In the cross section, you can see that most of the stations are generally slightly higher than the tracks leading up to them. The slopes assist with braking into and acceleration out of each station.
5 Likes
Sincere question for English mutants: how do they dig something that big under London? I guess they’re deep enough to be under all the myriad of old (and current) utilities and such, but us foreigners are led to believe that it’s priceless Roman ruins all the way down under there and that you can’t so much as dig a basement in London without a team of archeologists?
6 Likes
13 Likes
Perfect, thank you!! I was imagining those giant TBMs grinding through the earth and wondering how anyone would ever know what Roman somethings they ran right through.
7 Likes
Well, that and possible plague victims
9 Likes
Yeah, @GagHalfrunt and @timd already answered comprehensively but the TL;Dr is that most of the tunnel boring happened below the archaeology, but of course there were plenty of stations and entranceways that cut through from the surface to that level and there was extensive archaeology done on those. There are a few other large scale linear infrastructure projects going on in London at the moment (especially HS2) which means there has been a boom in archaeology, as reflected by the number of discoveries in the press (you might remember the Roman mosaic from a few weeks ago). AFAIK it’s mostly one consortium, MOLA Headland Infrastructure which is responsible for the excavations.
9 Likes
You can’t. At the very least an archaeologist is going to make a desk-based assessment. That means they will check through known sources (other excavations in the vicinity, stray finds delivered from the plot, historical maps and sources; the so-called Historic Environment Record) whether anything of significance is to be expected. Depending on that assessment the building project might be accompanied by an archaeologist doing a watching brief, i.e. standing beside the excavator to make sure nothing worthy of excavation is being found and recording anything that is. Or there might be a full blown excavation. Or nothing at all.
7 Likes
And dragons…
(Reign of Fire)
5 Likes
2 Likes
Alfred the Great built a network of burhs or fortified settlements, which could be seen as the ancestors of castles, to defend against Viking raids.
Yes, but those were fortified towns and they did not have any stone fortifications. They’re not really comparable to the motte and bailey castles that would eventually turn into the stone castles we know now. Nor, as mentioned, to the Roman burgi. The difference being that a proto-castle was a fortified building (a tower) rather than a fortified settlement. Otherwise you could argue that a longphort or a hillfort were proto-castles as well.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
