Wessex Guided Tours

Text and images © Roy Goutté

King Arthur’s Hall, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall

After many previous visits to King Arthur’s Hall on King Arthur’s Down to the North-West of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall and a few Heritage Trust articles later, I thought a further visit, but this time with a Cornish group of dowsers, would be of interest to readers.

A very well-known group are the West Cornwall Dowsers led by Bart O’Farrell, a well respected and experienced Cornish dowser, so I knew if they accepted my invitation to make a site visit a thorough and enlightening investigation would take place. This was something I was really looking forward to with relish. Alternative views are something one should always take into account, or most certainly be prepared to consider at least on sites of particular interest and intrigue as one can get very set and focused in their ways and see…

It’s that time of year again. With just 3 months to go before the Current Archaeology Live! conference in London, the nominations for the Current Archaeology Awards have been released.

The awards are designed to celebrate some of the stories and people featured in the magazine throughout the course of the year. There is no panel of judges, the only votes that count are those from the readership in the public vote via the website, so it really is just down to you (collectively) as to who the winners are.

As in previous years, there are four main categories to vote for:

• Research Project of the Year
• Archaeologist of the Year
• Rescue Dig of the Year
• Book of the Year

The nominees in each category are as follows:

Research Project of the Year

• How to build a dolmen: exploring Neolithic construction at Garn Turne
• Maryport’s mystery monuments: investigating gigantic timber…

The Making of a Roman Silver Cup. Getty Museum

Ancient Roman silversmiths developed their craft to the highest levels of refinement and beauty. Applying fire and basic tools to the shaping of precious metals, many of their sophisticated techniques are still used today. This video illustrates the making of a stunning silver cup that has survived from the first century, A.D.

This cup is on view at the Getty Villa from November 19, 2014 to August 17, 2015 in the exhibition Ancient Luxury and the Roman Silver Treasure from Berthouville.

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Have you been keeping an eye on our Events Diary (see the link on the left)? You should. Here are a couple of things you could have missed this month if you haven’t ….

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project is an unprecedented initiative to survey a vast tract of land around the iconic stones. Now that the bulk of the practical work is complete, Carly Hilts spoke to Vince Gaffney and Chris Gaffney to find out more.

An ambitious programme of geophysical survey, covering 12 square kilometres around Stonehenge, has revealed a landscape scattered with previously-unknown features. Credit: All images courtesy of the University of Birmingham and LBI ArchPro

Stonehenge could confidently claim to be one of the most-studied, and certainly most hotly debated, prehistoric sites in Britain. However, much of the local landscape, so important to any interpretation or understanding of the site, was largely terra incognita – until the launch of The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, the largest geophysical mapping survey of its kind yet undertaken.

Begun in July 2010, and headed by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for…

Located just outside the town of Dorchester in southern Dorset to the south-west of London, Maiden Castle is the largest extant Iron Age hillfort known to have been built in Britain and among the largest and most complex in all of Europe.

Featuring multiple earthen ramparts (pictured above is the ditch between two of them) – from the top of which you can see spectacular views of the surrounding countryside – and well-defended entrances, it would have once been home to several hundred people. It’s been speculated the name may come from the Celtic word “mai-dun”, meaning a great hill.

The first archaeological excavations were carried out here in the 1930s by Mortimer Wheeler and then later in the 1980s.

Initially built between 800 and 550 BC, the first Iron Age hillfort – built on the site of an earlier Neolithic enclosure with settlement dating back some 6000 years – was enclosed by a single…