diverse digressions and rambles on English archaeology, landscape and folk traditions with the occasional scenic diversions
This is the text of a talk I gave this week at the Radio 3 Freethinking Festival at The Sage in Gateshead. It was broadcast on Friday 11th November in The Essay slot on Radio 3 – you should temporarily be able to find a link to the Listen Again facility here “Arriving in the …
Continue reading “North-East Heritage and the Coalfields: Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival talk”
I’ve been looking at the recently published Southport Group report, a document resulting from a working group drawn from a cross-section of the English archaeological sector which aims to address the implications of PPG16 with the new PPS5. PPG16 was the planning policy guidance document which in 1990 established the current system integrating archaeology into …
I’ve just done a broadcast on Radio 3’s Night Waves about the commercialisation of British archaeology. It’s only a short piece, and broadly speaking positive about the unexpected surprises that have arisen out of archaeological excavation that has been carried out as part of the planning system. It was not intended to be an in-depth …
Last week I got the rare chance to head up into the North Pennines as I had to go to Westgate to look at a dig my university has been involved with. I’m not naturally drawn to moorland landscapes. I have a fairly low tolerance for Gore-tex and Kendal Mint Cake and normally prefer my …
Most people think of Wind in the Willows (1908) as a rather jolly and ever-so English story of meadows, moles and mucking about in boats. However, within it is a haunting, mystical passage, which see the animals hearing mysterious piping and then encountering the god Pan: “he looked in the very eyes of the Friend …
Following on from my last entry, the two key figures in founding the Inland Waterwazys Association were Tom Rolt and Robert Aikman. However, I’ve stumbled across another interesting connection between these two men; they also both wrote ghost stories. Indeed, both have stories anthologised in the excellent Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. Rolt’s ‘Bosworth …
On Monday night I caught The Golden Age of Canals, one of those wonderful documentaries that BBC4 insists on sneaking out without telling anyone. Although it’s not clear from it title, it was primarily about the movement to prevent British canals falling into dereliction following a final later flowering during World War II, rather than …
I’ve just come across the on-line image gallery of the photographs taken by Cecil Sharpe of the singers and musicians from who he collected his music. These are an absolute revelation. Despite the massive expansion of photography in the later 19th and early 20th century it is incredibly rare to see portraits (and this is …
Cecil Sharpe is one of the founding figures in the English folk revival. He was in the forefront of collecting traditional songs and tunes in both England and the Appalachians in the early 20th century. Like most such pivotal individuals he has been the subject of much revisionism, and there is a tension between celebrating …
An item on PM on Radio 4 about the power of sounds to evoke emotions got me thinking. The article discussed the impact of the sound of the Merlin engine [] of a Spitfire. Much as I hate to admit it, I am no longer in the first flush of my youth, and I’ve noticed …
Outlandish Knight 