Category Archives: ENGLAND

Medieval Castle Remains Uncovered in England

Medieval Castle Remains Uncovered in England

Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a castle that they believe dates from the 13th century. They’ve been working on a mound of land in Wem, Shropshire, that belongs to Soulton Hall, an Elizabethan mansion.

Medieval Castle Remains Uncovered in England
The remains are thought to date back to 1250

The hall was built in the 16th Century, but experts believe the castle remains could date back as far as 1250. Site manager Nat Jackson, of Dig Ventures, said the find was “just amazing”.

“We found what we think might possibly be a castle on the mound.

“We’ve got a substantial wall and substantial blocks of wood dating to about the 13th to 15th century. It’s very, very, exciting,” he told BBC Radio Shropshire.

A stone wall was uncovered at Soulton Hall

A test dig on the previously untouched mound was carried out in 2019, but teams returned in July to continue excavation work. Tim Ashton, the landowner, said his family have been curious about the lumps in the land for over 100 years.

“We’ve always had questions, my grandfather was born in the 1920s and always wondered what it was,” he said.

“The team is fairly comfortable in the time because of the objects we’ve been finding.

“The finds are all from that period, a pilgrims badge, ceramics, and ampulla which is a medieval way of carrying holy water and it was not made for a great deal of time.

“The moat bridge is colossal and we can be confident of the dating on that,” he said.

A pilgrims badge was among the medieval items found

Mr Jackson added: “We think it was quite a small one, dominating the road to Wem and there would have been a moat around it.

“We think we might have found the evidence of the bridge that went over the moat, but this is for further exploration next.”

Dig Ventures has been working with Cardiff University students in their field school.

Students from Cardiff University have been helping out at the site

Mr Ashton said for many of the students, have never met in person since beginning their course due to the pandemic, but others, could not graduate from their course without the field experience.

“They have had very little access to the field, some of them couldn’t graduate until they came to the dig, we’ve been planning it for eight months.

“It’s one of the first teaching digs [taken place since the pandemic] and they essentially found a perfectly preserved timber structure.”

Anglo-Saxon Sword Pyramid Found in England

Anglo-Saxon Sword Pyramid Found in England

A gold and garnet sword pyramid lost by a Sutton Hoo-era lord “careening around the countryside” on his horse has been discovered by a metal detectorist. The Anglo-Saxon object was found in the Breckland area of Norfolk in April.

Anglo-Saxon Sword Pyramid Found in England
A metal detectorist discovered the mount on 11 April

Finds liaison officer Helen Geake said the garnets are Indian or Sri Lankan, revealing the far-flung nature of trade links in the 6th and 7th Centuries.

Sword pyramids come in pairs so its loss “was like losing one earring – very annoying”, she said.

The tiny 12mm by 11.9mm (0.4in by 0.4in) mount dates to about AD560 to 630, at a time when Norfolk was part of the Kingdom of East Anglia.

Dr Geake said: “It would have been owned by somebody in the entourage of a great lord or Anglo-Saxon king, and he would have been a lord or thegn [a medieval nobleman] who might have found his way into the history books.

“They or their lord had access to gold and garnets and to high craftsmanship.”

The extremely fine foil on its back is believed to have been created by techniques like a modern pantograph, used to reduce the size of the design.

The mounts were part of the system that bound a sword to its scabbard.

“It’s believed they made it a bit more of an effort to get the sword out of the scabbard, possibly acting as a check on an angry reaction,” Dr Geake said.

Norfolk finds liaison officer Helen Geake said it revealed the remarkable craft skills of the Anglo-Saxons

A more ornate pair were discovered at the early 7th Century ship burial at Sutton Hoo, which recently featured in the Netflix movie The Dig.

They are less commonly found in graves, but are “increasingly common” as stray finds, probably as accidental losses. Dr Geake said: “Lords would have been careening about the countryside on their horses and they’d lose them.”

The find has been reported to the Norfolk Coroner, as required by the Treasure Act.

Canterbury Cathedral stained glass is among the world’s oldest

Canterbury Cathedral stained glass is among world’s oldest

According to recent research, stained glass windows in England’s famous Canterbury Cathedral might be centuries older than previously thought, with some panels dating back to the mid-12th century.

