Back from Fromelles

thoughts on visiting the war grave dig

Get your Guardian now!

big archaeology feature in today's paper

Ah God! to see the branches stir

I’ll take it with me on the train tomorrow, when I cross the English Channel into France to visit the excavation at Fromelles

A film (not about grapes)

Another TV job today, this time with a bit of filming (in the rain) of something I am sworn to secrecy about – in fact if the crew’s hotel printer had been working, I would have signed up to silence as well. I’ll let you know when the programme is to be broadcast (I’m a …

Good with funerals

I knew the Co-op was good with food and had an ethical bank, but I didn't know it was the UK's “number one provider of funeral services”. It also has an amazing collection of buildings (most listed) in the centre of Manchester, where its head offices have been since 1863. I went to visit them …

Splitting stones

I went out on a TV recce yesterday, enjoying a rare bit of warm sunshine on the Marlborough Downs. We were looking at sarsens, the strange stones that lie scattered on the surface that were used for megaliths at nearby Avebury and to the south at Stonehenge. You hear a lot about the Welsh bluestones …

Stonehenge: still a choice

The text below is based on a presentation I gave to the Society of Antiquaries in London in May 2006, as a contribution to a debate about the future of Stonehenge; my piece was driven largely by slides (I was still using Kodachrome then) showing the three main alternative routes for the A303 road then …

10 stones

The people of Britain as represented on the plinth in One & Other on July 29 2009

Got the shirt

So it all comes to an end. The weather was perfect – no rain, no wind – and the acrylic boxes sparkled like jewels in the floodlights. I got the ten stones out and back in time, I talked about them a bit while I was doing this and the catalogue posts went live on …