The New Murrey and Blue blog

As another year dawns, it must be time for another series of Britain’s archeological highlights, divided into five regions.

This time, it started in the north with Carlisle Cricket Club hosting a dig associated with the bathhouse of the emperor Septimius Severus, a particularly steep part of the Grampians and Lowther Castle, a site that was part of the kingdom of Strathclyde until 1092 and consequently didn’t feature in the Domesday Book. In the centre, they visited a nunnery by the Thames, a working pub in Northampton and a dig adjacent to Leicester Cathedral.

The third episode focussed on the west, including some safety work at Tintern Abbey and Syston in Gloucestershire. This was followed by a visit to the east, featuring Lincoln, Warham in Norfolk, Norton Disney, from where Walt’s family originated, then Forty Hall, a “Tudor” structure in Enfield, including a dodecahedron. An investigation of the Waterloo battle site stretched a point and completed the episode.

Part five illustrated the south, starting in the North Kent marshes where a mudlarker located a shoe from c.830 BC., the oldest found in the country, together with an even older bag. The same county features WW2 Dover, where some decommissioned gun emplacements were explored, and Smallhythe, the site of Henry V‘s docks, although they are now inland. There was also a visit to the Dorset coast and an investigation of Roman remains by Exeter Cathedral. The west was the focus again through Snodhill Castle near Hereford, with two or three postern gates for extra protection against Owain Glyn Dwr, a mosaic in Chedworth near Gloucester that dates from well after 410 the Romans actually left and Imber near Stonehege, which was permanently evacuated in 1943 and to which Alice Roberts has a family connection. The main discovery was a timber roundhouse in Trellau Park, Cardiff, with a bank and ditch enclosure and a non-Welsh flint arrowhead clearly implying trade with neighbouring tribes.