If accurate, the colourful panes would have witnessed the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in the cathedral by followers of King Henry II in 1170. The particular panels, which are installed over one of the cathedral’s entrances, depict the ancestors of Christ and had previously been thought to have been made by artisans in the 13th century.

If the revised date is accurate, it would make them among the earliest extant works of stained glass in the world. It would also restore a piece of the structure’s history long thought lost.

‘We have hardly anything left of the artistic legacy of that early building [apart from] a few bits of stone carving,’ Léonie Seliger, the cathedral’s head of stained glass conservation, told BBC News. 

‘But until now, we didn’t think we had any stained glass,’ Seliger added. ‘And it turns out that we do.’

The Ancestors of Christ stained glass panels at Canterbury Cathedral (above) date to 1130-1160, according to a new analysis, at least a decade before Thomas Becket was murdered in the church

Henry II initially appointed Becket as his chancellor, then nominated him as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, with the hope his confirmation would bring the Church of England more under the monarchy’ control.

But Becket discovered a newfound religious belief and worked to extend the reach of the archbishopric, recovering church lands lost to the monarchy and reestablishing the church’s jurisdiction over clergymen accused of committing secular crimes. He also excommunicated a number of Henry’s ministers and advisors and threatened the king with ecclesiastical punishments.

After Henry reportedly asked, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?,’ four knights rode to Canterbury and beheaded Becket in the cathedral’s northwest transept on December 29, 1170. In addition to Becket’s killing, the Ancestors of Christ panels ‘would have witnessed Henry II come on his knees begging for forgiveness, they would have witnessed the conflagration of the fire that devoured the cathedral in 1174,’ Seliger said.

Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England, is one of the oldest Christian structures in Great Britain.

‘And then they would have witnessed all of British history.’

The oldest known stained glass windows are those at Augsburg Cathedral in Bavaria, Germany, completed in the late 11th century.

As far back as the 1980s, art historian Madeline Caviness had questioned the dates assigned to some of the Ancestors of Christ panels at Canterbury, pointing to noticeable stylistic differences. But disturbing the fragile works of art and worship was too risky.

A stained-glass window depicts the murder of Thomas Becket by Henry II’s knights, part of a series on the sainted archbishop in the cathedral’s chapel

Four decades later, researchers from University College London (UCL) designed a ‘windolyser,’ a portable device that shines a beam on glass, causing it to emit radiation that can be used to determine when it was created—similar to how spectrometry can determine the chemical composition of distant stars. Materials scientist Laura Ware Adlington, who led the research, says some of the Ancestor panels could date to between 1130 and 1160, at least a decade before Becket was killed.

Founded in 597, the Canterbury Cathedral was completely rebuilt between 1070 and 1077. It was initially thought the ‘Ancestors Series’ panels were installed after a fire devastated the building in 1174—over a period ranging from the late 1170s through until 1220. But data from the windolyser suggested they were there well before the fire and had been stored during reconstruction and added to the rebuilt cathedral.

Founded in 597, Canterbury Cathedral was completely rebuilt between 1070 and 1077 and again after a devastating fire in 1174

‘The scientific findings, the observations and the chronology of the cathedral itself all fit together very nicely now,’ Caviness, now 83, told BBC News.

‘I wish I was younger and could throw myself more into helping Laura with her future work. But I’ve certainly got a few more projects to feed her.’

Other panels in the famed house of worship have also been reconsidered: in 2019, researchers suggested stained-glass windows dated to the Victorian era really were constructed in the Middle Ages,

Rachel Koopmans, a medieval history professor at York University, said a panel depicting a group of pilgrims heading to Canterbury actually dates to the 1180s—a decade or so after Becket’s murder and some 200 years before Chaucer wrote about such a pilgrimage in Canterbury Tales. The window was part of a series in a chapel built in Becket’s honour—of the dozen created to tell his story, only eight remains.

‘The unique panel picturing travelling pilgrims allows us to see how the earliest pilgrims to Canterbury interacted and what they would have looked like, right down to the pilgrims’ wonderfully decorated boots,’ Koopmans told York University magazine in 2019. Using documents in the cathedral archives and an 1861 photograph of the window, she made her case about the pilgrimage window and she and Seliger secured permission to remove it for study.

