The Great British Dig – History in Your Garden (2)

Hugh Dennis and his small team of archaeologists are back on Channel Four and this time they have gone back a full two thousand years and beyond. The series starts in Falkirk with a fort and a piece of the Antonine Wall, apparently buried under several gardens and a bowls club. After some digging, the…

The curse of a medieval well near Liverpool…

  While looking for examples of medieval curses, e.g. the terrible doom-laden threats screamed from someone burning at the stake, I came upon this site. Considering how close to the surface the well is, I find it astonishing that all those years of ploughing haven’t wrought more damage, but then I’m told that in the…

A pleasant surprise

In recent years, Dan Jones’ posing and fanciful Crimewatch-style re-enactments, together with Starkeyesque conclusions formed before he started, has marred quite a few series on mediaeval history. Now he seems to have changed tack completely with this series, covering canal building from the middle of the eighteenth century and – yes – I rather enjoyed…

The Mayflower

Below is William Halsall’s 1882 portrait of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor. It is obviously imagined as the original ship was almost certainly broken up at Rotherhithe in 1624, a more extreme case than  the “Streatham portrait“, which post-dates it’s purported subject’s death by about forty years. From the spelling of the title, the background…