A unique glimpse of the Lake District in prehistoric times is to be unveiled later this month when dozens of archaeologists and historians from all over the country gather in Keswick for one of the national park’s most popular annual conferences.
Sunday 30 October marks the tenth anniversary of the Lake District’s Annual Archaeology Conference and the gathering at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake will be the first to hear the published results of the eight year survey undertaken by Lancaster University’s Archaeological Unit.
The survey recorded hundreds of new sites including Neolithic stone axe factories in the central Lake District and extensive Bronze Age landscapes in the western fells.
The sell-out conference, called Surveying the High Ground ’ the Lake District National Park Survey, will also have presentations and discussion sessions looking at:
’ the prehistoric landscape of Dartmoor;
’ Cumbria to Cambria, a comparison of two upland regions;
’ making use of the Lake District National Park survey; and
’ investigating the landscape of Northumberland;
LDNPA archaeologist John Hodgson said while the Lake District study, commissioned by English Heritage and the Lake District National Park Authority, would form the backbone of the conference, there would be plenty of other issues to interest the delegates.
’The British uplands have a rich prehistoric archaeology including the remains of settlement and agriculture and ritual landscapes of standing stones, stone rows, stone circles and burial cairns.
’We are using the opportunity of the conference to examine the rich archaeology of the Lake District fells alongside that of other national park uplands including Dartmoor, Northumberland and Snowdonia,’ he added.
