centuries of Scottish environmental history across 13 chapters. This project initially sought to cover the early medieval period up until COP26, recently held…
The London we know today traces its roots directly back to the modest settlement developed on the banks of the Thames in the late 9th century, in the time of the Saxon king Alfred the Great. In spite of fires,…
Medieval people had a rather gloomy outlook: life was hard, the main thing was to avoid disaster, the future would probably be worse than the past.