Our Wetland Heritage: An Integrated Approach Towards Managing Coastal Landscapes

This report summarises the first phase of work on the Arts and Humanities Research Council Knowledge Transfer Fellowship scheme grant Our Wetland Heritage: An Integrated Approach Towards Managing Coastal Landscapes (AHRC ID No.: AH/G016895/1). This is a partnership between the University of Exeter, the RSPB and the Historic Environment Service of Essex County Council, in the proposed nature reserves of the South Essex Marshes, on the north banks of the river Thames east of London. The report describes the sources and methods used to understand the development of the historic landscape – the present pattern of fields, roads, flood defences etc – and provides an outline of the major phases of activity. The overall character of the historic landscape across the study area was remarkably uniform and indicative of a landscape that has been used primarily for pastoral use (albeit with some relatively recent ploughing in a few areas): none of the distinctive evidence for intensive farming in the medieval or early modern periods, that is so common on most other British coastal wetlands, was found although the possibility that late medieval flooding has destroyed or buried this evidence cannot be ruled out. A wide range of sources has enabled the pre-reclamation natural drainage pattern to be reconstructed, leading to the conclusion that until the 17th century the South Essex Marshes were an archipelago of many small islands. The first phase of embankment evident in the historic landscape appears to have been small, localised reclamations that probably date to the medieval period (perhaps the 12th to 14th centuries): originally few in number, and with many having been destroyed by later development, the surviving remains of these early embankments are of very great importance. The second phase of embankment can be associated with the well documented Dutch activity, which in addition to Canvey Island appears to have embraced almost all of the South Essex Marshes. Later phases enclosed remaining areas of marsh, some of which could have accumulated after the Dutch walls were constructed, but also relate to areas where flood defences had to be set back due to coastal erosion.AHR

Farms, fields and mines: an historic landscape analysis of Calstock parish

This report presents a characterisation of the ‘historic landscape’ – the present pattern of fields, roads, settlements and land-uses – in the parish of Calstock, in the Tamar Valley, Cornwall (Figure 1). The characterisation is based upon the Ordnance Survey First Edition Six Inch to One Mile maps of 1889, with additional data from earlier cartographic sources including the Tithe Map and Apportionment of 1839. The morphology of the landscape is described, along with data on when settlements are first documented, and the patterns of land-ownership and land-occupancy that they are associated with. A total of twelve historic landscape types are identified that range from ‘Late Enclosure’, that represents the enclosure of extensive former common pasture on the higher ground, through to ‘Strip-Based Fields’ that are derived from medieval open fields that were probably created by the time of the Domesday survey in 1086.Heritage Lottery Fun

The Living Past: the origins and development of the historic landscape of the Blackdown Hills - Phase 1: archive report

This report represents the archive for The Living Past: the origins and development of the historic landscape of the Blackdown Hills Project, which covered the Blackdown Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty on the borders of Devon and Somerset (Figures 1-4).It is intended to act as a record of the work carried out, rather than being a free-standing report, and as such is designed to complement the Summary Report. It contains a detailed description of the sources and methodologies used, an indepth commentary on each of the historic landscape character types, and a discussion of the other pieces of analysis carried out

The role of megatides and relative sea level in controlling the deglaciation of the British-Irish and Fennoscandinavian ice sheets

This is the final version of the article. Available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.Key external forcing factors have been proposed to explain the collapse of ice sheets, including atmospheric and ocean temperatures, subglacial topography, relative sea level and tidal amplitudes. For past ice sheets it has not hitherto been possible to separate relative sea level and tidal amplitudes from the other controls to analyse their influence on deglaciation style and rate. Here we isolate the relative sea level and tidal amplitude controls on key ice stream sectors of the last British–Irish and Fennoscandian ice sheets using published glacial isostatic adjustment models, combined with a new and previously published palaeotidal models for the NE Atlantic since the Last Glacial Maximum (22 ka BP). Relative sea level and tidal amplitude data are combined into a sea surface elevation index for each ice stream sector demonstrating that these controls were potentially important drivers of deglaciation in the western British Irish Ice Sheet ice stream sectors. In contrast, the Norwegian Channel Ice Stream was characterized by falling relative sea level and small tidal amplitudes during most of the deglaciation. As these simulations provide a basis for observational field testing we propose a means of identifying the significance of sea level and tidal amplitudes in ice sheet collapse.Funding was provided by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) through grant NE/I527853/1 (PhD studentship to S.L.W.). The research was supported by the Climate Change Consortium of Wales and the NERC BRITICE-CHRONO Consortium grant (NE/J007579/1). Jess Vaughan and Martyn Roberts drafted Figs 2–5

