Exploring Landscapes
From fell tops to roads and battlefields, places are another archive. They reveal the realities of power, war and everyday life, preserving history's layers in what was built, destroyed, abandoned, reused and reconstructed. Following paths and straying from them, Sophie walks and rides in search of traces of the past.
Battlefields
Battles are the hardest historical events to glimpse, and nowhere are history and landscape more entangled than the battlefield, where terrain shapes tactics and how men flee. Researching the history of war, Sophie walks battlefields and route marches, bringing an array of specialist skills to bear.
Riding
Horses were central to medieval mobility, whether for travel, communication, warfare or status. Riding through landscapes offers Sophie another way to explore the distances, routes and terrain that shaped people's experience of the past.
Norman conquests
Everyone knows the Normans conquered England in 1066 – but that is not quite true. While battle raged at Hastings, Cumbria flourished as an independent kingdom. Only a generation later was it conquered, in 1092. At Lowther, Sophie brings together landscape, archaeology and texts to reveal the second Norman conquest.