Today, January 29th 2021, the new drama film, The Dig, is being released on Netflix and we can't wait to watch it! We suspect our followers are the same! The film is an imaginative view of the now famous excavation of the main mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. It so happens that Sutton Hoo is one of our favourite historical sites, so much so that our very own James Pegrum has visited it many times in recent years, with the first occasion being part of our research for our big 2016 Anglo-Saxon build. 

The ship was found to be the grave of an important figure, thought to be King Rædwald of East Anglia, who reigned between around 599 and 624. He was buried along with over 30 different items which have helped deepen our knowledge of trade, technology, weapons, religion and so much more during the Anglo-Saxon period. Most famous amongst these items is the iconic helmet, which is currently on display at the British Museum.  Other items in the grave include a shield, throwing spears, a jewelled hilted sword, silver dish, silver spoons of Byzantine origin, gold coins from Frankish mint, beaver bad with a lyre inside. ​Archaeologist David M. Wilson has remarked that the metal artworks found in the Sutton Hoo graves were "work of the highest quality, not only in English but in European terms"

Such a situation occurred in 2002 when a survey at a development site in Amesbury, just three miles from Stonehenge, revealed an unexpected treasure. Work was taking place where a school was planned to be built when a grave with pottery from the Beaker period, which is dated to around 2,800 to 1,800 BC, was found.  Within the grave the archaeologists found the remains of single man, who came to be known as the Amesbury Archer and dubbed by the press as the King of Stonehenge.

The man buried with some of the richest articles from the early Bronze Age. In all, around 100 objects were found in the grave including three copper knives, two small gold hair tresses, two sandstone wristguards (these would have protected his wrist from the bow string), five pots, 16 flint arrowheads, a cushion stone (used for metal working), a bone pin (used to hold together a piece of clothing such as a cloak) and what is thought to be Britain’s first gold objects, dating ack to around 2,500BC. It was because of the worth of the gold that the man was named the ‘King of Stonehenge’ while the items related to archery; the arrow flint heads and wrist guards led to the skeleton being known as the Amesbury Archer.

Located in The Fens of Cambridgshire are the remains of a Bronze Age settlement known as Must Farm, named after the quarry in which they were found. Discovered in 1999 when a local archaeologist noticed a series of wooden posts sticking out of the quarry’s edge, the site has since been subject to a programme of excavations, which have revealed many incredibly well preserved artefacts that give us a real glimpse into life during the Bronze Age.

The excavations paint a very different environment at Must Farm to the one that exists today. Sometime around 1,000-800BC a series of piles, or stilts, were sunk into a river channel on top of which houses were built. Around the edge of the settlement a palisade, consisting of large ash posts, was constructed in situ, leaving the debris at the bottom of the slow-moving river.

What is remarkable is that at some point, perhaps as little as six months, after the settlement was built a fire tore through it, causing the homes and to collapse and drop into the river below. In the water the flames were immediately quenched as the homes dropped to the riverbed, where they were then covered with layers of non-porous silt, preserving everything from wooden utensils to textiles. It is this degree of preservation which makes the site so special and gives us an unprecedented insight into life during the Bronze Age.

Other objects found included a large wooden wheel (reported to be the most complete and earliest of its type in Britain), eight Bronze Age log boats, glass beads from main land Europe, and a bronze sickle. Must Farm also has the largest, and finest, collection of textiles from the British Bronze Age. The fibres and fabrics are incredibly useful to study as they reflect different aspects of the production of textiles, from the initial stages through to the finished objects. The finds indicate that the occupants were not isolated but had a good connection with those living in Britain and beyond.

Analysis of the materials recovered from Must Farm are still underway and you can follow progress over at the project’s website:

www.mustfarm.com

Recently, Must Farm was subject to a BBC documentary, which can still be found on iPlayer and is well worth a watch:

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07myxws/britains-pompeii-a-village-lost-in-time

These scenes were built by James Pegrum as part of a series of models on British history. Follow us on  Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to see them first.

We are delighted to announce that Brick to the Past have been commissioned by Nevis Partnership to build a minifigure scale model of Dun Deardail hillfort for permanent display at Glen Nevis Visitor Centre.

