CBA North West wants to hear about the latest archaeological research from across Cheshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, and beyond. They have issued a call for papers for their Spring Conference on Saturday 13th May 2023. The conference will be held at the National Waterways Museum in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, and the theme for this…
I have been lucky enough to have been involved with the research, restoration, and renovation of the Lion Salts Works, in a small way, on and off since the 1990s. So the news that the Lion Salt Works Trust is seeking to raise £21,000 to help towards the long-term ambition of making salt again in…
Rising somewhat surprisingly out of the northern Cheshire landscape is the sandstone ridge of Alderley Edge. With its precipitous cliffs hidden in woodland, mineral resources, and links to legend it is an evocative landscape that can draw thousands of people on a cold and wet new year’s day, causing parking havoc in the surrounding country…
The latest Archaeotea podcast is an edited recording of the discussion session at the end of the castles conference run by the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society at the Grosvenor Museum in October 2022. This event looked at a decade of archaeological and historical research on castles in Lancashire and Cheshire, providing a chance to…
Snow is often the archaeologist’s friend, a light dusting emphasising hardly visible earthworks or accenting the sharp lines of a ruinous structure. This is especially true for sites which from spring to autumn are overgrown by scrub or hidden by woodland. The autumnal fall of leaves reveals much of the outline of such monuments but…
In the latest installment of the Archaeotea Podcast I talk to Norman Redhead about his career as a planning archaeologist in Greater Manchester, and especially his role in promoting the excavation and exploration of the city region’s industrial archaeology from the 1990s to his retirement in 2021. Norman gave the Brian Grimsditch Community Archaeology Memeorial…
The South Trafford Archaeological Group are running a day school looking at medieval pottery from excavations in Trafford on Saturday 12 November 2022. The aim of the day is to compare the large amount of later medieval pottery from the Timperley Old Hall moated site with other sites of a similar a period from around…
The BBC has a long history of promoting and highlighting archaeology, and industrial archaeology and heritage in particular, on radio and tv, going back to the 1950s. Mentions of industrial archaeology span such tv documentary programmes as ‘Chronicle’, and ‘Horizon’ in the 1960s and 1970s, and ‘Timewatch’ in the 1990s and 2000s, including a famous…
This conference, postponed from 2020 due to the COVID pandemic, will look at a decade of archaeological and historical research on castles in Lancashire and Cheshire, providing a chance to review some familiar and not so familiar castle sites in the region. It is being run by the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society. It will…
The first in-person Greater Manchester Archaeology Day since 2019 will be held on Saturday 26th November 2022. The venue will again be the Peel Hall in the Peel Building, at the University of Salford, with GMAAS and Salford Archaeology hosting the day. Doors will open for registration at 09:30 ready for a start at 09:55.…
Late summer is a transitional time in the landscape and in northern England harvests of all kinds have borne fruit, from hedgerows to fields, whilst many trees have already started to turn in colour. Whilst the piles of dried leaves drifting along the winding roads are in part a reflection of the dry hot summer,…
As those of you who follow this blog know, I regularly lead adult education courses. These are usually in the evening but occasionally I run day time courses at the weekend. In September I’m running an adult education Day School looking at the archaeology of medieval churches in North West England, from the Saxons to…
On a pleasant late spring evening at the end of May 2022 I led half-a-dozen South Trafford Archaeological Group members on an archaeology and history walk around Sale (Greater Manchester) in search of evidence for the town’s agricultural past and a lost canal. The story of the enclosure of Sale Moor and its later conversion…
I teach adult education courses for a variety of organisations, and have done for more than 30 years. My specialist teaching subjects include Roman archaeology, late medieval archaeology, buildings archaeology, and industrial archaeology, with an emphasis on (but not exclusively) North West England and Britain. COVID-19 has forced all of us to change the way…
April 2022 saw the launch of the Oxford University Handbook of Industrial Archaeology, edited by myself and my fellow industrial archaeologists Prof Eleanor Casella and Hanna Steyn. This was the culmination, officially, of a ten-year process, begun in 2012 and whose completion was delayed two years by the COVID pandemic. It represents the first substantial…
archaeologytea 