More than £750 000 has been given to churches in Lincolnshire, including ones dating back to the 13th century, as part of a program by English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund to provide funding for the repair of historical churches.

Our very own Church of St Mary and St Peter in Harlaxton will be receiving £142,000 for repairs.

Dr. Anthony Streeten, Regional Director English Heritage said: “We are delighted to be able to help twenty places of worship in the East Midlands through this important grant scheme. Historic places of worship are at the heart of their communities. They give us beautiful spaces where people can find peace or companionship. Increasingly, these fine buildings are places in which to enjoy exhibitions and concerts or where local communities can even benefit from practical services such as post offices, shops, nurseries. These grants will reinforce the magnificent voluntary effort in helping to preserve and protect this wonderful part of our heritage for present and future generations to enjoy.”

The second phase of a £14 million restoration project at Chatsworth House, near Bakewell, Derbyshire, finished last weekend and it reopened to the public 14 March.  

 Part of the renovations include a new gallery devoted to Georgiana, wife of the 5th duke, the voluptuous superstar of 18th-century high society, complete with several hundred parts of her enormous mineral collection. Another is devoted to Lord Burlington (of Arcade fame), whose estates and art collections were absorbed into the Cavendish family through his daughter’s marriage to the 4th duke.

The present duke’s mother, the 90-year-old Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, has her own exhibition, with a Renoir on show, early works of Lucian Freud — and an Elvis phone. There is also a special edition of one of Evelyn Waugh’s books given to her by the author, with blank pages to avoid the bother of actually having to read it.

The exhibition runs until October 31.

A skull and rib bones were discovered under a cannon by marine archaeologists investigating the wreck of HMS Victory - the direct predecessor of Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar - which went down during violent storms in 1744.

In its day, the 1744 Victory was the biggest and most powerful ship in the world with a mighty 110 guns and fought during the War of the Austrian Succession.

Greg Stemm said: "This is the first time that we have come across a human skull and remains of this type." It is highly unusual for remains to be found in a wreck so deep, they would normally be eaten by the crabs, eels and fish.

On 3 October, Victory and the other ships of the line sailed into an almighty storm in the Channel Islands. All the ships returned, albeit limping - dismasted or with leaks - apart from the Victory. All 1,100 men were lost and only the ship's main topmast was ever found, washed up on Guernsey.

Writers and 'psychogeographers' Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore undertake their own journeys across England in collaboration with musicians and artists inspired by English Journey, JB Priestley's account of England in 1933. The project starts at Faster than Sound in Aldeburgh with song collector Shirley Collins, composer/musician Susan Stenger, composer FM Einheit and visual artist Graham Dolphin, presenting a unique interpretation of the Suffolk countryside.

Link to video of an English journey re-imagined.

Archaeologists have located not just the site of the Battle of Bosworth, but the spot where – on 22 August 1485 – Richard III became the last English king to die in battle when he was cut down by Tudor swords.

The crucial evidence, including badges of the supporters of both kings, sword mounts, coins and 28 cannonballs, was found in fields straddling Fen Lane in the Leicestershire parish of Upton.

The site was located by archaeologists using metal detectors across hundreds of acres, and poring over the evidence of medieval place names to match them to accounts of the battle. Their finds suggest a sprawling fight, with the two armies facing one another in straggling lines almost a kilometre in length.

One of the crucial finds, the largest of the cannonballs nicknamed "the holy grapefruit" by the archaeologists, was found just behind one of Oliver's barns. Another key discovery was a silver boar no bigger than a thumbnail, battered but still snarling in rage after 500 years.

"The fact that this little boar is Richard's personal emblem, and made in silver gilt, means that it can only have been given to one of the closest members of his retinue. The man who wore this would have fought and died at Richard's side," Glenn Foard said.

On Tuesday 16 February Dr Taylor will present a paper entitled ‘‘Divers singinge bookes’: Homogeneity and Identity in the Paston Music Manuscript Collection’ at a conference held at Chawton House Library, Hampshire. The paper pursues questions arising from Dr Taylor’s doctoral research on the Paston manuscript collection, an important collection of musical sources from the turn of the seventeenth century.

The conference, on the subject of Music, Literature, Illustration: Collaboration and networks in English manuscript culture, 1500 – 1700, is hosted by Southampton University and further details may be found at http://www.soton.ac.uk/cmrc/news/conferences/2009_10/music_literature.html

Scientists have used 70 tons of liquid sugar to preserve the remains of three Medieval bridges found near Leicester.

Experts from the University of Leicester immersed the 11th century bridges – whose ruins were so heavy they had to be carried in sections by eight-man teams – in tanks of sugar solution.

The bridge sections are thought to have been part of The King's Highway, a major national route linking London and the South with Derby and the North. They have gone on show at local science hub the Snibston Discovery Museum, where they had been kept in drying chambers for three years in the final part of the project.

"The carpentry and architecture of the 11th century bridge represents a crucial moment in British building history,” said Site Director Susan Ripper. “It combines the earth-based building technology of Anglo-Saxon England with the timber-frame technology which became commonplace a century later."

The Royal Society in London is making available in digital form the key original manuscript that describes how Sir Isaac Newton devised his theory of gravity after witnessing an apple falling from a tree in his mother's garden in Lincolnshire.

While Newton left no written account of the falling apple, one particular account written by one of Newton's younger contemporaries, an antiquarian and proto-archaeologist called William Stukeley, chronicles an episode between the two in 1726.

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden & drank thea under the shade of some apple tree; only he & myself," Stukeley wrote in the meticulously handwritten manuscript released by the Royal Society.

"Amid other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why sh[oul]d that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood.

"Why sh[oul]d it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the Earth's centre? Assuredly the reason is, that the Earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth's centre, not in any side of the Earth.

"Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly or towards the centre? If matter thus draws matter; it must be proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the Earth, as well as the Earth draws the apple."

Historians say this is the most detailed account of the apple ancedote.

Archaeologists have uncovered startling evidence of The Great Stonehenge Hedge.

Inevitably dubbed Stonehedge, the evidence from a new survey of the Stonehenge landscape suggests that 4,000 years ago the world's most famous prehistoric monument was surrounded by two circular hedges, planted on low concentric banks.

 The hedges could have served as screens keeping even more secret from the crowd the ceremonies carried out by the elite allowed inside the stone circle.

Mike Pitts, an archaeologist and expert on Stonehenge himself, said: "It is utterly surprising that this is the first survey for such a long time, but the results are fascinating. Stonehenge never fails to reveal more surprises."