Happy New Year!

To all our followers: 

Til árs ok friðar! - may the following year be plentiful and prosperous!  

We look forward in 2022 and in particular to perhaps unlocking the secrets of the Meols Boat and making some real progress with the scientific analysis of the Bebington finds.

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The boat beneath the car park

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New pub being built behind original Railway Inn, 1938 In 2007 a planning application was made to construct a patio extension at the Railway Inn, Meols. The assessment that routinely followed by the County Archaeology Office revealed a document reporting a vessel of unknown antiquity that had been buried underneath. Potentially an archaeologist’s dream: a major find under a pub! In 1938, when the Railway Inn was being knocked down and rebuilt further from the road, the site of the old pub being made into a car park, workmen had revealed part of a clinker vessel from under the waterlogged blue clay 2-3 metres below the original pub. A clinker has overlapping planks, a style which originated from Scandinavia over 2000 years ago  – mastered by the Angles and Vikings and characteristic of all their shipping – and a style of boatbuilding so successful it has subsequently been used through the ages and is still used today. The foreman on duty ordered the workmen to put all the clay bac...
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The Wirral carrs & holms, Meols & their relevance to the Battle of Brunanburh (taken from the Journal of the English Place Name Society, 2007)

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                 Above: Map of Wirral by Moll, 1724. In 2007 Steve published a peer reviewed paper in the Journal of the English Place Name Society (vol 39, pages 46-57) describing the distribution of the Old Norse topological names referring to marshy, wetland areas - namely carrs  (Old Norse kjarr - brushwood on a marsh) and holms (Old Norse holmr - island of dry land in a marshy/wetland area) - and then its relevance to the Battle of Brunanburh.   It develops a suggestion he made in April 2004 that Dingesmere in the Old English poem The Battle of Brunanburh referred to the "mere" (waterway/wetland) of the "Thing" (the Old Norse assembly at Thingwall) - an idea that was later published by Steve, also in JEPNS in October 2004 with Paul Cavill and Judith Jesch.  Steve initially suggested the coastal area was the Dee around Heswall but then I extended this to include the area around Meols based on the distributio...
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Study spearheads the chemical fingerprint of Viking weapons

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A new study examining the chemical makeup of iron artifacts from the Viking age aims to uncover new insights into where they came from that could reveal previously unknown information about historic events. Scientists from the University of Nottingham are leading the study that will examine 90 iron Viking-age artifacts. These are  weapons  that were used in battles at Fulford in North Yorkshire and Bebington Heath on the Wirral. Other material comes from the Viking camp at Torksey in Lincolnshire, and from the former Viking seaport of Meols. Fulford was the location for a battle in AD 1066 between Norse invaders and the Anglo-Saxons, immediately before the better-known battle of Stamford Bridge. The archeological material consists of iron weapons found at a number of short-lived iron recycling sites that were abandoned by the Norse victors at Fulford when they were defeated at Stamford Bridge five days later. The iron material from Bebington Heath was recovered from the possib...
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