Battlefields have inspired poetry, song and works of art, but the sites themselves can be difficult to make comprehensible for visitors.
Places that were once the scene of bloody combat can appear like any other field, particularly if you don’t know what to look for. But with a little help their secrets can be revealed to provide a jumping off point to investigate wider historical events.
The profile of battlefields is set to rise in the public’s consciousness as we near 2014’s 100-year anniversary of the outbreak of world war one. Among the plans to mark the centenary is a £5.3m project to send two pupils and one teacher from every secondary school in England on a battlefield tour of the western front.
“Battlefields can be thought-provoking and inspiring, as you are standing on the spot where history is made – that is something that we need to value,” says Julian Humphrys, the development officer at the Battlefields Trust, a charity set up in 1993 to help ensure that UK battlefield sites are preserved.
“What everybody remembers about a battlefield such as Culloden is the moor, and you can’t stand out there with the wind blowing and the rain coming across you without feeling something. I think there is often that sense of place with battlefields.”
Proximity of battlefields
Shakespeare’s Globe has seen the value of standing on the ground where history was made. This summer it left its London home to stage a series of plays on Wars of the Roses battlefields.
Four all-day performances of the three Henry VI plays were held in the open air at Towton, Tewkesbury, Barnet and St Albans, which saw some of the bloodiest battles in the country’s history.
Live theatre is an exciting way to bring the drama of a battlefield to life, although most sites offer more low-key activities such as talks and guided walks. Humphrys says that almost no one in the UK is more than 30 minutes from a battlefield site, although there are only a few with major visitor centres.
These include the National Trust for Scotland’s (NTS) £9.5m Culloden Visitor Centre, which opened in 2008. Many in the heritage sector see the site as a leap-forward in the interpretation of battlefields.
Katey Boal, the learning manager at Culloden, says that a lot of her team’s time is spent dispelling myths about the battle in terms of who took part and what the conflict was about.
“My team is very good at distilling the information and making it understandable and relevant,” says Boal. “Our job is about inspiring people and making them think critically about the world around them and not to accept pre-conceived notions.”
NTS is using its experience at Culloden to help develop the interpretation for a £9m battlefield visitor centre at Bannockburn, which will open next year in partnership with Historic Scotland. NTS is working with York-based interpretive designer Bright White and a panel of academic advisers on the project.
Bannockburn is different to Culloden in that there are differing opinions as to where the actual fighting took place, there are gaps in knowledge about how the battle played out and there are no material objects associated with the event.
Tom Ingrey-Counter, the interpretation project manager, says Bannockburn has become a place of commemoration, which has its own history, and a number of monuments have been created on the site, making it a tricky landscape to interpret. All this will feed into the interpretation.
Visceral experience
“At the new centre there will be an emphasis on enjoyment and we are using quite high-tech digital means to tell the story of the action over the two days of the battle,” says Ingrey-Counter.
“We will be presenting the most authentic representation of medieval Scottish fighting men that has ever been seen.”
Ingrey-Counter says it will be a visceral experience and might not be to everyone’s liking. “We have quite a singular vision and I don’t think people are going to all love it to the same degree,” he says.
“But one of things about the new centre is that people are going to care about it as it will have that wow factor and they are going to be drawn in.”
However, many places do not have sufficient visitors to justify a multimillion pound visitor centre or museum, so alternatives have to be found.
One innovative solution has been developed as part of the programme to mark the 500th anniversary of the battle of Flodden. The battle took place on 9 September 1513 and featured the Scottish king, James IV, and Thomas Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who was representing Henry VIII.
The battlefield is in a sparsely populated part of Northumberland near the Scottish border. It has a steady flow of tourists and the organisers have created an ecomuseum to bring the sites together (see box).
The concept was first developed in mainland Europe and is a way of uniting sites that have links to a particular topic. For Flodden this has drawn together 40 sites from across the UK that have links to the battle.
“From day one, what nobody wanted was a visitor centre – we are not a Culloden or a Hastings,” says James Joicey, the landowner of the site where the battle was fought and the director of Flodden 1513. The £1m project is supported by a £887,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
“There are professionals involved but essentially it is driven by community interests – that is the thing I love about it,” says Keith Merrin, the director of Woodhorn Museum and Northumberland Archives and a Flodden 1513 trustee.
“The sites themselves are the collective and as a result they can be really diverse.”
Historical agenda
Battlefields often have a diverse range of sites associated with them and as a result they can be difficult places to understand.
“I have always found battlefields very stimulating and moving,” says Nigel Steel, principal historian at Imperial War Museums (IWM). “I find it important to understand the landscape in order to understand the history. It is really rewarding when you get that and you can work it out.”
But Steel, who takes people on tours of world war one sites, says battlefields can be very confusing places. He also says that people need to be aware that visitor centres and museums that interpret battlefields often have a subjective view of events.
“The interesting thing about visitor centres in somewhere like the Somme is that you become very conscious of national perspectives,” Steel says. “There is not one story to tell, that is the difficult thing.”
He gives the example of In Flanders Fields Museum, which tells the story of the first world war in the West Flanders front region, including Ypres.
Ordinary people, extraordinary times
“In Flanders Fields is a powerful visitor experience,” Steel says. “Ypres is a kind of peace city and this was a war that swept over and destroyed their community, then another one came along before it was even rebuilt.
"There are a group of cities destroyed by war, like Hiroshima and Stalingrad, and Ypres will see itself in that mould. So the story told at In Flanders Fields reflects what the citizens of Ypres feel about the war that raged around them.”
There are many ways to interpret battlefields, and new technology is playing a growing part as it is elsewhere in the heritage sector. But it is hard to beat having a guide who can bring a site’s history alive.
