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Culture and heritage
Tixall Gatehouse. Photo credit: Mark Knight 2022
We inherit a legacy of cultural property from the past that includes the physical artefacts alongside the less tangible – but equally real – aspects of our heritage. Our buildings, art, dialect, folklore, even our landscapes create a unique and irreplaceable story of our past that influences our individual and group identities. These become symbols of our communities and affect the way we think of ourselves, helping set and guide the direction of our path to the future.
The cultural heritage aspects of our work includes project delivery but also focusses on involving people, connecting communities with their own history and heritage, encouraging those communities to take a sense of ownership. These actions bolster identities, engender a deeper sense of place, and enable a feeling of belonging.
Investigating and understanding our historic landscapes helps in creating strategies around environmental change and management, and helps to inform landowners in their planning and decision-making processes.
From ephemeral and mysterious prehistoric earthworks to post-industrial landscapes, the Staffordshire Trent Valley holds some of our most enigmatic heritage assets. Trent Valley Past and Present will investigate these, providing opportunities for groups and individuals to engage with their shared cultural heritage and seek ways in which these can be cared for and preserved for the future. Our landscapes hold a varied range of cultural heritage sites and a diverse historic landscape which will inform and influence our project delivery. By working in innovative ways, we will develop new and unique approaches to landscape projects that will protect and enhance both the natural and historic environments. We will work alongside landowners and managers to conserve these interlinked landscapes for future generations.
Each strand of the project is cross-linked and interlinked with the others. For example, the field name Hoblow on the tithe map from Mavesyn Ridware indicates the probable presence of a former burial mound. This is from the folk-belief that burial mounds were gateways to the otherworld and guarded by a mythical creature, in this case a demon or goblin, known in folklore as a ‘hob’. Other examples of this occur across our landscapes – Shugborough is a well-known site at which we have been working with partners restoring wetland, the name meaning “the barrow mound guarded by a shucka” which is the Old English word for a demon or wight. Geophysics has helped us accurately locate lost or suspected heritage assets. Historic graffiti gives us insights into a very different worldview. It may be that different methods of investigating these sites will be appropriate, each one finding new ways to tell old stories, building and creating a sense of place and informing our sense of identity.
Trent Valley Past and Present has been awarded funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and we acknowledge the strong support that has enabled our project, and thank the National Lottery players for making this possible. The project will run for two years, starting in October 2025.
The links below are to different strands of the interlinked project and will be populated with more information as the project progresses. Contact us if you’d like to be involved.
Working together with the Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Association (SAHS), we have engaged over 60 people in training to accurately identify and record historic graffiti in some of our oldest remaining buildings. Although we have not limited ourselves to churches specifically, in practice, the majority of accessible historic buildings are our churches and our discoveries during the pilot project have been fascinating. From crosses carved on doorways to apotropaic (magical protection) symbols inside and outside of buildings, we have found a wide array of different ways in which our ancestors interacted with sacred buildings.
Daisy-wheel pattern incised into the stonework at King’s Bromley church. Photo credit Mark Knight 2025
This image is of an inscribed ‘daisy wheel’ pattern, made with a compass or similar instrument, and is a six-petalled flower design which falls into the endless knot series of patterns found on church buildings across Europe. These patterns are thought to have been used to entrap demons or evil spirits within the fabric of the church building itself, thus averting evil. The one shown here was found on the outside of the church at King’s Bromley. Many churches were modernised during the Victorian period, however, and the stone may have originally been inside the building, and as good stone, reused elsewhere during refurbishment.
Historic graffiti project page
The late 11th or early 12th century font at the Church of St John the Baptist, Armitage. Image credit Iulian Praz 2025
Alongside both our specialist volunteers and working with dedicated consultants, we will use a variety of methods to investigate and record elements of our historic landscapes along with our cultural artefacts, including (but not limited to) burial mounds, buildings and other physical remains as planned or opportunities arise. This will include scanning these features and representing them as they are now, and in some cases recreating them digitally as they might have appeared in the past. Accurate digital models can be used as a baseline for assessing the current condition of our heritage assets so that management plans can be made for their protection and allow measurement of the efficacy of those plans. That way we can conduct future surveys and compare them with the baseline to understand their condition.
We will also create pastscapes, interpreting some of our enigmatic lost heritage and creating exciting visualisations of heritage assets that are otherwise invisible to the eye. These landscape features are often only visible as crop marks in aerial photography, or as vague undulations on the ground. Virtual representations and interpretations will enable us to grasp their significance more fully.
