History in my Landscape
How did it all begin?
How did my interest in History begin? We have to go back some time (oh, puns as well!).
In the United Kingdom children transfer from junior to senior school at the age of eleven. And that was me, trying not to betray my anxiety on entering this huge three-storey new-build and being surrounded by more children than I’d ever seen in my life.
By chance, my form room was on an upper floor, my allotted desk beside a bank of windows overlooking the playground. Beyond, bulldozers levelled a sea of mud to create what would become sports fields.
It was from this vantage point that worlds collided, and the moment remains vivid. Witnessing the difference in the speeds of light and sound had grabbed my attention: seeing a piler hit metal and hearing the sound a second later. But as I watched, there was waving. The machines stopped. Men in hard-hats grouped, and all walked away across the mud.
The following day archaeologists arrived, to look, to discuss, to take measurements. When they returned it was with all the paraphernalia for a dig.
What had been uncovered were the remains of an Iron Age farmstead, possibly late Celtic, possibly Romano-British from the 1st century AD, probably straddling the two. Postholes signified four roundhouses, two…
