Sycamore Gap — a rhetoric of remains

Landscape with monument. [Link] [Link] One of the most photographed trees in the UK, standing alongside Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, east of Steel Rigg by Milecastle 39, in the northern borders of the Roman Empire. October 2020. In the early hours of September 28, 2023, the tree was cut down by Daniel Graham and Adam…

ripples in deep time

Ripples in the sand of a 330 million year old river delta. Carboniferous deep time. In the distance, the steel boiler of the trawler Tadorne, wrecked in 1913. Howick Burn, Northumberland UK. An archaeological sensibility.

Archaeological Theatre

Visiting the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen [Link]. What an experience of archaeological theatre! [Link] I discovered the work of Danish neo-classical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 – 1844) at the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge in 1977, when its collection of plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was still housed in my college…

A journey round my father

Life dispersed in small things forgotten Funeral We buried him in the cemetery at Blyth (in the north-east of England) overlooking the beach in the plot where my mother has lain since 1999. It was a bleak place back then. Twenty five years have seen the trees and hedges mature. The watery sunshine of that…