Category: Data stories
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Same Shape, Different Millennia: every stone circle in Europe on one map
I put all 3,451 stone circles in Europe’s open map data on one map and dated each tradition. Most records are Iron Age judge’s rings in Sweden, the oldest are in Portugal, and the ring seems to have been invented more than once.
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Is the barrow a European thing?
I mapped 99,049 burial mounds and cairns from Ireland to the steppe and dated them with radiocarbon. The famous northern barrow belt is partly a belt of good records; the pattern that survives is earth against stone, and a Bronze Age peak.
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The Megalith Highway
From Portugal to Orkney, Neolithic farmers built the same great stone tombs. I mapped 13,280 megalithic monuments and tested, three ways, whether the idea travelled by sea.
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What Became of the Abbeys?
Henry VIII closed the monasteries of England and Wales between 1536 and 1540. I traced 808 of them to what stands on their sites today: more houses and churches than ruins. And the Cistercians chose quiet places, not empty ones.
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Whose Church Is It? The map of saints across Western Europe
I sorted 279,212 churches in twelve countries by their patron saint. Mary leads everywhere; then Peter, John and Martin; and Cornwall turns out to be the most varied corner of Western Europe.
