Antony Firth

Might be of interest: www.yorkshirefolksong.net/song.cfm?son...

Lady Lumley's Almshouses, Thornton-le-Dale - 1074192 | Historic England List entry 1074192. Grade II Listing: Lady Lumley's Almshouses. May include summary, reasons for designation and history.

Here's the list entry for the almshouses: historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-...

Grammar School, Thornton-le-Dale - 1361319 | Historic England List entry 1361319. Grade II Listing: Grammar School. May include summary, reasons for designation and history.

The old school building is Listed - see below. Inside, it was just one big hall with a raised section at the north end and perhaps a couple of small rooms off the side. No kitchen, which was problematic for a school dining hall ... historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-...

I should that it was a village primary school at that time - ‘Lady Lumley’s School’ itself had moved to Pickering long before.

The old school building to the right of the almshouses was used as the dining hall of the Victorian school (to the left) until about 1976, when the current school opened on Castlegarth.

Country diary: A riverside walk reveals the city’s history written in plants | Susie White Lower Ouseburn, Newcastle upon Tyne: Under boardwalks, in concrete, on window ledges, seeds borne by water and carried on feet survive

Great piece here on maritime culture-nature connections www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The Black Death’s counterintuitive effect: as human numbers fell, so did plant diversity New study finds that plant biodiversity collapsed in landscapes where arable production was abandoned during and after the Black Death era.

@trisnorton.bsky.social : you'll be interested in this. Discussion of a pollen study showing the relationship between mixed farming and plant biodiversity, impacted negatively by population decline during the Black Death. All those weeds around the margins lost theconversation.com/the-black-de...

CALL FOR PAPERS: Share your research at the Centre for Port and Maritime History's 30th Anniversary Conference, Liverpool, 10-11 September 2026. CPMH includes @ljmuofficial.bsky.social , @liverpooluni.bsky.social & Liverpool's Maritime Museum. Submit abstract to n.j.white@ljmu.ac.uk by 15 May.

Castle Ditches camp, Tisbury - 1005701 | Historic England List entry 1005701. Grade Not Applicable to this List Entry Scheduling: Castle Ditches camp. May include summary, reasons for designation and history.

NB: Other Castle Ditches are available … historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-...

📢 #CfP: Canal Dreams. Towards a Critical History of Inland Waterways
Researchers working on the imagination, construction and operation of artificial inland waterways are invited to contribute to an interdisciplinary workshop in Oct. 2026.
👉 t1p.de/hnutf
📝 Deadline: 15 Apr

#MaritimeHistory #History

Great post - this might be of interest (and to @jmbecologist.bsky.social): bsky.app/profile/anto...

Historic Floodplain Meadows in the Landscape: Investigating Anthropogenic Habitats Important for Nature Conservation, Carbon Sequestration and Flood Attenuation - Environmental Management In contemporary river valley floors, floodplain meadows are associated with rare grassland plant communities that are important for their conservation value. This article outlines a desk-based method ...

It is freshwater Friday, so a good time to flag our recent open access article with @floodplainmead.bsky.social on using a historic landscape approach to identify former meadow habitats with origins in the early medieval period: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Thinking with the Sea We are happy to announce the symposium Thinking with the Sea – Interactions and new perspectives inspired by the Blue Humanities that takes place in Turku in autumn 2026. Within the theme Blue…

The Call for Papers is open for the symposium "Thinking with the Sea: Interactions and New Perspectives Inspired by the Blue Humanities". 

📅 30 Sept - 1 Oct 2026
📍 Turku, Finland
⏰ #CfP deadline: 15 April 2026

Historic Floodplain Meadows in the Landscape: Investigating Anthropogenic Habitats Important for Nature Conservation, Carbon Sequestration and Flood Attenuation - Environmental Management In contemporary river valley floors, floodplain meadows are associated with rare grassland plant communities that are important for their conservation value. This article outlines a desk-based method ...

🥳🌱New Paper!🌱🥳

Check out how we have been working with our friends at Fjordr to detect historical locations of floodplain meadows using physical and documented traces in the landscape, suppporting the case for restoration. 👇

tinyurl.com/y8frpr2h

Timbers from 17th Century shipwreck appear on Dorset beach Experts believe timbers found at Studland Beach form a missing piece of the Swash Channel wreck from 1631.

