Achill Island: Irish island archaeology from the Neolithic to the Great Famine

The recent work of the Achill Archaeological Field School examines the island’s archaeology from the Neolithic through to the dark days of
the Great Famine. Stuart Rathbone explains.
Achill Island is a remote spot on the north west coast of Ireland, separated from the mainland by a narrow sound. It is the largest of the Irish islands, and is divided into a mountainous western half and a low-lying eastern half. Today, the island is all but devoid of trees and, apart from the rocky coastline and mountain tops, the entire island is covered in deep blanket bog.

Norfolk: land of Boudicca

Leading Norfolk archaeologist John Davies has just published a new book on the perennial favourite rebel queen, Boudica. We asked him to explain what recent archaeological discoveries have revealed about the homeland of the Roman Empire’s most famous British enemy.

Worship, Death and Taxes: the story of Higham Ferrers

Two very important discoveries have been made at the multi-period site of Higham Ferrers, in Northamptonshire: one a Romano-British shrine complex, and the other an example of the realities – and occasional brutalities – of Middle Saxon regional government. Oxford Archaeology’s Alan Hardy takes up the story.

Higham Ferrers lies in what is now an inconspicuous dry valley, bisected by a footpath called King’s Meadow Lane. Interest in the site grew when preliminary fieldwalking, a survey of cropmarks and a geophysical survey pointed to Iron Age, Roman, Saxon and Medieval activity, curiously not – it seemed – all on the same site. Was this a shifting, but long-lived settlement? Could it be the progenitor of the Medieval borough of Higham Ferrers, which lies a kilometre to the south, with a castle and fine buildings stretching along the southern bank of the River Nene as testimony to its prosperous Medieval heritage?

Greening the valleys:

the archaeology of industrial Wales

Wales was central to the world’s first industrial revolution; the abandoned remains of 200-year-old coal and iron industries litter the valleys. Frank Olding reports on the Green Mines Project, which is conserving and presenting the physical remains in Blaenau Gwent and regenerating this once-plundered landscape.

An 18th century ironworks; a wealthy ironmaster’s mansion; poignant memorials to workers buried in the Cefn Golau Cholera Cemetery; a fortified residence at Nantyglo—the last private defence-work built in Britain. All are vivid reminders of the bitter class war that sometimes raged in these idyllic, Welsh valleys. So it is that in one corner of Britain the  history of the industrial revolution is represented in physical remains—a history of technology and production, of wealth and power, and of poverty and resistance.