Home
Welcome to the pages of the Bowden Before the Conquest project.
The project aims to research the development of the Bowden area (which covers modern Great and Little Bowden and most of modern Market Harborough) from prehistory up to the times of the Norman Conquest. The eventual aim is to publish our findings in a book.
Since Bowden does not feature in the written historical record until Domesday we will need to use every technique available from Archaeology and History to achieve our aims, including researching what is known from what written records exist, making intelligent inferences from what is known about other similar locations, landscape archaeology, and more traditional archaeological techniques such as field walking. There should be plenty in there to interest anyone!
This is a very large project in scope and is open to anyone who wishes to join in. If you think you would be interested in helping us click here.
News
28th May 2005: Dig in Harrod Drive
Harrod Drive in Market Harborough is opposite St Mary-in-Arden churchyard. If we are right in our suppositions about St Mary's then Harrod Drive might well fall within the ancient church yard. One understanding resident allowed our team dig a small test pit in their garden. Click here for more...
16th April 2005: Dig on the Ridgeway
The residents of several houses on Ridgeway have found bits and pieces of archaeological interest in their gardens, mostly Roman pottery. One resident and amateur archaeologist found a stone floor when digging a test pit a couple of years back. A local archaeologist suggested that it was a Roman floor so we had to investigate further. Click here for more...
2nd April 2005: Archaeology Collecting Day & Exhibition at St Mary-in-Arden
We are held an exhibition and collecting day at St Mary-in-Arden Church.
We had a steady stream of passers by interested in what we had to show and our resident expert on St Mary's church did a roaring trade in guided tours of the ruins. We hope to hold another similar event later in the year.
30th March 2005: Geo-Physics Results Are In!
The results of our geophysical survey of the St Mary-in-Arden's churchyard are back. Click here for details.
Coming Soon
Time Team Big Roman Dig. Between 2nd and 9th July Time Team will be filming a dig in Medbourne under the direction of Peter Liddle (Leicestershire Keeper of Archaeology) and Dr Jeremy Taylor of the University of Leicester. More details of this dig here. We will be conducting a smaller scale excavation on the Ridgeway as a follow up to our April dig. More details of our dig here.
St Mary's Grave Inscriptions Database. Whilst researching the history of St Mary-in-Arden we unearthed the results of a large project undertaken back in the 1950s and 60s to record and catalogue the inscriptions on the gravestones before they were removed. We have a copy of this extensive work and will be publishing it on the internet in the next couple of months. The end result should be a fully searchable index of all of the headstones and their inscriptions. We hope this will be of interest to local people, and maybe of value to genealogists. In the meantime, the original is available for consultation at the offices of Harborough District Council.
Watch this space for more information!
This research project is being conducted under the guidance of Dr Graham Jones of St John's College, Oxford.
It is able to take place thanks to the generous support of Local Heritage Initiative who are funding the project.
|
|
|