Outlandish Knight

  My son is fascinated by animals and wildlife so over recent years we’ve visited a lot of zoos, and this week we visited Chester Zoo for the first time. It was an fascinating experienc...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2019/05/an-archaeologist-visits-zoo.html

Photo of the structure looking north from the south end I’ve spent a lot of time visiting Holy Island – Lindisfarne over recent years, and every time I come I discover something new. Over...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2019/04/fish-trap-on-holy-island.html

Today I stumbled a nice example of the intersection of landscape and archaeology and folk tradition. We visited Nun Monkton, a village a few miles to the north-west of York. It’s a classic med...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2019/03/maypoles-and-burying-peter.html

Today we took a visit to the Rollright Stones in Warwickshire. With my archaeology head on I should probably have been more interested in the Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monumentality...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2019/01/knickers-in-rag-tree-contemporary.html

Today Issy (no 1 Daughter) and myself did a  little experiment in historical baking. We've been doing some Christmas cooking, but as we had all the spices out we thought we'd try the Soul Cake...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2018/12/soul-cake-challenge.html

Yesterday I was reading Frederik Fahlander’s recent review of Oli Harris and Craig Cipolla’s Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium. It’s a generally positive review of a useful bo...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2018/11/from-pacific-to-north-sea.html

Last weekend I went to the Remembrance Sunday memorial events in the centre of York, marking the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at the end of World War I. As it was such a key anniversary, t...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2018/11/reflections-on-remembrance-sunday-2018.html

I’ve belatedly been reading Colleen Morgan’s great blog post about what she terms ‘citational communities’ – the invisible colleges of academics and researchers and their publicati...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2018/02/citational-practices-some-thoughts.html

A couple of weeks ago, we had an unexpected visit to the great cemetery at Brookwood in Surrey. Originally, designed as an overspill cemetery for the corpses piling up in Victorian London, it...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2017/09/exploring-brookwood-cemetery.html

I’ve just come back from a holiday in Suffolk. It’s an area I’ve been to several times and one of the places I always come back to is Iken, an isolated hamlet on the River Alde. Its chu...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2017/08/iken-suffolk-scene.html

There is no escaping the sea on Holy Island. From our trenches we could look out across the harbour and beyond towards the Farne Islands; the wind brought in rain from the North Sea and the crie...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2017/08/there-is-sorrow-on-sea-maritime.html

We’ve now spent two weeks on the island, busy living and working on top of each other, with the last couple of days particularly cramped due to some awful weather. As today was our day off...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2017/07/buddha-in-potato-patch-adventures-in.html

We’ve come to Lindisfarne to search for Saint Cuthbert, but we’re not the only ones. The island attracts many pilgrims, also on the tracks of the saint. Holy Island has always lured visit...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2017/07/notes-from-small-island-4-shadow-of.html

We’re back on Holy Island- Lindisfarne for a new season of excavation. It’s been a funny old week for anyone interested in early medieval monastic archaeology in Northern Britain. First, ano...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2017/07/notes-from-smallish-island-3-back-in.html

View looking northwards towards Staweford (near the trees in the middle distance). Image (C) Google Earth Over the last couple of years, due to my involvement with the Gefrin Trust , I've ...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2016/09/staweford-routeways-and-meeting-places.html

I’ve just had a great weekend down on my home turf in Wessex which involved a fair amount of sploshing around in water: paddling in the icy cold crystal-clear waters of the Test in Hampshire a...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2016/09/oh-is-water-sweet-and-cool-gentle-and.html

 Last week I finally made my first visit to Iona. Having spent so much time writing and thinking about the archaeology of Lindisfarne, it is natural that I had to eventually go back to the sou...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-pilgrimage-to-iona-first-thoughts.html

I’ve been watching the new BBC folk-horror production TheLiving and the Dead for the last month – it’s good; decent production values, often beautifully filmed, just this side of histr...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-living-and-dead-and-lack-of-sense.html

Reflecting on the experience of excavating on Holy Island, it struck me how much of my personal thoughts about the process revolved not about the archaeology as a physical resource or academi...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2016/07/notes-from-smallish-island-2-reflections.html

 After three days on Holy Island I've finally found a chance to sit down and pull my thoughts together. I'll write about the academic content of the project at a later date, but I want to expl...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2016/06/notes-from-smallish-island-1.html

Haymaking- Tristram Hillier (1943) (C) York Art Gallery  a landscape without people This is the second of my two contributions to the Archaeology Blog Carniva l which is asking us to outl...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2016/01/archaeology-blogging-carnival-grand_13.html

Anglo-Saxon burial from West Heslerton This blog entry is in responses to the blog carnival set by Doug’s Archaeology on The Grand Challenges for Archaeology , which asks  “What are t...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2016/01/archaeology-blogging-carnival-grand.html

Mumming play- Wantage - 26/12/13  A couple of years ago I gave a paper at a post-medieval archaeology conference in Leicester which conveyed some general thoughts about morris dancing cost...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2015/12/distribution-of-english-mumming-plays.html

This is the text of a paper I gave at the MR James conference (M R James and Modern Ghost Story ) in Leeds earlier this year- it's unedited, unreferenced (and pretty much unproofread), but h...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2015/10/a-person-of-antiquarian-pursuits-m-r.html

There was a good article in The Guardian yesterday about the artist David Inshaw. I suspect like a lot of people I first came across the work of David Inshaw via the cover art of the Arden S...

http://outlandish-knight.blogspot.com/2015/10/david-inshaw-and-silbury-hill.html