Exciting discovery from @bumaritime.bsky.social - Shipwreck timbers from 17th Century appear on beach www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Only two more sleeps before Ben Saunders @wessexarchaeology.bsky.social introduces Maritime Mapping around the Firth of Forth. Book your free ticket here👉 www.mining-landscapes.org/news
#MaritimeHeritage #Coal #MiningHeritage

Some wetland archaeology books for World Wetlands Day!

#WorldWetlandsDay

BCMH New Researchers is Maritime History conference will be in Southampton on 17/18 April this year -CFP now open - details and submission link here www.maritimehistory.org.uk/new-research... #maritimehistory

🚨🐟 CFP - COLONIAL HINTER-SEAS: A Conference on Subaquatic Resources and Waterside Lives from the Early Modern to the Contemporary, 10-11 August 2026, virtual, Zoom & 19-21 August 2026, in-person, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

Details: www.colonialfisheries.com/colonial-hin... 🐟🚨

ODHN and our Regional Representatives (RR) Network featured in MAHSNews - Ocean Decade Heritage Network In the latest edition of MAHSNews, the official publication of the Maritime Archaeological and Historical Society (MAHS), Charlotte Jarvis, Early Career Ocean Professional at ODHN, highlights ODHN’s R...

New newsletter article📄

Charlotte Jarvis highlights the ODHN’s Regional Representatives (RR) Network in the latest issue of MAHSNews.

Read the article and download the full PDF 👇

Let's talk about the Aylesbury tunnels.

The Making of Grimsby’s Dock Tower: The Entanglements of Infrastructural Relations This is the third post in Urban and Environmental Dialogues, our January collaboration with the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). For other entries in the series, see here. By Sa…

New on the blog! @samgrinsell.bsky.social on Grimsby's Dock Tower: themetropole.blog/2026/01/12/t... @nichecanada.bsky.social
#UrbanHistory #CoastalHist #NorthSea #EnvHist #EnvHums

Sad news - such a key figure in marine archaeology.

The 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage has been ratified by Ireland/
bit.ly/4pPEFcm

Some discoveries by the University of Reading finds ancient traps and footprints in the Severn Estuary UK. Traps dated to at least 7,000 years old are made from willow withies woven around wooden stakes to create a V-shaped fence in the bed of a former river channel.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-engl...

Really excited that our *new paper* is finally out 🔥 This study is the first to quantitatively investigate museum visitors’ perceptions of historical analogies that compare concepts from the deep past to modern political ideas.
doi.org/10.1057/s415...

Major #shipwreck discovery in Denmark- largest medieval cog (merchant ship) ever found. Built c1410, with 300-ton cargo capacity. Biggest contemporary English vessel was Henry IV's royal ship 'Trinity', also of 300 tons #maritimehistory #maritimearchaeology
www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/about-us/...

And Happy Christmas to you and yours also!

A little late in the day for #HillfortsWednesday, but here’s the entrance to Castle Ditches in today’s late afternoon sunshine…

"It’s Not Just One Place I’ve Fallen in Love With": A Participatory Place-Based Approach to Mapping Heritage | Journal of Maritime Archaeology Traditional Cultural Places (TCPs) are historic properties recognized for their cultural significance. Cultural value is determined by living communities and is not dependent on the presence of human-made or human-modified site features. Although eligible for consideration in federal decision-making, TCPs are often absent from state and federal heritage inventories due to challenges in their identification. Given the relationship between people and place, community-based inventory efforts offer opportunities to both document this heritage and support longer-term relationship building. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, we held participatory place-based mapping workshops in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to document TCPs and maritime archaeological sites. While ultimately successful, the workshops and our shared experiences were shaped by political tensions in the U.S. Pacific Island territories. This paper shares preliminary results on the use of participatory geographic information systems to inventory heritage, including TCPs. Our experiences, and those of our collaborators, are further contextualized within broader themes of Pacific militarization and critical minerals mining.

#OpenAccess #SundayRead: Roth et al. (2025) a share participatory place-based approach to mapping Traditional Cultural Places (TCPs) and maritime archaeological sites in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.