Farming regions in medieval England: the archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological evidence

© Society for Medieval Archaeology 2014. Accepted version deposited in accordance with SHERPA RoMEO guidelines. The definitive version is available at http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/0076609714Z.00000000036Regional variation in landscape character has in the past been studied by archaeologists in terms of its physical manifestations such as different settlement patterns and field systems. Local and regional distinctiveness in landscape character also results from how rural communities practised different agricultural regimes, and historians have long recognised the extent to which these varied across the country. Archaeologists, in contrast, have compared the animal bones and cereal remains from sites of different socio-economic status, but have not previously focused on the extent to which they vary across different geologies. This paper therefore presents an analysis of the animal bones of the three main domesticates (cattle, sheep/goat and pig), and the charred grains of the four main cereal crops (bread wheat, barley, oats and rye), across a series of different surface geologies within a study area extending from East Anglia down to the South-West Peninsula. It shows that, first, patterns of animal husbandry and cereal cultivation varied considerably across different surface geologies; secondly that, while farming practices do appear to have been influenced by surface geologies, they were also affected by cultural factors, particularly as human communities responded to the opportunities of a growing market economy; and thirdly that, while archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological patterns evident in the mid-11th–mid-14th centuries conform with what documentary sources tell us, the particular importance of this archaeological dataset is that it allows us to reconstruct farming regimes back into the undocumented early medieval (and indeed earlier) periods.Leverhulme Trus

The liminality of training spaces: Places of private/public transitions

This paper draws upon research, conducted for the London West Learning and Skills Council, on the training experiences of women with dependent children. One of the striking revelations of the research, we suggest, is the way in which training spaces are used and perceived by women, which are often at odds with government intentions. To help make sense of women’s use of and motivation for training we utilise the concept of ‘liminality’ and the private/public imbrication to explain the ways in which women use, or are discouraged from using, training spaces. Further, how the varied and multiple uses women in our research have put training to in their own lives has encouraged us to rethink the relationship between the private and the public more generally. In the light of this, we suggest that training and the places in which training take place, have been neglected processes and spaces within feminist geography and might usefully be explored further to add to an extensive literature on women’s caring and domestic roles and their role in the paid workplace

Brane-world Cosmologies with non-local bulk effects

It is very common to ignore the non-local bulk effects in the study of brane-world cosmologies using the brane-world approach. However, we shall illustrate through the use of three different scenarios, that the non-local bulk-effect ${\cal P}_{\mu\nu}$ does indeed have significant impact on both the initial and future behaviour of brane-world cosmologies.Comment: 17 pages, no figures, iopart.cls, submitted to CQ

GRB 090426: The Environment of a Rest-Frame 0.35-second Gamma-Ray Burst at Redshift z=2.609

We present the discovery of an absorption-line redshift of z = 2.609 for GRB 090426, establishing the first firm lower limit to a redshift for a gamma-ray burst with an observed duration of <2 s. With a rest-frame burst duration of T_90z = 0.35 s and a detailed examination of the peak energy of the event, we suggest that this is likely (at >90% confidence) a member of the short/hard phenomenological class of GRBs. From analysis of the optical-afterglow spectrum we find that the burst originated along a very low HI column density sightline, with N_HI < 3.2 x 10^19 cm^-2. Our GRB 090426 afterglow spectrum also appears to have weaker low-ionisation absorption (Si II, C II) than ~95% of previous afterglow spectra. Finally, we also report the discovery of a blue, very luminous, star-forming putative host galaxy (~2 L*) at a small angular offset from the location of the optical afterglow. We consider the implications of this unique GRB in the context of burst duration classification and our understanding of GRB progenitor scenarios.Comment: Submitted to MNRA

Bacterial Causes of Empyema in Children, Australia, 2007–2009

Most infections were caused by non–7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine serotypes