After several months of anxious waiting, it has now been confirmed that a team, led by Dr Richard Tipping of Stirling University, have been awarded a grant by the Leverhulme Trust to research the environment and landscape of the Battle of Bannockburn.
It was very gratifying to be asked to be a part of this big and exciting project - and to actually get the award is, of course, even better!
There are intractable limits to what the documents can tell us about the course of the battle - and even greater difficulties in explaining why the participants took the decisions they did.
A key question is why Edward II took the seemingly foolish decision to take his army down onto the carselands which, in the modern and popular view, were marshy or even peat-covered and intersected by deep, tidal channels.
But was it really like that? The hope is that scientific methods can provide new evidence. Formerly rather 'rough and ready' methods such as pollen analysis can now provide much finer detail about past environments.
My tasks will include comparing the findings with the documentary evidence, both with regard to the battle and the envionment. It is all going to keep me pretty busy for much of the first half ot 2013.
It was very gratifying to be asked to be a part of this big and exciting project - and to actually get the award is, of course, even better!
There are intractable limits to what the documents can tell us about the course of the battle - and even greater difficulties in explaining why the participants took the decisions they did.
A key question is why Edward II took the seemingly foolish decision to take his army down onto the carselands which, in the modern and popular view, were marshy or even peat-covered and intersected by deep, tidal channels.
But was it really like that? The hope is that scientific methods can provide new evidence. Formerly rather 'rough and ready' methods such as pollen analysis can now provide much finer detail about past environments.
My tasks will include comparing the findings with the documentary evidence, both with regard to the battle and the envionment. It is all going to keep me pretty busy for much of the first half ot 2013.
RSS Feed