Digital landscapes project page
One of our expert geophysicists demonstrating the use of electrical resistivity equipment to our volunteers on a Roman marching camp site. Photo credit: Mark Knight 2022
Using geophysics, conducting electrical resistivity surveys on below-ground archaeological features was a valuable and enjoyable part of the Transforming the Trent Valley scheme. We were able to ascertain the location and survival of a number of heritage assets, including a Roman marching camp, a Bronze Age burial mound, a possible Neolithic henge that was later used as a burial mound in the Bronze Age and a Roman road. We worked with Historic England and the National Memorial Arboretum as well as local land managers and farmers to produce some excellent evidence of survival rates. The results of these surveys provided vital information in the protection of these monuments and informed management strategies for their future.
Our volunteers were at the forefront of this work, and our specialists provided opportunities which included people from local communities that otherwise might never have the chance to engage this kind of archaeological investigation or with their own cultural heritage in these ways.
We plan to continue with this exciting work and will involve groups and individuals in getting to grips with this valuable method of understanding our unseen heritage.
Geophysics project page
In a world of seemingly ever increasing homogeneity, finding ways to remind ourselves of our uniqueness in the world are invaluable to our sense of place and our individual identities. One of these ways is through investigating our intangible cultural heritage. Intangible cultural heritage includes our local folklore and mythology, our songs or our dialect, the stories that we tell of ourselves that create our local distinctiveness, that make our places – and us – unique.
Trisentona river goddess sculpture at Croxall Lakes. Photo credit: Mark Knight 2024
We will engage with local groups and individuals to research their own past and share some of those results here. These histories are not always old; stories are created and morph into new versions with each generation. Others are truly ancient and are barely remembered or passed on orally. Part of our task will be to work with local communities and individuals to record these and to find ways to interpret these stories for future generations.
These interpretations might be oral recordings, or new works of art in the landscape, finding ways to create a sense of place that reflects those ephemeral histories and shared identities.
Folklore and mythology project page
An example of a tithe map from the 1840s. Copyright Staffordshire Past Track
A tithe map study will be led by the Institute of Names Studies (INS) at the University of Nottingham. Working with the INS we will train volunteers in the harvesting and data collection techniques required to be able to interpret and use the place and field name information from the Staffordshire Trent Valley tithe maps. Staffordshire Wildlife Trust is working to improve green spaces and brownfield sites within rural and urban environments, and to reconnect watercourses to their floodplains in order to help with flood risk management and habitat creation. We have seen how names can provide evidence, for example, for historic water-meadows, and that they can alert us to the possibility of archaeological remains. This can both guide the choice of sites for restoration, and also allow for the protection of the historic environment during work to improve the natural environment.
Tithe maps project page
COSMIC+ investigation conducted during TTTV. Photo credit: Mark Knight 2023
We will work collaboratively with landowners and custodians to explore opportunities for halting or reversing the damage to heritage. This will involve research and a detailed understanding of the issues to establish a broad approach to conserving heritage at risk. Using the learning from our citizen science programme and other research conducted under TTTV and other projects, we can establish a discipline that can be used to protect sites in the future. This could include Conservation Covenants to encourage different land management, seeking alternative uses for assets, or establishing a set of principles for natural heritage projects to follow. We will utilise the passion and skills of local communities and support them to become part of the solution.
Landowner liaison project page
The Catholme ‘woodhenge’ monument. Image credit: Iulian Praz 2024.
The Staffordshire Trent Valley is home to some of our most intriguing and ephemeral monuments. They are nationally significant and through the course of this project we will explore and explain these. The people of the Trent Valley created these landscape monuments largely in wood, or in earthworks on very large scale but they have been infilled and ploughed so that little is left to the naked eye. We will tell the story of these ritual landscapes and where we can, attempt to bring them back to life through art, story and digital imagery.
Ritual landscapes project page
Photo credit: Mark Knight 2025
Not all of our stories are written and oral history is a way of collecting memories of place. It is also a useful way of recording dialects and accents, of which there are many throughout the Trent Valley.
Oral histories project page
Photo credit: John Tanner 2025
Mark is sometimes available to give talks on various aspects of the project. For more information, please use the contact us facility in the about us menu from the header bar at the top of the page.
