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For most people doing basic starting level historical/archaeological research in the UK the search starts at Heritage Gateway - This website, probably designed for Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 6 is gloriously, terribly awful. Probably some usual Government IT project that cost many million, it in turn queries the Historic Environment Records (sometimes referred to as Sites and Monuments Records) which are held by County Council and District Councils in the UK. It queries all of them, even when you don’t need that and returns links through to another awful service that lists records that have no sorting or reason and may number in the many hundreds for you to click through. This will cover everything from Stonehenge to a single field find from back in the early 90s. ...

As mentioned in Part1 - I like a good church. I also like weird conspiracy theories and history. Where would the intersection of those things lead other than to the Poor Fellow soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, much better known as the Knights Templar. Formed in 1119 as a Monastic order of originally 9 knights whose purpose was to protect Christian pilgrims on the road to the Holy land. Over the next 20 years their wealth and influence grew, until in 1139 Pope Innocent II issued a papal bull - Omne datum optimum (Latin for “Every perfect gift). The papal bull contained a number of things, but mostly allowed them to pay no taxes and be holden to no authority other than that of the Pope. Although in reality not p^ssing off various European rulers proved to be diplomatic at the time and a failure to avoid doing that lead to serious problems many decades later but that’s not the subject of this post. ...

Normally when researching local history I’m looking for some tangible evidence of the past. I’m not an academic and theory is fun to read, but for me to be really interested it’s a part of exploration. Going out on a walk to find a place that connects back to a previous time. My historical time line is always a bit weighted. I love ancient history and the evidence that man left on the landscape 4000 years ago and I love things remaining from WW2 and the cold war which is an area of history I read about the most. My bio says I’m a bit hazy on the other 3020 years which is broadly true, but I’ve also gone out looking for mediaeval and later. ...

This was a personal blog albeit with a slight preference to regional history. I also have a interest in tech and numerous other things I wanted to share and write about. It was always about things that interested me, and a chance to add words to my photos of places I’ve been and the details surrounding them. I posted something, perhaps overly harsh, at a moment of frustration at the end of a bad week and got slapped for it very publicly on Bear, which then caused some other people to weigh in. Ok perhaps deserved criticism, but the net result of someone calling me out on it is traffic I didn’t want. So I pulled my blog for a while. ...

Whilst doing a fairly substantial walk in a remote part of the county, I ran into a couple walking their dog. The first time we crossed paths, we exchanged a polite greeting as walkers often do. The second time, I’d come around the apex of my walking loop and I think they were heading back to their no doubt very lovely big house nearby. This time, the gentleman of the couple stopped to chat (much to the annoyance of his wife I suspect). He asked if I walked a lot in the county and if I knew about the ‘bridge of a million bricks’. Now you can’t tell me about a place with a name like that and expect me to leave it alone. ...

I like a good church, which might be an unusual statement coming from an avowed atheist, but there is something amazing that these buildings, many over 1000s years old, dot our country and still show some amazing features created with care so long ago. When I’m walking I’ll often try to pass and investigate churches out in the countryside of Hereford and Worcestershire. This awareness of what churches may offer was triggered by someone from an era of my life long since past, who introduced me to Simon Jenkins and his book ‘Englands 1000 best churches’. Only really as I’ve explored more local history have I really taken an interest again. ...

Possibly a slightly confused post this one, I learned today of the passing of Erich von Däniken an author, who if he is still known, is generally though of as one of the founding members for what now tends to be called alternative archaeology or Pseudoarchaeology depending on how cynical you are. He paved the way for people like Graham Hancock and a host of YouTube and podcast presenters currently marching around Egypt and Peru speculating on if ancient aliens or some other developed civilisation before the ice age built things we still can’t really explain. ...

I’ve been running Linux since you had to install it from floppy disks. Its rare these days given how smooth everything normally is compared to how it was back ‘in the day’ I have to debug anything on my desktop environment (work servers are a different story!) but today I did - so documenting for posterity. I’m testing out a number of tools to smooth my workflow going into the new year and Obsidian is one. I’m late to the party I know. I particularly wanted to be able to cross reference web pages when doing research to installed Obsidian Web Clipper on my Firefox (v143 at the moment) on Fedora Linux. Having got both Obsidian installed (AppImage) and the Firefox plugin I was driven slightly mad when trying to use it - Firefox could’nt handle the obsidian:// protocol - now fair enough this is installed in my own location but the documentation isn’t really accurate, talking about registering Firefox protocols and adding entries to about:config. Also that process has changed, but anyway. ...

The two AIs - problems of obscure interests on the internet. Thus far, I’ve only written about local history which was one of the major things I’ve wanted to write about for some time. That said, I do intend for this blog to also be a bit more general with some of my other thoughts featuring, this is a bit of a mix between some random thoughts I’ve been trying to make sense of, reflections on tech and my day job combined with some rambling about how annoying I often find the internet and social media. Especially when it comes to connecting to other people, which it should be much better at. ...

In my first blog post Hunting Worcestershire’s forgotten WWII History where I describe looking for tank traps from the GHQ line offshoot protecting Birmingham and the Black Country1 I mention that close to Stourport there are some that are unusually made from sandstone from the area as opposed to the more regular concrete. Well today I was able to find one site of these sandstone versions. They’re at the entrance to a nature reserve/natural area just outside the town. There are apparently 2 sites, one of 5 cylinders and one of 6. I believe this is the site of 5. Most are very heavily overgrown now, but 3 still protect the entrance to the footpath and are visible beneath the moss. ...