New cameras for St Albans Cathedral's peregrine falcon live stream
The shingle nesting tray replicates the bird's natural clifftop nesting habitat.As peregrine falcons remain loyal to their nest site, the cathedral is now an established breeding ground.For four years viewers of the online video feed have witnessed the birds lay and hatch peregrine chicks.
Lea Ellis, engagement manager at Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust said: "The webcam give us all an opportunity to marvel at the wonder of nature first-hand and enjoy the wellbeing benefits that come with that. "I'm hopeful that we'll see more chicks successfully hatching this year."
St Albans Cathedral dates back 1700 years and is the oldest site of continuous Christian worship in Britain.Canon Will Gibbs added: "This is wonderful news and yet another expression of our core commitment to the environment and all creation and to the cathedral and its grounds being a place of welcome for humans and animals alike."
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Scotsman
2 days ago
- Scotsman
Search for Viking life - and boat burial - on tiny Nave Island off Islay
The excavation could be a breathrough in the understanding of the Viking presence on Islay. Sign up to our History and Heritage newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... A search for the first Viking house or possible boat burial on Islay is to get under way. Archaeologists will move on to tiny Nave Island, which sits just at the mouth of Loch Gruinart, following the findings of an earlier investigation in 2022. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Nave Island spans just 43 hectares and sits on the western 'sea road' of Britain but, despite the high volume of place names on Islay which are derived from Norse, no evidence of Viking-era dwellings or classic boat burials have yet been found. READ MORE: Travels routes of Vikings across Scotland to be mapped like never before Now a team from Reading University are to return to Nave Island after preliminary investigtions suggested that a piece of land close to a Christian site, which had its roots in a 6th Century monastic complex, could have been a place of importance for Viking settlers. The site of interest - which commands 'spectacular views' over the narrow stretch of sea to the Islay mainland - is a stone and earth structure around 20m in length with rounded ends and curved or bowed sides. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad A report from archaeologists who investigated the site said: 'This research has established that the earthwork has similarities with Viking or late Norse domestic structures recorded from the Western and Northern Isles, but can also be compared to Viking funerary monuments, in particular boat burials from the Irish Sea Zone. 'The recent survey work has, therefore, opened new lines of inquiry thatcould be pursued to advance understanding of not only this monument, but also medieval exploitation of the wider Islay landscape.' READ MORE: Incredible journey of star item in the Galloway Hoard revealed for the first time While Viking houses or boat burials - usually associated with high-status figures - have not yet been found on Islay , the archaeological record shows at least seven Viking graves and a coin hoard are known. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Scandinavian artefacts found near Ballinbay on Islay indicate a Viking cemetery, with further mid to high status burials discovered near Bridgend. A late 10th Century hoard unearthed on Machrie farm included more than 90 coins, including examples minted by the English king Aethelstan and the Viking kings of York, as well as some silver ignots. Professor Steve Mithen, from Reading University, and his team now seek to expand understanding of the Viking presence on Islay after Historic Environment Scotland approved an excavation of the site. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad While there are no written accounts of Viking activity on Islay, raids on nearby Rathlin Island and Iona illustrate that Norse warlords were operating in the area as early as 785AD. While now uninhabited and owned by Islay Estates, the last recorded residents of Nave Island were kelp burners who built their oven and chimney within the chapel ruins, the report from the investigation team said. Traces of earlier farm settlements dating from the medieval period were also found. Traces of Viking boat burials in Scotland are relatively rare, with only around 10 such sites found in Scotland to date. They range from the Ardnamurchan boat burial on the mainland, where a a high-ranking warrior was found with his weapons to the Scar boat burial in Orkney, where a woman, man, and child were buried together. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Revamp of Armley Gyratory completed with new footbridges
A £40m scheme to revamp a major Leeds junction has been completed after three years of work. Newly built footbridges over Armley Gyratory have been opened, marking the end of the final phase of work on the redevelopment. It followed the earlier completion of changes to the road layout at the junction, which is one of the major access routes into and out of Leeds city centre. Leeds City Council thanked drivers for their patience during the works, which have been designed to make the gyratory safer and to reduce city centre traffic. The replacement footbridges span Wellington Road, Spence Lane and Gelderd Road. The council said the previous footbridges, which have been demolished, had been of poor standard and were approaching "expiry". More than 660 trees have also been planted in the area as part of the overall Jonathan Pryor, the local authority's deputy leader, said: "We would like to thank everyone involved in working on this scheme, along with people's ongoing patience while this essential project was carried out."Although it's great to see this project complete, we're conscious that there's still a lot of other work taking place around the city and we are working hard to deliver these as swiftly as possible while minimising disruption wherever we can." Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Spectator
