Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

I was going to post something completely different today. I had it all set up & all I had to do was hit ‘publish’, but I wandered on to Twitter and saw a tweet from UCD's Steve Davis (@AerialAndBugs) about a one-star Tripadvisor review of The Giant’s Ring, Co. Down. Back in July 2015 user ‘mark r’ wrote a review under the title ‘ Giants ring..Giant let Down ’: “what an embarrassment .i wouldn't bring any one here to see these 5 boulders in a field .that you cant find anyway .someone has taken all the signs away. good on them ..a really Boring place to see .apparently the rocks are a memorial to the dead.you will probably want to join them when you see them .sorry but its pants” [ sic. ] Link to Tripadvisor [ here ] My first instinct was to disagree with this awful review (and many commenting on Steve’s Tweet did exactly this). My second reaction was ‘Nobody mentioned the fact that the carpark there is a gay pick-up area?’ Indeed, once I had a look at Tripadvisor it be...

Let’s be honest, folks – there are a lot of bad things happening in the world right now … pretty much wherever you are, politics is a roaring dumpster fire of awfulness … we’ve got universities that protect plagiarists on their staff (I see you UCL!) … Keepers of Antiquities that believe private citizens can be ordered about like medieval serfs and claim that you’re an embezzler for expecting something so outlandish as being paid for undertaking work (waves at Maeve Sikora!) … and then there’s the pandemic … it’s all just so depressingly awful. But do you know what’s brilliant? Piggy Back Rides! Sure, they don’t solve any of the above problems, but they are great. That feeling of being carried about is reassuring and throws us back to memories or fantasies of happy, carefree childhoods. How could you improve on all the great things that are encapsulated in the simple joys of the piggy back ride? How about this: a piggy back ride through a great archaeological site! And that is exactly ...

Those of you following our Archaeology 360 video series will know that we first visited the early medieval site at Nendrum [ here ] and, rather predictably, followed it up with a visit to Mahee Castle [ here ], just a couple of hundred meters away. For the concluding part of this trilogy (for a trilogy it is!), we visited the slightly less well-known church site at Tullynakill, Co. Down.   Tullynakill, although not nearly as well known, is part of the Nendrum story as it took over the former's role of parish church by the late 15th century. While the standing structure is of this date, to a century later, the decorated stonework is all of 17th century manufacture.   This is not the first time the Chapples Minor have visited Tullynakill! We were last here in 2015 where I took photographs and they played hide-and-seek [ here ]. Indeed, the Chapples Minor declared that of all the sites we visited that day, it was the best, but mostly because of the hide-and-seek experienc...

The British Museum holds 62 items identified as coming from Co Down, along with a further two items attributed to Antrim/Down. The majority of these (16) are assigned to the Bronze Age, followed by the Neolithic/Bronze Age (13) and Medieval period (11). The most common object type represented are vessels (15), followed by axes (8). The most common material types represented in this assemblage are Metal (28) and Stone (17), followed by Pottery (15), Glass (3), and Bone (1). < Table of Contents Neolithic: Stone items Down scraper (?); flake 20050504.960 Flint flake, possibly used as scraper; some percussive ripples remaining on lower side; retouching is bifacial but is for the most part concentrated on upper face; brown colour. http://britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1606914&partId=1 Down scraper (?); flake 20050504.970 Flint flake, possibly used as knife or scraper; retouched bifacially, mostly c...