The Till-Tweed river catchment areas in Northumberland contain outstanding archaeological and palaeoenvironmental remains which have been in general only poorly understood. This study has assembled ...detailed data that will provide a platform for future landscape-based research and site-based investigation. Written from a landscape, or geoarchaeological perspective, this study develops a methodology and management tool that will allow planners, curators and developers working in the region to to easily access information across sectors, and provide a transparent and easily comprehended record of sensitive archaeological and palaeoenvironmental sites.
The international wool trade was an important part of Northumberland's economy in the fourteenth century, and participation in it was central to the working lives of many local merchants. However, in ...the mid-fourteenth century the wool trade was subjected to an unprecedented period of royal regulation and taxation. The reaction of local export merchants to this was smuggling. This article examines both the practice and the prosecution of wool smuggling from Northumberland, primarily by use of legal records, and sets smuggling in a wider commercial, constitutional and judicial context to reveal its wider regional significance. Firstly, it situates Northumberland as a region in which this illicit economy assumed a particularly substantial measure of importance in commercial life. Secondly, it engages with the question of governance. Here, by focusing on the perceived legitimacy of taxation and law enforcement in the North-east, it argues that the conflict which resulted from the crown's attempt to reshape the wool trade led to the blunting of the institutional mechanisms which were supposed to police the export trade in Northumberland. Smuggling therefore reveals some of the limits of royal authority in the far north of England.
A heterolithic tidalite succession yielding spring–neap bundles is newly reported from a mid‐Carboniferous (Serpukhovian) section of the Alston Formation of Northumberland, England. The rhythmite ...records deposition over an interval that can be confidently calibrated to at least 84 lunar days, and attests to a non‐negligible tidal range in parts of the Northwest European Seaway in the late Mississippian. The tidalite is notable for the presence of a striking crowded Skolithos ichnofabric on both bedding planes and in vertical section. Bedding plane expressions of the ichnofabric reveal true substrates of sand piles excavated during burrow construction, in addition to an apparently remarkable equal spacing between individual burrows that is shown to be genuine through pair correlation function analysis. These characteristics show that the burrowed horizons were registered by contemporaneous ichnocoenoses, with no palimpsesting of burrows. The irregular vertical distribution of burrow horizons, despite a near‐continuous semi‐diurnal record of sedimentation, is suggested to be an artefact of spatial patchiness of burrowing communities in the depositional environment; imperfectly registered in a vertical profile with high‐temporal, low‐spatial resolution. The succession proves that burrow palimpsesting is not an inevitable ichnological conclusion of sedimentary stasis, and attests to intermittent palaeoecological fidelity of the stratigraphic record at the small spatio‐temporal scales recorded at outcrop.
Giordano Bruno's visit to Elizabethan England in the 1580s left its imprint on many fields of contemporary culture, ranging from the newly-developing science, the philosophy of knowledge and ...language, to the extraordinary flowering of Elizabethan poetry and drama.
This book explores Bruno's influence on English figures as different as the ninth Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Harriot, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Originally published in 1989, it is of interest to students and teachers of history of ideas, cultural history, European drama and renaissance England.
Bruno's work had particular power and emphasis in the modern world due to his response to the cultural crisis which had developed - his impulse towards a new 'faculty of knowing' had a disruptive effect on existing orthodoxies - religious, scientific, philosophical, and political.
The Carboniferous Lower and Middle Coal Measures coals of the Northumberland Coalfield are anomalously rich in selenium (Se) content (up to 62 ppm) compared to the averages for the common UK and ...worldwide coals. As well as posing an environmental toxicity threat, Se is now regarded as an important resource for alloys, photovoltaic products and nanotechnologies, and high Se coals in North East England offer an opportunity to assess the Se means of occurrence, origins, transport mechanisms and enrichment in coals. At least two generations of pyrite host high Se in the sampled coal seams: microbial-formed disseminated pyrite (both cubic and framboidal in habit) and later cleat-filling pyrite, identified by petrographic observations, laser ablation methods and sulphur isotope compositions. There is a notable Se enrichment of up to 250 ppm in later formed cleat-filling pyrite. Trace element enrichment may have been sourced and influenced by seawater distribution during diagenesis, and localised dykes and deformation may have acted as an enrichment mechanism for sampled seams in the region. The high Se coals in Northumberland may provide a potential E tech element source and should be considered and carefully managed as coal mining and production are reduced in the area. The study also highlights the nature of Se enrichment in pyritic coals affected by cleat formation and multiple episodes of mineralisation, important as critical element demand continues to increase worldwide.
•Carboniferous Coal Measures coals in Northumberland are markedly enriched in Se.•Multi-generational pyrite is responsible for the high Se content.•Cleats provide trace element fluid pathways and contain high Se concentrations.•Se may be sourced from seawater inundation and/or local intrusions.•Se-rich coals may form important future critical metal sources worldwide.
This volume provides both a quantitative statistical and qualitative analysis of Late Northumbrian verbal morphosyntax as recorded in the Old English interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It ...focuses in particular on the attestation of the subject type and adjacency constraints that characterise the so-called Northern Subject Rule concord system. The study presents new evidence which challenges the traditional Early Middle English dating attributed to the emergence of subject-type concord in the North of England and demonstrates that the syntactic configuration of the Northern Subject Rule was already a feature of Old English. By setting the Northumbrian developments within a broad framework of diachronic and diatopic variation, in which manifestations of subject-type concord are explored in a wide range of varieties of English, the author argues that a concord system based on subject type rather than person/number features is in fact a far less local and more universal tendency in English than previously believed.
