ARCHAEOLOGY

King Arthur has made his mark on Britain’s landscape, and not surprisingly left his name on numerous ancient sites. Here, Dave Weldrake considers Arthur’s relationship with Round Tables and maidens…   Arthurian place names A lot of time and effort has been spent on trying to site the battles of King Arthur. (See for instance […]

Mike Haigh summarises a fascinating story of the author’s earliest experience of the past The Alderley Edge shovel is really a dull, functional tool – but it has a remarkable story. It begins in the early 1940s at Alderley Edge Council School in Cheshire, where local lad Alan Garner was taught the rudiments of education

Laurence Main finds  an old spirit path in Wales This did not begin with a thick pencil, drawing lines on a grubby, folded map. Perish the thought! My means of maintaining a modicum of sanity in this world is to escape to the hills and ancient trackways. Yes, old straight tracks. I didn’t make them straight.

Is the famous Cretan fresco denoting the stars around Taurus? William Glyn-Jones thinks it may be…   Cr. Heraklion Archaeological Museum CCO, Wikimedia Commons      The Bull Leaper fresco (p.16) from the palace of Knossos in Crete has always been a particular favourite of mine. The graceful power of the bull, with its sensuous

Should we take seriously legends about ‘retribution’ coming to humans who violate ritual sites? Robert W E Farrah has been wondering the same thing…       It was during the campaign to stop a Christian ‘Millennium Monument’ being erected in the vicinity of Mayburgh henge (see NE 84 & 85) that I was reminded

Janet Bord considers the development of holy well research and interest through the lens of her work in Wales Davina Ware      Little did I know what I was letting myself in for when I started researching the book which was published in 1985 as Sacred Waters: Holy Wells and Water Lore in Britain and Ireland. I

Lichen growth is a perennial but rarely remarked feature of a megaltihic site visit. Mark Greener explains why we should take notice Lichens are easy to overlook: seemingly nondescript splodges on megaliths, insignificant against the scale of the stone let alone compared with the grandeur of the sacred landscape. Yet they’re integral to megalithic beauty:

Mark Greener reviews recent findings on ‘megalithisme’   The 35000 remaining megaliths scattered across Europe – from Sweden to Sicily, from Poland to Portugal – include tombs, standing stones, stone circles, alignments and buildings.1,2 Despite this widespread distribution, megaliths share numerous features.1 As long ago as 1719, the Swiss antiquary Jacques Christophe Iselin remarked on

John Billingsley shares a site that once offered – and may yet – a unique but vulnerable glimpse into the prehistory of North Africa, and local serpent worship   The ancient site of Slonta,1 in NE Libya, is one unlikely to be seen by western tourists for some time to come, if ever. I was