Using digital photography technologies and spectrometry, they verified the glass in that window dated to the 1100s as well, nearly 800 years earlier than assumed. In medieval times, stained glass windows held significant importance, educating an illiterate populace about religious narratives.

‘They were the comic books of their day,’ Koopmans told the magazine. ‘They were designed as colourful bands to be read and admired by visiting pilgrims.’

‘Jurassic Pompeii’ yields thousands of ‘squiggly wiggly’ fossils

‘Jurassic Pompeii’ yields thousands of ‘squiggly wiggly’ fossils

Palaeontologist Tim Ewin is standing in a quarry, recalling the calamity that’s written in the rocks under his mud-caked boots.

'Jurassic Pompeii' yields thousands of 'squiggly wiggly' fossils
Fossilised seafloor animals from the Jurassic, all piled on top of each other

“They tried to protect themselves, adopting the stress position of pulling their arms in,” he continues. “But it was all in vain; you can see where their arms got snagged open, right up to the crown. They were pushed into the sediment and buried alive.”

There’s a little smile creeping across Tim’s face, and he’s got reason to be happy. The misfortune that struck this place 167 million years ago has delivered to him an extraordinary collection of fossil animals in what is unquestionably one of the most important Jurassic dig sites ever discovered in the UK. We can’t be precise about the location of the excavation for security reasons, but you’ll recognise from the gorgeous, honey-coloured limestone that we’re somewhere in the Cotswold country.

Things have changed a bit since Jurassic times, though.

No quaint villages and dry-stone walls back then; these parts were covered by a shallow sea, maybe 20-40m deep. And it was a damn sight warmer than your traditional English summer. The movement of tectonic plates means Britain was roughly where North Africa is today. So you can imagine the types of creatures that would have been living on this ancient, near-tropical seafloor.

The fossils are in clay layers that intersperse the Cotswold limestone

Stalked animals called sea lilies were tethered to the bed in great “meadows”. Their free-floating cousins, the feather stars, were ambling by, looking to grab the same particles of food. And down in the sediment, starfish and brittle stars were feeling their way across the bottom with their fives arms, no doubt bumping into the occasional passing sea urchin or sea cucumber. It’s exactly this scene that’s preserved in the rocks of our mystery quarry. The quantities involved are astonishing. Not hundreds, not thousands, but perhaps tens of thousands of these animals that scientists collectively call “the echinoderms”. It’s a great name, derived from the Greek for “hedgehog”, or “spiny”, “skin”. What is a sea urchin, if not an “underwater hedgehog“?

Echinoderms- Animals of the sea floor

  • Some may look like plants but they are all animals
  • Skeletons are made from calcite (calcium carbonate)
  • They display radial symmetry, in multiples of five
  • They have no brain but do have a nervous system
  • Arms and tube feet are moved by pumping seawater
  • Lost parts can be regrown, much like a gecko’s tail

Most of what we know about the deep history of echinoderms from British fossils comes from the few specimens that emerged from railway cuttings and quarrying in the Victorian age. Tim Ewin’s institution, the Natural History Museum in London, has these items tucked away in a small space that will now be utterly inadequate to accommodate the truckload of new examples that is coming.

The individual calcite plates, or ossicles, that made up the skeletal frames are preserved

“In this age of a rock from the Middle Jurassic, only two species of starfish were known, represented by five specimens,” he says. “In just a few days of collecting here, we’ve got 12 starfish specimens, and expect to find many more.

“And it’s the same for the comatulids, or stemless crinoids (feather stars) – 200 years’ worth of collecting is represented at the museum by about 25 specimens. Here, we’ve probably got 25 specimens just under our feet, and we’ve collected over 1,000.”

The NHM was given only a few days in the private quarry to collect the specimens

But it’s also the quality of the preservation that’s jaw-dropping. Lean in close to a slab of rock that’s just been cleaned up and you’ll observe what, at first sight, reminds you of a plate of noodles. It is in fact a great mass of fossil arms from who knows how many sea lilies. You can clearly discern the individual calcite plates, or ossicles, that made up the skeletal frames of these animals when they were alive. What’s more, the specimens are fully articulated. That’s to say, all parts are still intact. Everything is captured in three dimensions.