4 days ago
- Spectator
The masterpieces of Sussex's radical Christian commune
Ditchling in East Sussex is a small, picturesque village with all the trappings: medieval church, half-timbered house, tea shops, a common, intrusive new housing developments down the road, a good walk from the nearest train station and the Downs on its doorstep. But the resonance of the place owes much to the remarkable artistic activity that has bloomed since Eric Gill moved his family there in 1907. It was part craft commune, part lay monastery, a living experiment in distributism, the radical Christian political philosophy that held that land should be distributed as widely as possible. It was an attempt to resurrect the medieval guild. Gill's Catholic community even had its own: that of St Joseph and St Dominic, which held that 'all work is ordained to God and should be Divine worship' and 'making the goodness of the thing to be made the immediate concern in work'. Dominican friars were frequent visitors. In the early 1920s, Gill's distributist experiment was something of a tourist attraction, with a succession of visitors dropping by to observe this community of craftsmen (Gill repudiated the effete term 'artist'), with its woodworking, stonecutting, silverwork and printing. (Hilary Pepler ran St Dominic's Press, and Edward Johnston – the one member of the group who declined to convert to Catholicism – was their lettering man.) David Jones, painter and poet, was introduced to Ditchling by Mgr John O'Connor – G.K. Chesterton's original Father Brown – and was, for a time, engaged to Gill's daughter Petra. The women did the domestic chores and some skilled work such as weaving. Jones would much later say that 'if I were to write down a typical day at Ditchling in 1922, it would be very hard indeed to convey the naturalness, unaffectedness, happiness, sincerity, rightness, freshness which we at the time felt and that in spite of the usual tensions, strains, squabbles, etc. But just to give an account of it now would seem affected, arty-crafty, self-consciously 'religious', eccentric, mistaken if not actually bogus.' In the same letter he reflects on the 'extreme difficulty of conveying to chaps now the particular freshness or springtime… of the… Weltanschauung of the 1920s'. The workshops and chapel of the group were – unforgivably – demolished in 1989, and the houses sold privately (one owner painted over a mural by Jones) but the establishment of the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft was some compensation for the loss. It was reinvigorated in 2013 and, notwithstanding its small size, has held excellent exhibitions of local artists and associates of the Ditchling group, including Edward Johnston and Frank Brangwyn. Now, 40 years on, it presents another reworking to expand the range of artists on show and deal with the problem of Eric Gill – now best known for interfering with his daughters, plus his dog. On the first, there is a striking assembly of portraits on show of individuals associated with Ditchling, extending beyond the Guild, from Mary Gill, Eric's wife, eyes bent on her work, to Amy Sawyer, a flamboyant artist who wrote plays for local performance. There's fine textile work, notably Grace Denman's striking silkscreen prints, and a reimagining of Ethel Mairet's weaving workshop, complete (for the multisensory route is the way to go nowadays) with an olfactory station for smelling her dye plants, including cabbagey woad. Ditchling's tradition lives on: the illustrations here by John Vernon Lord for Aesop's Fables are exquisite and playful. But it's the work of the Guild that remains outstanding and that ethos of 'the goodness of the thing to be made' is evident in every medium, from Dunstan Pruden's exquisite silver work to Joseph Cribb's curvy, sensual carvings in wood and stone to Johnstone's calligraphy. The radical character of distributism is there in Philip Hagreen's funny anti-capitalist wood engravings. In one, the snake in Eden, 'The First Advertiser', is seen coiled around a tree. 'Eat More Fruit,' it demands. But it's David Jones who steals the show without dominating it: his moving 'Our Lady of the Hills' (1921) is the poster image and I loved the engaging, perky 'Agnus Dei' he created for the guild chapel. Wedding dress, made and worn by Petra Gill, c.1930. DITCHLING MUSEUM OF ART + CRAFT Gill, we know, experimented sexually with his two older daughters (the incest with his sister was consensual). There's a curious little room, established on the advice of the Methodist Survivors' Advisory Group, to which entrance by under-16s is discouraged, which aims to represent the achievements and personality of the girls in their own right, including Petra's hand-woven wedding dress (see above). But separating these things from the rest means that lovely pieces – such as Gill's studies of his daughters in admirable clear line and David Jones's affectionate depiction of Petra – are presented as part of a problem. I'd have put the lot out on general display with a panel offering information about his sins. 'The Plait', 1922, by Eric Gill. IMAGE: DITCHLING MUSEUM OF ART + CRAFT COLLECTION Unless you're a local, it's a hike to get to Ditchling. But it's worth it.
