If you’ve not used The Northern Antiquarian (TNA) before, welcome! We’re yet another on-line database that does individual site-profiles of the neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and early christian archaeological sites that are found across the countries of Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England. Stones circles, cursus monuments, petroglyphs, holy wells, prehistoric tombs, henges, hillforts and all the rest – we have thousands of them! So why do another website when we already have the great huge resources like the Megalithic Portal, Canmore,and StonePages?
Well, apart from giving more detailed write-ups of each place, TNA thinks it is vitally important to add the elements of folklore, traditions and customs that are found at our ancient sites. Although these ingredients tend to be frowned upon by archaeologists and some other academics, this is merely because such folklore is considered to be little other than superstitious nonsense. This is both lazy thinking and shows a lack of understanding of how non-industrial peasant and tribal people viewed the world. Additionally, as time goes by, TNA hopes to add the astronomical elements found at many megalithic sites as the intriguing ingredients within archaeo-astronomy continues gaining momentum, both in these islands and much further afield.
TNA is easy to use, I think you’ll agree. The drop-down menus allow you to seek out (for example) just stone circles that you may be looking for, or just cursus monuments in the Antiquities menu; but if you’re just wanting to find sites in one particular county in Scotland, Wales, etc, you’ll find those places in our Locations menu. Nice n’ easy.
The website intends to slowly expand, both in the number of sites, as well as with the addition of several different ‘site-types’, or categories in the Antiquities section — but the basic lay-out of the site will pretty much remains the same for the foreseeable future. However, in time, if we’re able to get some financial resources, it’s hoped that we’ll be able to expand our geographical field with more explorers and contributors—like some of the crew to the right—who can add site profiles from wider and wider areas. I am hoping that, if enough Donations come in, we will be able to pay the contributors for their detailed site profiles. But that’s one for the future.
In the meantime, I hope you find at least some of the sites on The Northern Antiquarian worthy of your attention. And please, if you find errors that need correcting, or have additional notes that can be added to a site, please get in touch. All published contributions, no matter how small, will be duly credited and cited in the acknowledgements of each site. It is hoped that anyone who uses material from The Northern Antiquarian will credit us too. However, if you’re one of those tossers who just use other people’s works, plagiarise and don’t give credit where it’s due, if I find out I’ll simply lift anything you’ve done and treat you with the same disrespect. Sadly there are too many wankers in both academic and amateur fields who do such things… 🙁
On a more pleasant note: if you have a website of your own that covers material relevant to TNA, just add us to your website and we’ll reciprocate and add yours to our Links page too.
And last, but by no means least, I have to give a huge “thank you” to James Elkington, not only for kick-starting me into doing this website, but helping here and there when I got stuck. Cheers dood. 😉 But after spending the last year going through map after map, code after code, tediously raking through all the countless pages on this site, I’m giving myself a pat-on-the-back for getting 95% of this damned Northern Antiquarian website up-and-running at last. As someone who had very little idea of how to do web-design, I’m reasonably pleased at the present result. But there’s still a lot more work that needs doing…