Dun Deardail occupies a striking position on a rocky knoll above Glen Nevis and is surrounded by the often snow-capped peaks of the West Highlands. To its east it is overlooked by Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain and to its north, Glen Nevis unfolds, revealing the historic town of Fort William. The hillfort is thought to have been  built and occupied, perhaps over several periods, between 700 BC and AD 900 and is unusual because the stones that once made up its walls have been vitrified. Vitrification is the process by which stones are fused together at temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Celsius. It is uncertain why vitrification took place, but current theories tend to see it as either an act of aggression following capture or as ‘ritual closure’ at the end of the site’s active life, akin to the destruction of many Neolithic ritual monuments.

Nevis Landscape Partnership have been running  an ambitious project to excavate the Dun Deardail. Working closely with Forestry Commission Scotland & AOC Archaeology, they aim to uncover the mysteries surrounding this ancient settlement and have got hundreds of ‘citizen archaeologists’ involved in the work. You can find out more in this video.

The funding to build LEGO Dun Deardail has been provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Highland Council Discretionary Fund.

We’ll be keeping you up-to-date as we build LEGO Dun Deardail. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter andInstagram for the scoop!

Thursday saw us traveling to Thurso, the most northerly town on mainland Britain and the home of the superb Caithness Horizons Museum. Our mission was to deliver and set up the now well publicised LEGO broch for Caithness Broch Project, a task which we of course delighted in, because  a). it meant that we got yo visit a museum, and b). it meant that we got to play with LEGO. The LEGO broch will now form part of a summer exhibition on, you guessed it, brochs, before being taken on a tour of local schools as part of Caithness Broch Project's exciting outreach program.

We won't give you a full look at the model just yet, there will be a proper press release issued by Caithness Broch Project that will do that. In the meantime, please enjoy our little teaser... and to see more, visit the museum!

Dan Harris has been island hopping in Scotland’s Western Isles, here’s what he found out.

What do you do for a holiday if your country has just heedlessly voted to devalue its own currency? Well one thing is to take a bit of gamble on the weather and look a bit closer to home and, to be fair, when you live in a country that disregards the forecasts of economists about a post-Brexit economy, then disregarding the forecasts of the Met Office is the next logical step, even if years accumulated climatic data and complex mathematical models suggest the odds are stacked against you. And so with unrealistic expectations of a brighter tomorrow, we hopped on the ferry at Ullapool and set sale for the Isle of Lewis.

For those unfamiliar with Scotland’s geography, the Isle of Lewis is the largest island in the Western Isles of the Outer Hebrides. More accurately, it is just over half of the largest island in the Western Isles of the Outer Hebrides, because confusingly, the southern half is called the Isle of Harris, despite being part of exactly the same landmass.

Situated on Europe’s Atlantic edge, Lewis and Harris are both astonishingly beautiful islands, with everything from vast, white sandy beaches to precipitous, rugged hills and mountains. You might be able to tell, it didn’t really take that much to convince me to visit them, even if the weather was more promising in the Mediterranean. But I’ll pause there, because this isn’t supposed to be some kind of ‘what I did on my summer holidays’ type essay, of the sort you had to write on your first day back at school. No, this is essay is supposed to have some relevance to the Blog and oh what relevance there is!

Not only beautiful, the Outer Hebrides are also home to some of Scotland’s finest archaeological sites and so this trip wasn’t just a holiday, it was also a field trip. There were three sites in particular that we wanted to visit and by happy coincidence, they are all within a few miles of each other, on the western coast of Lewis. Of greatest relevance to our current work was the Dun Carloway Broch. This remarkably complete structure, perhaps second only to Mousa on Shetland, is thought to date from the late first millennium BC and the late Iron Age. It’s south side stands almost intact to what is thought to be its original height of 9 metres. Remarkably, people alive in the 1830s remembered seeing the broch in a near-complete state, roofed over with a large flat stone. The broch has a well preserved entrance, guard cell, intra-mural staircase and cavities, scarcement ledges and ground level chambers. The ground floor of the broch is uneven and contains a large slab of bedrock, suggesting that a second timber floor would have been the main living space. The broch proved an excellent source of first-hand information to help inform the construction of our own Lego Broch for Caithness Broch Project…despite not actually being in Caithness.

Just south along the coast is another of Scotland’s best archaeological sites, the Callanish Complex of Standing Stones. These are somewhat older than the Broch, dating back to around 3,000 BC and the Neolithic period. The complex comprises of at least 19 visible monuments as well as many now hidden remains. The best known and best preserved is known as Callanish 1 or Cnoc An Tursa, located just to the west of the village of Calanais. While we don’t have any immediate plans to build any more stone circles, it’s always worth having a few examples stored up, just in case we do decide to. Building an accurate model of Callanish 1 would certainly prove an interesting challenge.

