Olympics opening – (in)tangible heritage

London – the opening of the 30th Olympiad A bucolic pastoral green and pleasant land succumbing to dark satanic mills, in William Blake’s vision, homage also to Tolkein’s pitting of Hobbiton against Isengard’s tower; Shakespeare’s Tempest declaimed by Brunel on the slopes of a druidic oak-toppped Glastonbury Tor; dreams of Peter Pan and Mary Poppins;…

chorography – then and now

Chorography – a workshop at Durham University July 10 2012 – [Link] Summer fieldwork. I am less focused on the excavations at Binchester this year [Link]. I am pulling together my long-running research into the region – the English Scottish borders. How do you tell of such a place? All that is there, and has…

Lordenshaws and the Coquet Valley

(Use the controls to navigate through the panorama) The Simonside Hills loom over the upper Coquet valley looking north. The magical and haunted Whitton Dene is in the middleground. The path off to the left is to the main carved rock outcrop. The hillfort is one of the most accessible sites of prehistoric rock carving…