“We talk about the fives (radial symmetry) in echinoderms. They’re all there; you can see them,” says NHM senior fossil preparator Mark Graham. Specialists in fossil echinoderms believe the Cotswold quarry will help them better categorise the species’ different life stages, their ecology and their proper position in evolutionary history. To paraphrase that old cliche: the textbooks might not need to be rewritten but some extensive notes will almost certainly have to be added to the margins.

The arms of another crinoid are imprinted on a piece of Jurassic wood

And the new learning will go wider still, says echinoderm specialist Jeff Thompson.

“We live in a changing world today, and if we want to understand how climate change might affect not only the future of humanity but of all life on Earth’s surface, then the echinoderms are one of the best groups to study,” he tells me.

“We know quite well what happened to them through a variety of mass extinctions, so their experience can be really helpful as we try to understand the major changes in biodiversity across geological time.”

Sally Hollingworth is half-standing, half-sitting at the edge of a pool of muddy water. She’s busy trying to ease yet more feather stars from the clay layers that intersperse the quarry’s limestone units.

She’s gently prodding with a spatula, attempting to get under the specimens to lift them without breaking them.

“I call them ‘squiggly wigglies’,” she laughs. “The stalked crinoids, I call those ‘stalkie walkies’.”

It’s Sally and her husband, Neville, that the NHM have to thank for finding this marvellous site. The pair are keen amateur palaeontologists. They spend their weekends investigating the Cotswold hills and their surrounds, looking for interesting rocks. The most promising items they take home to “his and hers” studios (a shed and a garage) where they use air abrasion tools to lift off any obscuring sediment. It was while cooped up during lockdown that Sally and Neville first identified the potential of the quarry. After examining the location on Google Earth and comparing it with geological maps of the area, they sought permission from the landowner for a recce, which Sally says seemed somewhat underwhelming at the time.

“We were finding only tiny fragments of Jurassic sea creatures and we said, ‘well, OK, let’s take a slab home and see what we can reveal if we can clean it up’,” she recalls.

“I remember Nev shouting from the garage, ‘Sal, Sal! You’ve got to come and have a look at this!’ It was this beautiful sea lily emerging, coming to life, from the slab.”

Anatomy of a Crinoid (Sea Lily)

  • Sea lilies are the stalked variety of crinoids
  • Adult animals anchor themselves to the seabed
  • Their crowns are pointed into the water current
  • Feathery pinnules catch floating food particles
  • This detritus is propelled down towards a mouth

When Tim Ewin was notified, he immediately recognised the quarry’s importance and arranged for an expert team to come in and conduct a systematic search. Sally and Neville, far from being pushed aside by the professionals, are integral members of the group. Their local knowledge and homemade elderflower cordial are greatly appreciated.

Working the site is a mucky business. Recent rains have turned the floor of the quarry into a mud bath, and the precise and careful process of fossil excavation means the researchers have no choice but to get down on their hands and knees in the sticky mess.

“Some nice things are being protected by overturned food trays. It might not look like it in all this mud but there are actually some places where we’re not supposed to put our feet,” says NHM curator Zoe Hughes. “But there’s such an abundance, it’s maybe not such a concern,” quips colleague Katie Collins. “There’s such a bonanza of stuff.”

Slabs go through a triage process to select the best fossils for future study

The focus is those clay layers. These hold the mass of echinoderms. The context appears to be a busy swathe of sea-bottom where nutrients were constantly being delivered to the site. You see this in the occasional chunk of Jurassic wood that pokes out from the goo. Maybe there was a delta not far away that was directing food-laden waters to this scene. This can explain the abundance of fossil animals but it doesn’t explain their supreme preservation. For that, we have to return to the idea of a calamity. The clue to the drama is recorded in the harder, more sand-rich bands of clay – a signal of a sudden shift towards a more energetic environment.

“What we have is something very suggestive of a dramatic mudflow,” explains Zoe. “We have this happy little ecosystem and then, boom! – something catastrophic happens.