The final site visit took us to the island of Beàrnaraigh Mòr, perhaps better known as Great Bernera, which is connected to Lewis via a short bridge. On its northern coast lies the sandy bay of Traigh Bostadh where in 1993, following a severe storm, the remains of a Viking house and older Iron Age village were uncovered. Evidence suggests that the bay was occupied at least as far back as 1,500 years ago by people thought to be Pictish in origin. The Iron Age village proved the most interesting find, comprising of a complex of semi-subterranean, drystone dwellings of a ‘jelly-baby’ shape. The local history society has built a life-size reconstruction of one of these Iron Age dwellings, which can be visited for a small donation. While obviously less ambitious than Caithness Broch Project’s aim to build a life-size reconstruction of a broch, the house is an excellent example of what can be done and of the benefits of recreating historical buildings using traditional methods.

Since I don’t think you want to hear about my days spent on the beach or wandering the hill country of Harris, this marks the end of my report. As forecasted, the trip ended with driving rain and winds so strong they uprooted our tent, leaving us soaked, cold and in need of alternative accommodation – next year we’ll probably just holiday in Greece.

This week is National Parks Week in the UK, so we thought it might be a timely moment to bring you an article about why we love them. A strange topic, you might think, for a blog that mostly concerns itself with Lego and photos of decaying piles of stone, but in fact, National Parks provide us with a great deal of inspiration.

Our National Parks aren’t just wildernesses to be preserved like enormous cumbersome museum exhibits, they’re vibrant fluid entities, embracing history and culture as much as nature and conservation. Their landscapes are the product of thousands of years of interaction between man and environment, and it’s this interaction that provides us with the rich and infinitely diverse subject matter that proves so popular in Lego form.

By now I think it’s fair to say that we’re well accustomed to creating massive sprawling landscapes that test our reserves of dark green and reddish brown, but landscapes aren’t just endless expanses of pasture and peat bog, they’re also made of buildings and ruins and of course,  decaying piles of stone. To date, our largest model of a National Park’s landscape is 2015’s ‘The Wall: Rome’s Northern Frontier’, a sixteen square metre intricately detailed depiction of Hadrian’s Wall.  Some of the Wall’s most iconic and best preserved sections are located within the Northumberland National Park, including Housesteads Roman Fort, which provided much of the source material for our own fort. We of course undertook  a field trip to Housesteads, walked a section of the wall, chatted to English Heritage’s knowledgeable staff and generally had a good poke around. The visit proved invaluable and, in our own inflated opinion of our work, it’s reflected in the quality of the build.
 
2017 will once again see us drawing heavily on the history and landscape of one of Britain’s iconic National Parks. At the moment we’ll leave you guessing as to its identity, but needless to say, we have big plans for this one, it is after all, a big Park. Field trips are already underway; stay tuned for further clues, updates and, in the not too distant future, a big announcement.

Anyway, the point is we love our National Parks and we love building bits of them. Don’t forget, this week is National Parks Week, so put down your phone, tablet or computer and get out and enjoy one... or two or three if you can manage it.

Field trip season well and truly kicked off this weekend as we ventured north to what is arguably the farthest corner of mainland Britain. On Sunday we were lucky enough to be given a tour of some of the finest Broch sites in Caithness and Sutherland by none other than local Broch experts Ken and Iain from Caithness Broch Project.

Field trips are a valuable part of what we do and despite some mildly grim weather and the occasional cloud of midges, this one was no exception. Brochs on our visit included Nybster, Dunbeath , Kintradwell / Cin Trolla and Carn Liath and they provided us with a wealth of features, some of which are delightfully grizzly, to include in our forthcoming model.

As if having two Broch experts accompany us wasn't enough, we were also lucky enough to bump into AOC Archaeology's John Barber, who has years of experience working in Scotland's  historic environment. John is currently undertaking research into the engineering, architecture and conservation of  brochs with the University of Edinburgh, so the opportunity to quiz him did not go unmissed.

This may well have been our most productive field trip ever and so now, with our heads full of new found information, it's time to get building... or maybe go on another field trip, because you can't have too much of a good thing.