H.G. Wells' steampunk bank holiday (The War in the Air, 1908): "young men and women on bicycles and motor-bicycles, and gyroscopic motor-cars running bicycle-fashion on two wheels… And there were several navigable gas air-ships, not to mention balloons, in the air. It was all immensely interesting…"

The jouney from fallen stone to #StandingStoneSunday: #OTD in 1958 The Sphere reported on preparations by 'Ministry of Works experts' to re-erect the Stonehenge trilithon that collapsed in 1797. The raising of Stone 58 "proved more difficult than anticipated and it gave… several moments of anxiety"

'The Relics of Our Ancestors' from the Festival of Britain, part of an exhibit on 'The People of Britain' convened by Jacquetta Hawkes. It aimed to show how "different breeds of ancestors have contributed to the shaping of such a rare miscellany of faces as confronts the visitor in any London bus" 🧵

On 30 April 1910 the Western Mail printed an article on ‘May-Day and Its Meaning’ by Owen Rhoscomyl, the Bardic name of the writer and soldier Arthur Owen Vaughan (1863-1919). It's an account, of sorts, of the whole of British prehistory, an odd mash-up of archaeological fragments and folklore. 🧵

Good morning

More 2001 future nostalgia on BBC R4X today (from 2018, so stop before the last 4 mins to avoid El*n M*sk references)

The Glacial Question, Unsolved by J.H. Prynne (d. 22 Apr 2026) "...the ice smoothing the humps off, filling the hollows with sandy clay as the litter of "surface". As the roads run dripping across this, the rhythm is the declension of history, the facts in succession, they are succession, and

Can you see what’s wrong with this answer, Google AI…? (stuck on a crossword clue, solution was Meat Loaf in case you’re wondering)

GK Chesterton on the "deep difference between England and America" #OTD in 1924: while an ex-Secretary of State hounds professors out of their colleges for mentioning Darwin could we imagine "Winston Churchill in the red jersey of the Salvation Army, jumping up and down and calling out Hallelujah!"?

I wouldn't normally recommend the Spectator but making an exception for this: Moorcock on Priest on Ballard

St Nicholas, Pyrford, surrounded by spring #SteepleSaturday

Game birds aside, a nice return from 30 seconds of merlin bird app on the Wey meadows this morning - plus the stonechat(?) takes flight

⚡️EU sanctions Russian cultural figures involved with illegal archaeological excavations in occupied Crimea. Since 2014, Russia has been systematically looting artifacts and even destroying Ukrainian cultural heritage sites on the occupied peninsula. kyivindependent.com/eu-sanctions...

For JMW Turner's birthday, here's all the fun of the fair on St. Catherine's Hill, Guildford (watercolour of 1830, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

He lived so long that his obituarist died before him…

The BBC's obsession with promoting metal-detecting continues, still without acknowledgement of its many problematic aspects...

Great to be there - the O2 is quite a big room 😊

Coin hoard in vessel (damaged during excavation) #FindsFriday

All these stories of life and transgression in Tehran are amazing

#OTD 100 years ago the Hampshire Telegraph reported the discovery of a #Roman villa (with baths) in a garden in Havant. 'Spes bona' indeed, unless you were trying to plant an orchard, as the homeowner was. Instead, he ended up creating something rather like the Blue Peter Italian sunken garden… 🏺

#OTD 100 years ago the Hampshire Telegraph reported the discovery of a #Roman villa (with baths) in a garden in Havant. 'Spes bona' indeed, unless you were trying to plant an orchard, as the homeowner was. Instead, he ended up creating something rather like the Blue Peter Italian sunken garden… 🏺

"A wintry impression of Anstiebury Camp" by Donald Maxwell #HillfortsWednesday

Donald Maxwell, illustrator, writer, war artist & ley hunter (more on that anon), was born #OTD in 1877. Of the numerous travel & topographic books of the earlier C20, his stand out to me for the impressionistic, snapshot quality of the sketches and paintings. A few examples from Surrey and London…

“…hating the idea of city-focused politicians having a say over their rural lives” - I feel like Raymond Williams would have had something to say…

For goodness sake can we have fewer poor people in our museums and gardens. This is the burning issue that keeps me awake at night and I am glad Robert Jenrick is tackling it.