“Perhaps there was an earthquake that caused the mudslide and this came in and covered everything up. This is why the preservation is so amazing because the scavengers couldn’t then get to all those animals to pick them apart.”

As Neville Hollingworth likes to put it: “What we’ve got here is a sort of Jurassic Pompeii.”

NHM senior fossil preparator Mark Graham cleans up the fossils using a blast of air and powder
Fossil

Discovery at Dartmoor mine rewriting more than 1,000 year’s worth of history

Discovery at Dartmoor mine rewriting more than 1,000 year’s worth of history

A new discovery at a Dartmoor mine in England dates human activity there back potentially by more than 1,000 years. Initial examination of waste deposits at Kelly Mine, an iron ore mine near Lustleigh, reveals that iron-smelting occurred there far earlier than the contemporary mining activity for which the site is renowned.

Kelly Mine, which operated from the 18th century until 1951, produced a unique type of iron oxide that was utilized for a number of industrial applications.

A concentration of slag was discovered when volunteers were repairing one of the old mine workings, and it turned out to be leftovers from bloomery smelting, an ancient method used to make wrought iron from iron ore.

Dr. Lee Bray, an archaeologist at Dartmoor National Park, has been inspecting and recording the fragments.

He said: “The finds are very exciting because it puts the history of human activity at Kelly Mine back probably by over a thousand years, certainly much earlier than the 18th Century.

An exciting discovery has been made at Kelly Mine on Dartmoor

“The types and quantities of slag present suggest iron was being produced on a relatively small scale, probably just for local needs.

The material looks unlike the typical waste from Medieval or Roman iron production, and it is possible we are looking at evidence for prehistoric smelting on the site. It’s a valuable insight into a lesser-known part of Dartmoor’s history.”

“While its tin mining and industrial sites attract lots of attention, it’s fascinating to discover fresh information that shows a wider range of minerals have been exploited in the region.”

Kelly Mine is one of Dartmoor’s important industrial historical sites. The first reference to workings dates to around 1797 but the first official record of the mine is in 1877.

It ultimately shut down in 1951.  For years, the equipment and location sat idle until 1984, when the landowner leased the property to a group of mining enthusiasts.

The architect believes Stonehenge once had a thatched roof to form the temple

The architect believes Stonehenge once had a thatched roof to form the temple

One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Stonehenge is how any of it is still standing, given the predations of souvenir-hunters and vandals including the great 17th-century architect Sir Christopher Wren. He paid many visits to the ancient monument on Salisbury Plain and his surname can still be seen carved on one of its stones.

Landscape architect Sarah Ewbank believes Stonehenge (pictured) once had a thatched roof

The Victorians were even more destructive, renting chisels to visitors so they could take great chunks of Stonehenge home, and over the centuries farmers purloined stones for building their barns. Perhaps they might all have had more respect for the monument, now a Unesco World Heritage site, had they heard the extraordinary theory being put forward in a new book by 62-year-old landscape architect Sarah Ewbank.  She would have us believe that the Stonehenge we see today represents the ruins of a majestic building that once had a spectacular thatched roof. As mind-boggling as contemplating an upright Tower of Pisa or a Day-Glo Taj Mahal, this may seem as barking as other ideas expounded about Stonehenge over the centuries: that its layout was based on the female private parts, or that it was a site of human sacrifice or a landing pad for aliens.

But Sarah is deadly serious, and she backs up her arguments with the rather ferocious electric saw she keeps in the garage of her pretty Cotswolds cottage near Lechlade, Gloucestershire. The feisty grandmother does not use this to intimidate those who disagree with her — although she is rather frustrated with the academics who have repeatedly refused to engage with her idea that Stonehenge was a Neolithic version of the Royal Albert Hall.

No, the saw is used to fashion ever-more detailed models of how she thinks Stonehenge might have looked. Each has taken about two months to complete and they have got bigger each time. While three earlier models have been banished to the attic, version four is currently taking pride of place in the dining room. Built on a scale of 1:33, it is surprisingly persuasive. The moment you see the familiar stone slabs as the supports for an upper storey you think ‘Ah, yes, of course it was a building. What else could it have been?’

