The ancient London mulberry tree threatened by a block of luxury flats - and the fight to save it

It always puzzled me that there are no ancient mulberries to be found in my neighbourhood of Spitalfields, the centre of London’s silk industry from the 16th century. 

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So I was delighted when I was taken to visit the Bethnal Green mulberry, a gnarly old specimen which, in local lore, is understood to be more than 400 years old and is believed to be the oldest tree in the East End of London. 

I found it a poignant spectacle to view this venerable black mulberry. Damaged by a bomb in the Second World War, it has charring still visible upon its trunk which has split to resemble a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. Yet, in spite of its scars and the props that are required to support its tottering structure, the elderly tree produces a luxuriant covering of green leaves each spring and bears a reliably generous crop of succulent fruit every summer. 

Little did I know that this encounter with such a remarkable mulberry would lead me all over London to visit its fellows in a quest to understand the significance of these ancient trees. Or that it would bring me back again to the East End to confront the controversy that has arisen over the Bethnal Green mulberry which could result in it being uprooted from the earth. 

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The ancient London mulberry tree threatened by a block of luxury flats - and the fight to save it

Aancient coins found in the grounds of a Northumberland school are worth more than £11,000

A hoard of silver coins has been found buried in school grounds near a medieval castle in Northumberland.

The 128 coins were discovered by the caretaker, who was using a metal detector in the grounds of Warkworth Church of England Primary School.

The school is near Warkworth Castle, once the seat of the powerful Percy family.

The coins date from the 15th and early 16th centuries, covering the reigns of Edward IV, who became king after victory in the Wars of the Roses and Henry VII, the first monarch of the House of Tudor who won the throne when his forces defeated King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

The coins were declared as treasure and have been valued at more than £11,000 by the British Museum, which did not take up the option to buy them.

They have been divided between the finder and the landowner, the Diocese of Newcastle.

On Wednesday, September 13 the 66 diocesan coins will be sold by Newcastle auctioneers Anderson and Garland.

They comprise groat and half-groat coins from the reigns of the two monarchs, plus nine Charles the Bold coins from the 1460s.

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Charles the Bold was ruler of Burgundy in France and on good terms with Edward IV. The rulers agreed that the Burgundian coins could be legal tender in England.

The chairman of the school governors, John Hobrough, said: “The coins were found by the school caretaker who was given permission to use the metal detector. We have kept it under our hat to a certain extent.”

Andrew Agate is Newcastle-based finds liaison officer for the North East for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, to which such discoveries are reported

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Aancient coins found in the grounds of a Northumberland school are worth more than £11,000

Unearth some surprising history at the Festival of Archaeology

A Stone Age cult site in Bidford and Iron Age settlement in Rugby are just two of the topics to unearth at the Festival of Archaeology in Warwick.

Market Hall Museum will host a number of talks throughout July about archaeological adventures and discoveries – some of which will be shared for the very first time.

The festival kicks off on July 19 with a free lunchtime talk on the ancient craft of metalworking, exploring the creative skills of the bronze-smith in prehistoric Warwickshire.

The following day Archaeology Warwickshire will present findings from the team’s excavations in Bidford, where they uncovered a 4,000 year old henge complex.

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Explorations go further afield on July 24, when senior archaeologist Dr Cathy Coutts will be talking about discoveries made at St John’s Hospital in Lichfield. It is here that evidence of at least two black people of African descent was uncovered in the medieval cemetery.

The final event on July 27 will see Nigel Page talk about Ridgeway Farm in Rugby, where excavations have revealed a complex landscape of Bronze Age pit-alignment boundaries, Iron Age settlement and Roman enclosures.

Visit warwickshire.gov.uk/heritageboxoffice for tickets and full details.

Source

https://leamingtonobserver.co.uk

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Unearth some surprising history at the Festival of Archaeology

Bones at famed Stone Age site are turning into jelly

Ten thousand years ago, Stone Age hunter-gatherers built houses, tracked game, and conducted elaborate shamanic rituals among the wetlands of North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. When archaeologists uncovered this Mesolithic dwelling known as Star Carr in 1948, they found well-preserved headdresses made of deer antler, as well as animal bones and wooden and bone tools. Revisiting the site 50 years later, researchers discovered its waterlogged wood rapidly and mysteriously breaking down and many of its bones literally turned to jelly. 

These “jellybones,” as the authors refer to them in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have only arisen recently because Star Carr’s mucky, low-oxygen wetland prevented the site’s archaeological treasures from breaking down. But as the land was drained for agricultural purposes in the late 20th century, the groundwater level lowered, creating dry zones and exposing sulfurous sediment to oxygen, producing sulfuric acid. 

The acid ate away the bones’ calcium, leaving behind spongy collagen fragments (like the one seen above). To see how the materials might fare in years to come, the team put bone and wood samples in vats with various sedimentary compositions and acidities—each corresponding to environmental conditions found within different regions of Star Carr—and left them for a year. In wet, high-acidity vats, fresh bone turned to jelly and wood’s lignin—a molecular structure found in plants’ cell walls—deteriorated. In drier environments, the jellybones disintegrated entirely. 

All signs point to the site’s preserved materials rapidly disappearing if Star Carr’s hydrology can’t be changed quickly—and that may already be impossible, as simply pumping more water back into the system might not be enough to reverse its acidity.

Bones at famed Stone Age site are turning into jelly