And all because of a fish from the river Wey… The story goes that his pregnant mother had a dream in which she was told that if she ate a pike her son would arise to great preferment. Soon afterwards, in taking a pail of water from the river she found she'd caught a pike, which, of course, she ate…

Because well-being is linked to place and heritage, not just nature

Edward Thomas was killed at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917. Here he is writing about a wet day from an earlier spring, in 'The Icknield Way'. He's in England, but I think there's a Welsh cadence about this prose, like Dylan Thomas: "It has been, let us say, a day that should be spring…

Another in the plethora of books (re)discovering well-known ancient (or at least oldish) places - is this is a post-lockdown phenomenon? Anyway, nothing new here except the wonderful Andy Partridge quote about how his local landscape "marked me like an Avebury stone or the ripples across a hillfort"

An Easter chick(en) question for Romanists. I found this reference in a 1960s bird book to a chicken bone from Silchester with a metal band around it, as if the bird were a pet. It's mentioned in a book of 1921 but I can't find anything else; does it exist, perhaps in @readingmuseum.bsky.social?

Bluebells have arrived in Croydon

An early contribution to #StandingStoneSunday and one of the great Stonehenge photos IMHO: the Automobile Club's visit on Easter Saturday 1899, "the first motorcars that have ever reached that hoary Druidical temple on the windy downs of Wilts". Note the steam charabanc, and a photobombing horse.

Hay Judas

Crucifixion assemblage, from an ivory devotional booklet of c 1340, probably made in Cologne - now in the V&A

This sounds like fun

One wonders what the Diggers would make of the gated community of oligarchs and millionaires now occupying St George's Hill - plus ca change, probably. Of course the 20thC development has also excluded the public from what's left of the Iron Age hillfort there, so here's a 🧵 for #HillfortsWednesday

A #TombTuesday post from the excellent Beatriz Gonzalez exhibition at the Barbican: nearly 9000 empty graves in derelict columbaria in Bogota sealed again by her screenprints of porters carrying a corpse, to honour the anonymous dead - and now transposed to the gallery

Am I overinterpreting if I see this as representing the imposition of a grid-like Roman order on the circular Iron Age world...? #MosaicMonday

This lot all singing together on the dog walk

Palm Sunday 1968: at the start of his Silbury Hill excavation Richard Atkinson's team observed the old custom ("at least practised by children") of climbing to the top & consuming sweet treats with water from the Swallowhead spring. No climbing these days, & I'd be careful about drinking the water…

"Forgetful people who allow their timepiece to go on without making the sixty minute jump will find themselves behind everybody else" - so remember tonight's important "move", folks! (From May 1916, when summer time first came in)

Most movie archaeologists are glorified tomb robbers, but there's no glory in the superb 'La Chimera' (iplayer), where the present seems as ruined as the past & protagonist Arthur belongs, as the director puts it, "to neither the world of the living nor the dead; he is the stranger at the threshold"

The Guardian published a top list of moon songs without The Whole of the Moon or The Killing Moon and I can never trust their journalism again. (I'd also have Breakdown by One Dove: "tides and werewolves may be turned/but you don't know how to cry")

What's that you say? Two open access papers on early prehistoric dogs? Fine, but can I have my breakfast please...?

I love this track's (and the album's) retro-futurism - Metroland is Betjeman to an industrial beat

Good morning

A summary of the brief heritage references in the govt's new Land Use Framework: Vision for land use in 2030 and 2050 By 2030… The largest landowners & the Government Estate will be… testing new approaches to multifunctional agriculture like agroforestry, protecting our nature & heritage assets...

The Transport Secretary has approved the revocation of the A303 Amesbury to Berwick Down Development Consent Order. The justifications relate to lack of funds, changing transport priorities, and releasing land for alternative proposals. They don't make reference to archaeology or the WHS.

The House of Drage using Stonehenge to sell furniture #OTD in 1926, with the usual anachronistic Druids worshipping the dawn, as imagined by Fortunino Matania. In this case what was dawning was a new era of consumer credit. Stonehenge had of course just been done up, and now your home could be!

Kudos to the BBC (for a change) for quietly putting out a variety of sf/cli-fi to help remind us that the climate crisis is existential: see The White Lady of Morecambe, Fire Ready (both Radio4) and The End We Start From (now on iplayer) - all written by women too