Robert Penson Lecture in Garden History, Oxford, 25 June

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The Robert Penson Lecture in Garden History is at St John’s College, Oxford, on Tuesday 25 June 2019 at 5.15 pm. The lecture will be held in The Auditorium, Garden Quadrangle, St John’s College. It will be followed by a reception at which all are welcome.

Speaker:  Mr Michael Lear, Curator and Landscape Architect (Lear Associates) and Trustee, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Title:  ‘How can a knowledge of plants inform garden history?‘

The lecture is free and open to all.

For further information see: https://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/events/robert-penson-lecture-garden-history/

Old Canal swingbridge foundations

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Swing Bridge abutment

narrow path into the bank

Earlier today members of the BAS Active Archaeology Group visited the south abutment of the old swing bridge  at White Houses on the Wendover arm canal.  The bridge has been missing for over a hundred years and the only image does not give much clue as to its physical dimensions.   Our excavation today attempted to find the platform on which the bridge would swing.  We did not find a platform but a narrow brick path leading into the bank.  We will discuss with the Wendover Arm trust what to do next.

Geophysical survey at Boveney Church

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On Sunday, 27 January 2019, members of the BAS Active Archaeology Group assisted Kris Lockyear and his team from the Community Archaeology Geophysics Group in a survey of the church yard of St Mary Magdalene at Boveney near Eton. The church dates back to the 14th-century and is the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches. There is debate about whether its churchyard was or was not used for burials and they asked whether a geophysical survey could resolve this.  We will update this post when the survey results are published.

University of Cambridge reveals ‘changing face of UK’ in aerial photos

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A news item from the BBC:

A collection of aerial photographs described as the “historical Google Earth” has been made available online by the University of Cambridge. RAF pilots were asked to capture the bomb-scarred post-war period to the emergence of motorways and new cities. The collection dates back to 1945, with more recent images captured in 2009 for a university project. The first 1500 images of 0.5million are now available on the Cambridge Digital Library http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/   including this one of Dorchester on Thames in 1948.