Numerical models solving the full 2‐D shallow water equations (SWEs) have been increasingly used to simulate overland flows and better understand the transient flow dynamics of flash floods in a ...catchment. However, there still exist key challenges that have not yet been resolved for the development of fully dynamic overland flow models, related to (1) the difficulty of maintaining numerical stability and accuracy in the limit of disappearing water depth and (2) inaccurate estimation of velocities and discharges on slopes as a result of strong nonlinearity of friction terms. This paper aims to tackle these key research challenges and present a new numerical scheme for accurately and efficiently modeling large‐scale transient overland flows over complex terrains. The proposed scheme features a novel surface reconstruction method (SRM) to correctly compute slope source terms and maintain numerical stability at small water depth, and a new implicit discretization method to handle the highly nonlinear friction terms. The resulting shallow water overland flow model is first validated against analytical and experimental test cases and then applied to simulate a hypothetic rainfall event in the 42 km2 Haltwhistle Burn, UK.
Key Points
A novel surface reconstruction method developed for hydrodynamic overland flow modeling with improved numerical accuracy and stability
An implicit scheme for discretizing nonlinear friction terms to achieve the correct flow equilibrium at disappearing water depth
A new local bed modification technique is further introduced to preserve the lake at rest solution
•Citizen scientists can collect relevant rainfall, river level and flood observations.•Community-based observations add value to the hydrological modelling process.•Their observations are most ...valuable during local flash flood events.•Traditional ground-based gauges and rainfall radar miss or underestimate flood peaks.•Combination of data sources required to fully characterise local catchment response.
Despite there being well-established meteorological and hydrometric monitoring networks in the UK, many smaller catchments remain ungauged. This leaves a challenge for characterisation, modelling, forecasting and management activities. Here we demonstrate the value of community-based (‘citizen science’) observations for modelling and understanding catchment response as a contribution to catchment science. The scheme implemented within the 42km2 Haltwhistle Burn catchment, a tributary of the River Tyne in northeast England, has harvested and used quantitative and qualitative observations from the public in a novel way to effectively capture spatial and temporal river response. Community-based rainfall, river level and flood observations have been successfully collected and quality-checked, and used to build and run a physically-based, spatially-distributed catchment model, SHETRAN. Model performance using different combinations of observations is tested against traditionally-derived hydrographs. Our results show how the local network of community-based observations alongside traditional sources of hydro-information supports characterisation of catchment response more accurately than using traditional observations alone over both spatial and temporal scales. We demonstrate that these community-derived datasets are most valuable during local flash flood events, particularly towards peak discharge. This information is often missed or poorly represented by ground-based gauges, or significantly underestimated by rainfall radar, as this study clearly demonstrates. While community-based observations are less valuable during prolonged and widespread floods, or over longer hydrological periods of interest, they can still ground-truth existing traditional sources of catchment data to increase confidence during characterisation and management activities. Involvement of the public in data collection activities also encourages wider community engagement, and provides important information for catchment management.
ABSTRACT
The Holocene Storegga tsunami, 8120–8175 cal a bp, resulted in run‐up heights of up to 3–6 m around mainland UK and coincided with a suggested large population decline in the coastally ...focused Mesolithic population in Northern Britain. At Howick, Northumberland, the site of a Mesolithic settlement, a nearby sediment deposit may be of tsunamigenic origin, but this is uncertain. Here, a numerical model was used to simulate the Storegga tsunami in Northumberland. Two scenarios of relative sea‐level change, and a third incorporating high tide, were simulated with mortality estimated within the intertidal zone for the Mesolithic sites in the region. The results showed that only with the addition of high tide could the sediment deposit site have been inundated by the tsunami. At Howick, mortality estimates varied but were up to 100% within the resource‐rich intertidal zone. The tsunami inundated a large area and would have led to the loss of key resources such as hazelnuts prior to the winter months. These combined effects would have probably been replicated throughout coastal settlements in Northern Britain, possibly leading to the contemporary population decline estimated to have occurred at this time.
Thirty mudstone samples from coastal exposures of the Northumberland Formation on Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada, yielded diverse dinoflagellate cyst and terrestrial sporomorph assemblages. ...A late Campanian age for the formation has been well defined through magnetostratigraphy, macrofossil biostratigraphy, and geochemical studies of the Hornby Island section. Dinoflagellate cyst taxa corresponding to 61 genera are exceptionally well preserved and include specimens referable to at least 68 formally established species. The earliest occurrences of Canninginopsis maastrichtiensis, Druggidium cf. discretum, Phanerodinium belgicum, Renidinium cf. vitilaire, Senegalinium simplex, Spiniferella cornuta, and Xenicodinium delicatum sensu Slimani et al. are reported along with the most recent occurrence of Senoniasphaera protrusa, extending their stratigraphic ranges into the upper Campanian. The palynomorph assemblages support a late Campanian age. Two dinoflagellate cyst ecozones are recognized (ecozone 1 and ecozone 2). Assemblages suggest sediment deposition in an inner shelf environment with moderate to high nutrient input and primary productivity.
•High diversity in first northeast Pacific study of Mesozoic dinoflagellate cysts.•Dinoflagellate cysts reinforce late Campanian age for the Northumberland Formation.•Two distinct ecozones recognized within the Northumberland Formation section.•Palynomorphs support inner shelf setting with moderate to high primary productivity.•Palynomorphs indicate mid-latitude position for the Cretaceous Nanaimo Basin.
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