Sarah points out that Stonehenge has a total diameter — some 30 metres — which is almost exactly the same as Shakespeare’s Globe (pictured), a very similarly thatched building

As to what kind of building, Sarah thinks it was an all-purpose Neolithic temple with a large oval hall overlooked by galleries in which crowds might have gathered to hear speakers below.

She points out that the total diameter — some 30 metres — is almost exactly the same as Shakespeare’s Globe, a similarly thatched building in which, several millennia later, the human voice could carry to every audience member.

‘It is unquestionably the right size for an enclosed public venue,’ she says, speculating that the scenes at Stonehenge might have been as boisterous as in Elizabethan times.

‘Maybe there was feasting in the galleries, with dancing and musicians playing below, or perhaps ceremonies took place to welcome in the solstices. It all sounds rather splendid.’

It does indeed, and Sarah contends that archaeologists have under-estimated our Neolithic and Bronze Age forebears who built Stonehenge over centuries, years starting around 5,000 BC.

Building blocks: the basic structure which can be deduced from what is left to this day
Layers upon layers: architect Sarah Ewbank’s theory has an inner wall and doorway
A giant roof: Sarah believes the monument took the shape of an all-purpose Neolithic temple

‘They have assumed they were rough, tough, types who had advanced little from grunting cavemen and were hardy enough to worship outdoors. But we know that the Bronze Age was sophisticated enough to have goldsmiths making absolutely stunning jewellery and they knew how to make copper alloys like bronze.

‘It seems obvious to me that they would have wanted to mark the winter solstice inside, under a roof, not outside in the freezing cold.’ It has taken five years for Sarah to develop her theory with the support of Crispin Scott, a 65-year-old retired Army officer who is her partner of 14 years. They are both divorced, with five grown-up children between them, and Sarah has fitted in her research around her work and their shared hobby of bell-ringing.

‘Initially, Cris couldn’t understand why I was doing it. But as I got more into it, he realised that I was on to something,’ she says.

It has taken five years for Sarah to develop her theory with the support of Crispin Scott, a 65-year-old retired Army officer who is her partner of 14 years. Pictured: One of Sarah’s model
Sarah has been in architecture for more than 40 years and has been involved in consultancy and planning for everything from historic estates to Oxford colleges. Pictured: Sarah’s model

Her interest was first sparked when she saw a TV documentary about new excavations at Stonehenge. ‘I wondered: “Why to keep digging down instead of looking up?”

‘I could see its slabs were of a suitable size to be support piers for a roof and wondered if their layout held clues that would reveal its shape.’

Designing landscapes for more than 40 years, she’s been involved in consultancy and planning for everything from historic estates to Oxford colleges. But this task involved throwing her brain into reverse. Instead of creating a design from scratch, she was trying to deduce what a design might have been from the four concentric formations of stones that make up Stonehenge: an outer and an inner circle, a horseshoe and an oval. None is complete, and indications of where the missing stones once stood have been identified by archaeological investigations.

These suggest that the outer ring consisted of 30 pillars of grey sarsen stone, each about four metres high, somehow transported from quarries on the Marlborough Downs, about 20 miles away. Sarah points to other famous historic buildings — most notably the Parthenon in Athens — whose roofs are supported by similar columns. ‘It’s a common building form,’ she explains.

Sarah has built multiple models of how she see’s how Stonehenge was originally built

It’s believed that these pillars were all originally capped by horizontally placed stones known as lintels. Where these are missing it’s possible to see two knobs on top of each pillar which would have been slotted into two corresponding holes in the bottom of the lintels. Since gravity alone would have been enough to hold the lintels in place, Sarah argues that the knobs and sockets would not have been necessary unless they were supporting something.

‘Their existence suggests that the sarsens’ uprights and lintels were engineered as if to take the load of a roof,’ she says.

While the sarsen stones would have formed an outer colonnade, a wraparound walkway covered by the roof but open to the elements, Sarah believes it’s logical that the hall would have had a wall to give protection from the weather. According to her, the remains of the doorways within that wall can be seen in Stonehenge’s inner circle, made up of smaller bluestones transported from the Preseli mountains in Wales, some 150 miles away.

