Mark Walters
banner
mark-walters.bsky.social
Mark Walters
@mark-walters.bsky.social

Archaeologist at Heneb: The Trust for Welsh Archaeology. Into: Sound & Music, Photography, Botany, Dragonflies, Palaeontology, Astronomy, Art, LiDAR, Ancient History, Numismatics, Gaming, Border Collies

Engineering 23%
Political science 17%

Reed Bunting watching me on the canal before sundown

Nice out the back

Oh great 👍

Hughes not Jones 🙂

Ahh, nice, I picked up the Aled Rhys Jones project too 👍

Probably our most played CD over the last 16 years. Bluetech’s 2010 Love Songs to the Source album. A hugely collaborative album blending languorous dub/reggae rhythms, electronics, superb guest vocals, trumpet, saxophone and more. One of the greatest albums to chill out with & great on the road too

Good to have a bit more of the Game of Thrones world on the screen. I read the hedge knight stories back in 2014.

Enjoying a read of the Winchelsea novel by Alex Preston. A really pacy swashbuckler set on the south coast around Winchelsea and Rye in the 1740’s.

On what would have been Gills birthday happy memories of 30 years exploring together. Missing you always 💔

It’s so wet in the fields around us that it’s attracting Little Egrets down to feed on the worms surfacing due to the saturated soil. Nice to be able to watch them from the house 🙂

This was our last visit to Sycamore Gap in 2022

Great to receive the companion volume to the earlier Hadrian’s Wall in our time book. As someone who has walked, driven and even excavated along the wall on many occasions you do get attached to the superb archaeology and surrounding landscape here and you certainly notice the trees along the way.

I have never read a novel set in the Black Country before but found this one in a review. Set around the Pelsall & Brownhills collieries & canals in the 1870’s. It uses the Black Country dialect in conversations which you pick up after a while. A good read and beautifully evocative writing.

It’s a constant battle with rural landowners isn’t it. Our village benefitted by having a retired lady from Natural England on the local council who was really good at negotiating public footpath opening on neglected routes and the network has really developed over the last 10 years.

EA won’t bother unless it’s a main river or tributary of a main river. We have reported to Natural Resources Wales in the past as the Montgomeryshire Canal is a SSSI and SAC in places, but they never do anything either.

All that quality topsoil washing off the fields into the canal as a brown silt. The farmer ploughs right up to the edge of the canal here so anything that goes onto the field surface (cow slurry, fertiliser, sprayed treatments) also washes into the canal.

Reposted by Mark Walters

Update on our archaeological excavations on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and the first direct evidence linking the island to the Bronze Age tin trade.

www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...
Excavating the British tin trade that shaped the Bronze Age « Archaeology# « Cambridge Core Blog
In 2025, we published an article in Antiquity, demonstrating through chemical and isotopic analyses that, c. 1300 BC, tin ingots made from tin ores in southwest Britain are found on shipwrecks off the...
www.cambridge.org

Donation page to help secure the Ellastone Bronze Age gold fastener for The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Staffordshire and prevent it being bought by a private collector….. www.stokemuseums.org.uk/pmag/help-sa...
www.stokemuseums.org.uk

I always check out which species of Gulls have landed in the fields around us. Most people don’t give them a second look & they just get dismissed as generic ‘seagulls’, but I like to know what is passing through. In this case about 100 Lesser black-backed & some smaller juvenile Black-headed Gulls

This solitary Cyclamen is always the first ground colour along the canal, well ahead of the carpet of Primroses lining the towpath this year

Reflections and glowing hazel catkins in some unexpected sunshine this morning down the Montgomeryshire Canal

🐕 👀 You should be playing with me not reading that new novel 🙂
My new book Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers, and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-94 is out in June on @whiterabbitbks.bsky.social . It's a love letter to the music of my youth and a flashback to the most exciting time of my writing life. Pre-order geni.us/StillInADream

Yes, the intro was a good read 👍
BREAKING: A Gamekeeper has pleaded guilty in England’s first-ever Hen Harrier persecution case.

Covert video and audio gathered lawfully by the RSPB Investigations team has helped expose the deliberate targeting of a Hen Harrier, leading to a landmark guilty plea:

www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happen... 👈

Late afternoon wellness break in the sunshine on the Breidden - needed this ☀️🙂

It will become a vital archaeological finds guide in the future if everything is dated by type in there 🙂 In fact some community digs have already used crisp packets and BBE dates on other 20th century wrappers to date events eg. the Kelvingrove skatepark closure.

If you can get a research project going with the Uni that would be great 👍

It’s a lovely bit of data showing that the interior is well preserved 👍