A small team of archaeologists has been undertaking research into the island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides. Camping for a few days at a time over a number of years, they have carried out both survey and excavation work. Derek Alexander, Daniel Rhodes, Stuart Jeffrey, Tessa Poller, and Siân Jones describe the results of these efforts to date.
The cemetery – defined as a burial ground without an attached primary church or chapel – is a place where artistic, architectural, horticultural, historical, and literary interests are combined. Many were planned as places of botanical and geological instruction, while the epitaphs, extolling the moral virtues of the deceased, were intended to encourage emulation by the living. Appreciating their great value is a vital step towards ensuring that these spaces do not succumb to neglect and decline, as Chris Catling reports.
The Archaeology of Industrial Cheshire in 20 Digs is a well-illustrated introduction to Cheshire’s industrial past. Each concise chapter combines documentary evidence with excavation results to trace the development of the county’s key industries across two millennia. The book opens…
A Cold War lookout post has been rediscovered in the grounds of Scarborough Castle. Built in 1963-1964, it is one of over 1,500 posts constructed across the UK to detect nuclear explosions. This example was sealed and buried in 1968;…
Reviled when they were first constructed, cooling towers are now admired for their gracious hyperboloid curves and sculptural presence, just as they are about to disappear from the landscape. The Twentieth Century Society has described the group of eight towers…
REVIEW BY BRANDON BRAUN The Latin motto for Shropshire – Floreat Salopia, ‘may Shropshire flourish’ – has been used since at least the 17th century, so it is a fitting title for the 100th volume of the Transactions of the…
Eight of Norfolk’s First World War pillboxes have been awarded Grade II- listed status by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, on the advice of Historic England. Among the first pillboxes in Britain, these concrete structures were built between…
REVIEW BY MAGNUS ALEXANDER This is a fascinating landscape history of a medieval ‘watermilling powerhouse’, which demonstrates that over 1,000 years of watermilling has had a huge impact on an apparently natural braided river. Most of the book consists of…
Over the past 15 years, a series of research projects at Wrest Park, a 19th-century country house in Silsoe, Bedfordshire, has revealed in detail how the grounds of this estate evolved over the centuries. This work was recently highlighted during…
REVIEW BY MATT RITCHIE This is a very fine biography of Britain and Ireland’s once extensive ancient forest and woodland. The book is nicely balanced – the first half spans the millennia from the Mesolithic to the Normans, while the…
Sherds does not share the passion for cycling that seems to have gripped so many people over the last two decades. In the words of the self-styled ‘Super-Tramp’, W H Davies, ‘A poor life this if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare’, and it is the standing and staring that walking permits, whereas cycling (uphill at any rate, with traffic presenting an ever-present threat) seems full of care
REVIEW BY RP Most people see the British footpath for its immediate purpose: a means of getting from A to B (seldom achieved without also acquiring muddy shoes and the occasional nettle-sting). Not so for Tom King, who has spent…
REVIEW BY CH Located more than 100 miles from the Scottish mainland, the cluster of islands collectively known as St Kilda have variously been mythologised as a romantically remote place whose hardy inhabitants were torn from their traditional way of…
On the banks of the Tweed in the Scottish Borders is the reputed site of Merlin’s Grave, the embedded remnant of a legend long associated with the nearby village of Drumelzier. Dr Ronan Toolis explains how a community archaeology project revealed why this tale became rooted to this part of Tweeddale.
Your thoughts on issues raised by CA.
Orchards have not featured largely in studies of the historic environment, though there is a growing recognition of their ecological value. Yet orchards were once ubiquitous features of the landscape in many counties, whether in the form of a small plot attached to a farm, or as a large commercial orchard cultivated as the owner’s principal source of income. Making up for this omission is a new book by Gerry Barnes and Tom Williamson that attempts, for the first time, to provide a comprehensive overview of the development of orchards in England from the Middle Ages to the present day, as Chris Catling reports.
REVIEW BY JIM LEARY Jack Cornish is Head of Paths at the British walking charity Ramblers and, like me, an advocate of old and lost paths, the overgrown and the abandoned. The Lost Paths charts some of Cornish’s journeys along…
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 CH Infrastructure projects often offer exciting archaeological opportunities to explore an area’s past on a large scale. The construction of a windfarm off the Yorkshire coast was one such case: the cables connecting it to the National Grid…
REVIEW BY AB Until the mid-20th century, England was covered with orchards. But these quintessential features of the historic landscape did not simply spring into being: the story of England’s orchards is filled with generations of people who cultivated them.…
REVIEW BY AB It is easy to think of castles as a static part of the historical landscape, towering relics of a bygone era, but these buildings have rich stories, many of which are still being written. In Castles of…
Review by Duncan W Wright. The fens of eastern England are usually characterised as unremittingly flat, with big skies but little topographical variation. This (frankly lazy) assumption fails to account for the subtle differences in geology and height above sea…
Review by William D Shannon. O ’Cionnaith, himself a land surveyor, presents a vivid account of how Ireland became one of the most-mapped countries in the world, following the Cromwellian and Williamite land redistributions, which led to the Down Survey…
Woodchester Mansion is considered to be one of the UK’s most haunted buildings, and people pay large sums to spend the night in the freezing cold mansion with their ghost-detecting cameras and radar equipment.
Last year, Historic England archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to confirm the remains of Tudor and Jacobean formal gardens at Belhus Park in Thurrock, Essex, the site of a manor built in the medieval period and rebuilt in the 16th century.…
When The Making of the English Landscape by W G Hoskins was published in 1954, its author claimed that ‘no book exists to describe the manner in which the various landscapes of this country came to assume the shape and…
London Clay is an impressionistic survey of London and its history, filtered through the prism of the underlying geological strata. It is at once personal and overarching, meandering from pre-Roman to Victorian, south London to north, via what Chivers (a…
The Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s was one of the most-important religious, political, and social events ever to unfold in England and Wales. This act, and the associated (but separate) Reformation of the Church, brought about fundamental change…