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12 votes
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On the 200th anniversary of his death, George III’s collection of more than 3,000 military maps, views and prints in the Royal Collection have been made publicly available online
5 votes -
Cod war tensions with Iceland – British trawlers, bunched together as they are, make easy prey for Icelandic gunboats in 1976
3 votes -
Snowdrift at Bleath Gill
5 votes -
A scandal in Oxford: The curious case of the stolen gospel
7 votes -
The dognapping of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog Flush in 1846, and how she negotiated for his safe return just before secretly eloping with Robert Browning
8 votes -
Slot Machine - A British Pathé short film about vending machines in 1960s Britain
5 votes -
How Britain dishonoured its African first world war dead
7 votes -
MI6 accused of thwarting efforts to solve the 1961 killing of UN chief Dag Hammarskjöld
8 votes -
Samuel Morland, Magister Mechanicorum
5 votes -
The life and work of Lady Hale
4 votes -
Ancient technology: Saxon glass-working experiment
5 votes -
The world’s oldest medieval map
8 votes -
Britain's equivalent to Tutankhamun found in Southend-on-Sea
7 votes -
Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick's grave 'found by author'
6 votes -
Where does London stop? | Unfinished London
12 votes -
Emmeline Pankhurst: The Suffragette who used militant tactics to win women the vote
7 votes -
In the 19th century, American theatres provided the stage for a war between high and low culture, the elite and ‘Know-Nothings’ – and Britain and the US. In 1849, events turned bloody.
6 votes -
Remarkable 120-year-old letter to Santa discovered in England
6 votes -
A 4,000-year old tale of trade and contraband
3 votes -
How the English failed to stamp out the Scots language
7 votes -
World's first sci-fi convention (Royal Albert Hall, 1891)
7 votes -
How did Americans lose their British accents
24 votes -
The exotic dead animals that appeared in the menageries of Victorian Britain’s grand exhibitions were far from perfect specimens. Stuffed, stitched, painted hybrids – accuracy was not a priority.
4 votes -
The location for Stonehenge may have been chosen due to the presence of a natural geological feature
I watched a documentary about Stonehenge tonight, and it proposed the theory that the location for Stonehenge was chosen because of a natural geological feature in the area. There's a man-made...
I watched a documentary about Stonehenge tonight, and it proposed the theory that the location for Stonehenge was chosen because of a natural geological feature in the area.
There's a man-made path that proceeds south-west towards Stonehenge: "The Avenue". This path was built around the same era as Stonehenge itself. If you walk westward along The Avenue on the winter solstice, you'll be facing the point on the horizon where the sun sets. However, under The Avenue, there's an old natural geological formation from the time of the Ice Age: a series of ridges in the rock which just coincidentally align with the sunset on the winter solstice (an "axis mundi"). Before Stonehenge was built, there was a chalk knoll on that location. That meant that you could walk along a natural geological path towards the sunset on the shortest day of the year, and there was a local geological landmark in front of you.
The theory is that these natural geological formations coincidentally aligning with an astronomical phenomenon made the site a special one for early Britons. That's why there was a burial site there, and later Stonehenge was built there.
Here's the article by the archaeologist who discovered the Ice Age ridges: Researching Stonehenge: Theories Past and Present
13 votes