Ethandun
A landscape-led reassessment of the 878 campaign and the proposed identification of Ethandun at Fenny Castle in Somerset.
Landscape · Archaeology · Language · Evidence
Britain Before Maps
A landscape before borders.
Before Britain was mapped, divided into counties or recorded in charters, people were already moving through its valleys, following rivers, crossing ridges, building homes and giving meaning to the land around them.
Begin exploringBegin here
One landscape. Many worlds.
The first two paths establish the country beneath the later monuments and names: how Britain changed after the dinosaurs, and the Neolithic world that emerged much later.
A proven British landscape
Britain, 125,000 years ago
During the last interglacial, rivers, woodland and open ground supported animals that now seem more at home in Africa than Britain.
Hippos in British rivers
The hippos of this period are identified as the same common-hippo species that survives in Africa today; there is no secure evidence that the British animals were larger.
Enormous straight-tusked elephants
Some members of the species reached about 4.5 metres at the shoulder and more than 14 tonnes—around twice the weight of a very large modern African elephant.
Lions, hyenas, rhinoceroses and bears
British fossils also preserve lions, spotted hyenas, narrow-nosed rhinoceroses, brown bears, wolves, bison, wild boar and several species of deer.
Evidence: Joint Mitnor Cave geological report · Natural History Museum
The second path
The Neolithic World
Britain’s Neolithic story will be explored through the lives of its communities as well as its surviving monuments: where people settled, how they travelled, how they understood water and terrain, and why particular places became marked in stone.
This area will grow from the continuing Circle of the Stone research.
Research strands
Reading landscape, language and evidence together.
Stone, water and settlement
Research into the relationship between lived landscapes, routes, seasonal water, settlements and places later marked by stone.
Place-names in the land
Early forms, landscape descriptions, water names and the danger of forcing later linguistic assumptions onto older terrain.
Research approach
Evidence first. Questions welcome.
This project brings together archaeology, landscape, language, historical records and environmental evidence. Where something remains uncertain, it is presented as uncertain. Where a new interpretation is proposed, it is identified as an interpretation or hypothesis.
Established evidence
Historical or linguistic interpretation
Landscape observation
Working hypothesis
About
Sharon J Coles
Sharon J Coles is a freelance historical researcher based in Somerset. Her work examines the connections between landscape, place-names, early records and archaeological evidence, with particular interests in Neolithic Britain and the Saxon landscape of Somerset.
“Look again at Britain before maps—and ask what the landscape itself may still be telling us.”