The Bamburgh Research Project, which has done more than anyone else to bring to light the extraordinary archaeology and history of Northumbria, is looking for help and seeking it through crowdfunding via Sponsume. If you can help at all, either by contributing a small amount or sharing the link and spreading awareness, please do so.
I will be at the Current Archaeology Live! conference this Friday and Saturday, the 1st and 2nd March, at Senate House in London. Look for me at the Bamburgh Research Project table, where I will be sitting alongside Graeme Young (archaeologist and director of the BRP) on Friday and Paul Gething (co-writer, archaeologist and BRP director) on Saturday, talking about the work of the BRP, Northumbria and our book, the fruit of the BRP’s researches.
Northumbria: the Lost Kingdom will be on sale at a Conference special price of £12.99, which is 25 per cent off the normal RRP. It would be great to see you there. Tickets for the Conference are on sale here.
Now, pdfs and all the other technological and digital whizz bangs that allow files and pictures to be shared between computers and tablets and pills and potions and what not are all very well, but, believe me, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to compare with holding the first paper copy of the book you’ve spent the last three years working on in your hands.
There it is, pictures, words, the whole blessed shebang: a real, actual, frankly all-but-breathing thing! You can take your Kindles and your iPads and all the other devices that depend on moving electrons around and shove them. Give me paper, give me vellum, give me inky fingers and pages you can flick through marvelling at the pictures, the design, the way the words sit upon the page.
It’s been a memorable day. First, Professor Tolkien of Oxford comes out, and then I get to see the final version of the cover – front and back – of Northumbria: The Lost Kingdom. I like it.
Writing the chapter on the geology of Northumbria, it’s apparent that the reaction of 19th-century geologists against ideas of catastrophism went far too far. Yes, many processes occur constantly and gradually, but the history of the earth in general and Northumbria in particular is punctuated by catastrophic events: most recently the tsunami unleashed by the Storegga Slides, when huge sections of the continental shelf off Norway slid into the abyssal depths and set off giant waves down the east coast of Britain in 6100BC.