A sketch showing how Sarah Ewbank, from Gloucestershire, imagines Stonehenge looked

Before metal hinges were available, doors were jointed onto pivoting vertical poles that turned when the door was open or shut. One of the bluestone uprights contains a vertical groove into which such a pole would have fitted perfectly, while the two bluestone lintels remaining contain holes which Sarah thinks may have been used to secure a wooden board containing sockets for the door-poles.

Moving towards the centre of Stonehenge, the next formation is a horseshoe of four trilithons — sets of two stones capped by a lintel — with another taller trilithon at the end. Sarah suggests that all were supports for a central wooden framework spanning the centre of the oval hall, with rafters radiating downwards to the outer circle of sarsen stones to support the roof’s lower slopes.

Innovative: architect Sarah Ewbank

In her view, Stonehenge’s builders would have known exactly how to build the central wooden cradle she posits as holding up the roof because it resembles a large upturned boat. Her final challenge was to find a purpose for the oval of bluestones at the centre of Stonehenge. She concludes that these supported columns held up the balcony. While her fourth model shows this being reached via a spiral staircase, she admits that this is pure guesswork. But she is more confident that our Neolithic predecessors were capable of high-quality carpentry using oaks from the woodlands which covered about a third of Great Britain.

All this begs a question. If Stonehenge really was a building, then how on earth did they go about constructing it?

Using her experiences of shifting weighty objects with very limited resources, Sarah imagines an ingenious arrangement for raising Stonehenge’s wooden trusses, the largest of which she estimates as weighing 20 tonnes. This involves building a high platform on which each truss could be laid flat, with one end butting the top of the lintel before being hoisted upright with ropes.

So what do the experts make of all this? Over the years, Sarah has asked but received no real replies.

‘I would like to sit down and have a sensible conversation with them, but it seems anything challenging the view of a broad consensus of current archaeologists is routinely rejected,’ she says,.

But English Heritage is unlikely to be entering such discussions any time soon. ‘The idea of a roof on Stonehenge wouldn’t make any sense,’ says the monument’s curator, Heather Sebire.

‘Part of the point of the place is the majesty of the stones, so why would you put a roof on them? The bottom line is that there isn’t any evidence for it.’

This doesn’t sit well with Sarah. ‘Just because something hasn’t survived, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist,’ she says, and her book certainly makes a plausible case that the roof on Stonehenge did exist. One thing is certain. Given the huge distances over which the stones had to be transported by land, the construction of Stonehenge was an astonishing technical accomplishment — with or without a roof.

Can 4.5 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Hold Secrets of Life on Earth?

Can 4.5 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Hold Secrets of Life on Earth?

Scientists are set to uncover the secrets of a rare meteorite and possibly the origins of oceans and life on Earth, thanks to Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) funding.

Research carried out on the meteorite, which fell in the UK earlier this year, suggests that the space rock dates back to the beginning of the Solar System, 4.5 billion years ago.

The meteorite has now been officially classified, thanks in part to the STFC-funded studies on the sample.

The Winchcombe meteorite, aptly named after the Gloucestershire town where it landed, is an extremely rare type called a carbonaceous chondrite.

It is a stony meteorite, rich in water and organic matter, which has retained its chemistry from the formation of the solar system. Initial analyses showing Winchcombe to be a member of the CM (“Mighei-like”) group of carbonaceous chondrites have now been formally approved by the Meteoritical Society.

Winchcombe meteorite
An image of one of the fragments of the Winchcombe meteorite.

STFC provided an urgency grant in order to help fund the work of planetary scientists across the UK. The funding has enabled the Natural History Museum to invest in state-of-the-art curation facilities to preserve the meteorite, and also supported time-sensitive mineralogical and organic analyses in specialist laboratories at several leading UK institutions.

Dr. Ashley King, a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum, said: “We are grateful for the funding STFC has provided.

Winchcombe is the first meteorite fall to be recovered in the UK for 30 years and the first-ever carbonaceous chondrite to be recovered in our country. STFC’s funding is aiding us with this unique opportunity to discover the origins of water and life on Earth. Through the funding, we have been able to invest in state-of-the-art equipment that has contributed to our analysis and research into the Winchcombe meteorite.”

