past maps
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This discovery was announced several months ago (as you will see in the links at the end of this post), but I have only just received this BBC article When we think of moats we generally associate them with castles, or upper class residences and manor houses. We do not associate them with lower classes…
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Well, now I’ve read it all. Please look at the above map, into which you can zoom at here. Do you see the images of monarchs on the left (Lancaster) and on the right (York)? You’ll probably need to zoom at the Wikimedia link above to read the words atop the Lancastrian column. They…
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Many sites are connected with Atlantis. So much so that the name is attached to “lost” towns and villages that are being searched for today. Among these is Ravenspur, which was in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It’s famous to medievalists for being where Henry IV (as Duke of Lancaster) landed in 1399 and Edward…
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Have two lost islands been traced off the Welsh coast….?
Atlantis, Bermuda Triangle, Brutus, Cantre’r Gwaelod, Cardigan Bay, Conwy Bay, Cornwall, Dunwich, Edward IV, Gough Map, Henry IV, Hy-Brasil, Ireland, Iseult, islands, lost lands, Lyonesse, past maps, Ravenspur, Richard II, Scilly Isles, Seithenyn, South Devon, Suffolk, tristan, Trojans, Tyno Helig, WalesThe thought of lost/sunken lands has always fascinated me, beginning with the legendary land of Lyonesse, once believed to be off the coast of Cornwall, between Land’s End and the present Isles of Scilly. It features prominently in the story of Tristan and Iseult. And, like many such sunken lands, the bells of its…
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The Great British Dig – History in Your Garden (3)
air raid shelters, Anthony Babington, Battle of Marston Moor, Biggin Hill Grange, Channel Four, chapels, Coventry, Elizabeth I, English Civil War, executions, Glen Mill, Henry III, Hugh Dennis, King’s Lynn, Morda House, Odiham, Oldham, Oswestry, past maps, plots, Priories, prisoners of war, ramparts, Second World War, sieges, Sir Francis Walsingham, workhousesThis excellent Channel Four programme has returned for a third series soon after the second, perhaps because the pandemic interrupted some of the earlier filming. The first episode features Odiham Place in Hampshire, looking for the home of Sir Francis Walsingham, although it was actually built for Henry VIII and was smaller than a 1739…
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While ambling around in the hope of finding a 14th century map of Europe, I happened upon this site It’s interesting, and includes an anecdote (modern) of the ruse used by a US cartographer of adding fake towns to his maps, to catch out forgers. Someone wasn’t caught out by this, he was actually…
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Wandering around the net in search of one thing does, as we all know, often turn up something else entirely. I came upon this site which tells of a map from a period following the one in which we’re mainly interested, but I found it intriguing. It seems the present Blackwall Tunnel mightn’t be…
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“….Where and how did medieval mapmakers, apparently armed with no more than a compass, an hourglass and sets of sailing directions, develop stunningly accurate maps of southern Europe, the Black Sea and North African coastlines, as if they were looking down from a satellite, when no one had been higher than a treetop?…” I have…
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Some people create just for fun, others to have fun AND to inform. Suffolk modelmaker Colin Patten plans to do both in a large-scale model of the entire town of Ipswich in late medieval times, before the abbeys and priories were swept away in the Reformation. Mr Patten has already done a similar model of…