Are we all Druids now? Tuning in to the BBC’s religious affairs programme on 1 October, Sherds was amused to hear Emma Restall Orr, founder of the Druid Network, talking about the ‘long hard struggle’ to persuade the Charity Commission for England and Wales to grant charitable status to the Druids. This was a frustrating [...]

State of play Believing that things are not what they used to be is a viral disease that strikes as you enter adulthood and gets worse with age, says folklorist Steve Roud. One symptom is the perennial complaint that children do not play proper games any more. In 1804, the demise of childhood games was [...]

Rock and roll Bits of rock, in various guises, form a running theme in this month’s Sherds, starting with Neolithic ball bearings. Numerous attempts have been made to explain how the slabs of stone used in the construction of Stonehenge got to their destination. Could these huge blocks, weighing up to 4 tonnes, have been [...]

Contradictory policies David Cameron marked the beginning of the holiday season (now but a distant memory) with a speech on tourism that included some startling statistics: did you know that Britain is only 22nd in the list of most popular destinations for Chinese tourists – by comparison, Germany is 10th. Or that the UK is [...]

Plans to ‘de-regulate’ Britain ‘Help us repeal bad laws,’ said Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on 1 July, asking the public for feedback on unnecessary legislation the British people would like to see scrapped. One response, published in the Independent on 5 July 2010, was so witty, it deserves a wider audience. ‘In Hereford’s Cathedral [...]

Heritage plaques Strict rules govern the erection of Blue Plaques, the circular memorial tablets in Wedgwood blue that mark the residences of celebrated historical figures. The person commemorated must have been dead for 20 years or have passed the centenary of their birth; should be considered eminent by other members of their profession or calling; [...]

Freudian dating parties Responding to the news that the National Trust and Mills & Boon have formed a partnership to publish bodice rippers set in historic houses, several CA readers have pointed out that the link between heritage and romance is far from new: museums and galleries have been exploiting their potential as trysting places [...]

Sexing-up the heritage Regular readers will begin to think that Sherds is obsessed with matters amorous, but in truth this is only a reflection of the extent to which the world is becoming ever more eroticised. Even Dr Who now has a feisty heroine who makes suggestive innuendoes about how long it is since the [...]

Ever been had? What makes a good April Fools’ Day hoax? Certainly not the infamous spaghetti-tree documentary that was shown on Panorama in 1957, which is often cited by journalists too young to know as ‘the spoof that fooled the nation’. It didn’t, of course. A nation brought up on macaroni cheese and spag bol [...]

Does civilisation start with beer? According to archaeologist Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Neolithic Revolution was driven not by the desire for bread, rice, millet or sorghum, but by the thirst for soul food in the form of beer. In other words, we turned from the harsh and [...]

The triumph of the numerologists Chairing a meeting at the Society of Antiquaries on the life of Jacquetta Hawkes recently, the Society’s President (Geoff Wainwright) observed approvingly that she had had no time for numerologists with their cabalistic papers on the ‘megalithic yard’ (the unit of measurement supposed to underlie the layout of every megalithic [...]

Great Scott! World’s oldest butter There are two ways to write an archaeological news story that are best avoided (but frequently deployed): claiming that something is the oldest example of its kind – or the earliest (which amounts to the same thing). So when the press reported that the ‘oldest butter in the world had [...]

Treasure found in river Seeing the headline ‘Treasure found in river’, most Current Archaeology readers would probably think ‘Bronze Age deposition’, but this haul of loot, found by amateur divers Trevor and Gary Bankhead on the bed of Durham’s River Wear, are of a more recent vintage. In the course of the 300 dives conducted, [...]

Pee for the Planet Despite having a woman as its Director General, the National Trust has issued some surprisingly sexist advice on saving the planet: they want men to pee on their compost heaps. Doing so will make better fertiliser and save the water that would have been used to flush the lavatory. The result [...]

Bye bye nursery rhymes? The readers of the Daily Telegraph thrive on apocalyptic stories predicting the end of civilisation as we know it, usually because of a European directive – banning the sale of ‘traditional’ 100 watt light bulbs, for example, or forbidding the sale of fruit by the imperial pound (never mind that the [...]