Some links to Harewood’s past

With everything really beginning to gear up for the excavation this year, I thought as this is the first blog post, I should direct you to some other web pages which outline what we have achieved with the excavation so far, and to give a bit of background to what we hope to do this year.

I recently wrote an article for The Culture Vulture online blog which gives a good overview of the site history.

David Altoft, one of our student excavators from last year, has written a more in-depth article entitled Gawthorpe Hall: A Modern Estate in the Making (Part 1 of 2) in the student led journal run from The Department of Archaeology at The University of York.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the landscape setting of Gawthorpe, it might also be worth having a look at this fantastic panoramic image by Russ Drury. He shared the link to his picture on twitter, and I thought others might like to see his work. Just to the right of the statue of Orpheus, on the lawn between the terrace gardens and the lake, you can just see where our trenches are. This image gives you a good idea about how the Hall would have sat within the topography of the valley. The landscape you can see so clearly in this image though is the remodeled 18th century landscape, which looks drastically different from how the landscape would have looked during the life of Gawthorpe Hall.

Finally, I would encourage anyone who wants to talk about this research on twitter to use the hashtag #GawDig12 as it would be fantastic to get some discussion of the site going on twitter too. For those of you not on twitter, please do feel free to post comments here, and I will do my best to answer these!

Over and out…. for now,

Emily Rayner