Category: Data stories
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Where Was the Battle? The lost battlefields of early Britain
I gathered 88 proposed sites for 18 lost battles of early Britain and tested each against what the texts actually say. Camlann’s theories are 679 km apart; Whalley’s fit inside 3.5 km.
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Silver and Names
The Vikings left two traces in Britain: buried silver and place names ending in -by, -thorpe and -thwaite. I put every listed Viking hoard on the map of Norse names. Mostly they agree, but Lincolnshire, with 294 Norse names, has no listed hoard at all.
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Cold years, witch years? Scotland’s witch panics and the Little Ice Age
Scotland accused 3,840 people of witchcraft between 1563 and 1736, 57% of them in five sudden panics. I mapped where they lived and tested whether the panics followed cold years. They did not.
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The Villages That Vanished
England has thousands of deserted medieval villages. I mapped all 2,222 in Beresford’s gazetteer and set them against Domesday Book: the doomed were already smaller in 1086, and most emptied long after the Black Death.
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Bloody Place Names: do Britain’s battle names mark real battles?
I measured 756 grim place names on the OS map, from Battle to Gallows Hill, against 507 recorded battles and sieges. Only Battle names reliably mark a battlefield; most of the rest are red herrings, and the Slaughters mean wet land.
