Summer snapshoot

Some sundry updates,

Lots of digging in our back garden has reaped some archaeological rewards - local Boarstall/Brill ware pottery, from c1350-1450. The Boarstall kilns were less than 10 miles away from our home, and Oxford and it environs were their key market. You can read more about the kilns, which were quite an industrial complex,  here. And thanks to Emma of Trinty Court Pottery for helping identify the pieces.

 

A week in Northumberland bagged a fair few castles with a WoRs – Alnwick, Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh –  part of the gatehouse photo’d below. The latter, built in the early C14th, had a lively time in the WoRs. The castle was held by the Percys, and besieged three times, by Edwards IV and Warwick in the early 1460s. Warwick took possession of the castle after Sir Ralph Percy’s death at Hedgeley Moor in 1464. 

During these assaults, it took a pounding by Yorkist artillery. It would have been a tough duty hauling the guns along the sandy and marshy coastal route, deliberately flooded as part of the defences, to the castle.  

 

 

 I also managed to get to Flodden. Possibly one of the easier battlefield landscapes to understand, helped by some excellent interpretation boards. But as ever, that odd dichotomy between a rural idyllic landscape on the day of our visit, and the reality of day. Never sure about the ethics of visiting such sites.

And continuing on the Northumberland theme, there is a stand of Percy and some of his MAAs nearly completed. Hopefully will be done in the next few weeks.