The meteorite was tracked using images and video footage from the UK Fireball Alliance (UKFAll), a collaboration between the UK’s meteor camera networks that includes the UK Fireball Network, which is funded by STFC. Fragments were then quickly located and recovered.

Since the discovery, UK scientists have been studying Winchcombe to understand its mineralogy and chemistry to learn about how the Solar System formed.

Dr. Luke Daly from the University of Glasgow and co-lead of the UK Fireball Network said: “Being able to investigate Winchcombe is a dream come true.

Many of us have spent our entire careers studying this type of rare meteorite. We are also involved in JAXA’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx missions, which aim to return pristine samples of carbonaceous asteroids to the Earth.

For a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite to fall in the UK, and for it to be recovered so quickly and have a known orbit, is a really special event and a fantastic opportunity for the UK planetary science community.”

Funding from STFC enabled scientists to quickly begin the search for signs of water and organics in Winchcombe before it could be contaminated by the terrestrial environment.

Dr. Queenie Chan from Royal Holloway, University of London added: “The team’s preliminary analyses confirm that Winchcombe contains a wide range of organic material! Studying the meteorite only weeks after the fall, before any significant terrestrial contamination, means that we really are peering back in time at the ingredients present at the birth of the solar system, and learning about how they came together to make planets like the Earth.”

A piece of the Winchcombe meteorite that was recovered during an organized search by the UK planetary science community is now on public display at London’s Natural History Museum. 

Mystery as a fully-sealed bottle of liquid discovered between skeleton’s legs

Mystery as fully-sealed bottle of liquid discovered between skeleton’s legs

Experts at Hull’s largest-ever archaeological excavation believe they’ve made significant progress in unraveling the mystery of a bottle discovered between a skeleton’s legs. The unique blue-colored glass bottle marked ‘Hull Infirmary’ appears to have been placed in a grave at the former Trinity burial cemetery on purpose.

The glass bottle discovered at the Hull burial has the words “Hull infirmary” on it and contains a mysterious brown liquid.

The fully intact sealed bottle also contained an unknown brown liquid. It was discovered earlier this year as part of the major excavation at the site where burials took place between 1783 and 1861.

A 70-strong team of specialist archaeologists have been working there since last year as part of the nearby £355m A63 upgrade scheme on Castle Street in the city centre. They are examining around 1,500 exhumed skeletons.

The site is one of the largest post-medieval cemeteries to have ever been excavated in the north of England and the discovery of the bottle initially raised a few eyebrows.

Osteology supervisor Katie Dalmon explained: “It’s quite normal to find artefacts such as rings, coins, items of clothing and even tableware such as plates in a burial plot but this bottle was quite unusual.

“Not only was it apparently specifically placed between the person’s legs but it was also sealed and was nearly full of liquid.”

The ‘Hull Infirmary’ inscription on the side of the bottle was the first clue in what has become an ongoing piece of archaeological detective work.

The hospital was first established in temporary premises in 1782 – a year before the burial ground opened – and then moved to a purpose-built home in Prospect Street in 1784.

Katie added: “We now know a little bit more about the identity of the body – it’s a woman who was in her 60s at the time of death. We also know she was suffering from residual Ricketts and osteoporosis.

“She was also buried in the middle of a burial stack with the bottle. It was deliberately placed with the individual and was not part of any backfill.”

Tests have also been carried on the mysterious liquid in an effort to establish what it actually is with samples being sent to experts from Nottingham Trent University to carry out a high-tech analysis.

Katie said: “The tests have confirmed the presence of sodium, potassium and phosphorus and have also discounted any pharmaceutical materials being present.

“The results leave us with the likelihood that the liquid is probably urine but they also raise a whole series of other questions.

“What could this mean? Why was it placed there and, if it’s not the urine, what could it be?”

She said another theory being examined was that the liquid might have been a type of phosphate-based tonic drink.

“These were popular in the 19th century when they were advertised as a cure for various medical ailments, including tuberculosis.

“We can’t be exactly sure at the moment so we are carrying out more tests to try to get a definitive answer.”

The team from Oxford Archaeology is expected to spend several years studying all the finding findings from the burial ground. Work on the actual site is due to end next month when the remaining giant tents covering the excavation area will be removed.