Steel says that the personal stories attached to objects are also important and are among the resources that museums can bring to battlefield interpretation, alongside photography, maps and other archive material.
He points to the steel helmet of William Short, a first world war soldier who ignored the severe wounds he received in the battle near Pozières in 1916 and continued fighting.
“Short was an ordinary guy but somehow, in that circumstance, he does this extraordinary thing,” says Steel.
“His hat, with its texture and the dents in it – suddenly it’s real and this is a real man wearing a real hat. That is what they wanted to happen when they put his hat in a box in the summer of 1917 and sent it to London.”
In 2008, five local people on the Scotland/England border met to discuss what should be done to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Flodden, which took place on 9 September 1513. Flodden was Britain’s last great medieval battle and the last time a monarch, James IV, died in battle.
An initial search came up with 33 community groups already planning something and further research found another 87 events were in the pipeline. The strategy quickly changed from creating a centrepiece, to linking together what was already planned.
Five years later there’s a thriving ecomuseum (a community-led museum involving tangible and intangible heritage in its original context).
Money from European Northumberland Uplands Leader+ fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund (£887,000), along with technical support from a number of organisations, has enabled a professional and sustainable ecomuseum to emerge.
At its core are two elements: a diverse programme of hundreds of community events; and a network of places linked to Flodden.
The project was not planned as a national pilot. However, in the context of the big society, it is a good example of genuine community-led development and offers a low-cost model to leverage public service spending.
Alistair Bowden is the project coordinator for Flodden 1513
The battle of Bosworth (22 August 1485) was where Richard III lost his life and crown to Henry Tudor (modelled left), who became Henry VII.
But since the Bosworth Battlefield visitor centre opened in 1974, the location of the conflict has become a battle in itself, albeit a bloodless one. The visitor centre developed by historian Danny Williams offered visitors interpretation, a tea room and guided walks.
But the story was thrown into confusion when historian Colin Richmond questioned whether Williams had correctly identified where the battle took place and the debates have rumbled on ever since.
In 2005, the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded Leicestershire County Council a £1m grant to improve the site’s infrastructure; revamp the exhibition; and carry out an archaeological project to pinpoint the battle’s location.
Right at the end of the project, the archaeologists found the evidence they were looking for – lead round-shot.
“We are at a point where we can categorically say this is where a large part of the fighting took place,” says Richard Mackinder, heritage officer at Leicestershire County Council, who worked with Glenn Foard from the Battlefields Trust on the archaeological project.
“But we don’t know all the answers – it is an ongoing project of discovery.”
In 2012 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded Newark and Sherwood District Council £3.5m to create a new museum in the Old Magnus Buildings. In addition to interpreting the town’s history, Newark Museum is to become a National Civil War Centre when it opens in September 2014.
The town’s role as a Royalist stronghold in the civil war made it the hub of a communications network and the three sieges of Newark had a harrowing impact on the civilian population, the town’s development and the landscape.
Newark and Sherwood Museum Service holds a rich collection of civil war objects, including items of national significance such as a 1646 siege plan, plus coin hoards, armour, cannon and musket balls, personal items and written tracts.
The collection will be enhanced with objects on loan from partner museums such as the Royal Armouries.
There are many heritage sites that include interpretation on the British civil wars within their local contexts. However, none of them present an overall story of the wars, their causes, or the lasting impacts and significance for the present, on the scale of this project.
Bryony Robins is the development manager for Newark and Sherwood District Council’s Museums and Heritage Service
Places that were once the scene of bloody combat can appear like any other field, particularly if you don’t know what to look for. But with a little help their secrets can be revealed to provide a jumping off point to investigate wider historical events.
The profile of battlefields is set to rise in the public’s consciousness as we near 2014’s 100-year anniversary of the outbreak of world war one. Among the plans to mark the centenary is a £5.3m project to send two pupils and one teacher from every secondary school in England on a battlefield tour of the western front.
“Battlefields can be thought-provoking and inspiring, as you are standing on the spot where history is made – that is something that we need to value,” says Julian Humphrys, the development officer at the Battlefields Trust, a charity set up in 1993 to help ensure that UK battlefield sites are preserved.
“What everybody remembers about a battlefield such as Culloden is the moor, and you can’t stand out there with the wind blowing and the rain coming across you without feeling something. I think there is often that sense of place with battlefields.”
Proximity of battlefields
Shakespeare’s Globe has seen the value of standing on the ground where history was made. This summer it left its London home to stage a series of plays on Wars of the Roses battlefields.
Four all-day performances of the three Henry VI plays were held in the open air at Towton, Tewkesbury, Barnet and St Albans, which saw some of the bloodiest battles in the country’s history.
Live theatre is an exciting way to bring the drama of a battlefield to life, although most sites offer more low-key activities such as talks and guided walks. Humphrys says that almost no one in the UK is more than 30 minutes from a battlefield site, although there are only a few with major visitor centres.
These include the National Trust for Scotland’s (NTS) £9.5m Culloden Visitor Centre, which opened in 2008. Many in the heritage sector see the site as a leap-forward in the interpretation of battlefields.
Katey Boal, the learning manager at Culloden, says that a lot of her team’s time is spent dispelling myths about the battle in terms of who took part and what the conflict was about.
“My team is very good at distilling the information and making it understandable and relevant,” says Boal. “Our job is about inspiring people and making them think critically about the world around them and not to accept pre-conceived notions.”
NTS is using its experience at Culloden to help develop the interpretation for a £9m battlefield visitor centre at Bannockburn, which will open next year in partnership with Historic Scotland. NTS is working with York-based interpretive designer Bright White and a panel of academic advisers on the project.
Bannockburn is different to Culloden in that there are differing opinions as to where the actual fighting took place, there are gaps in knowledge about how the battle played out and there are no material objects associated with the event.
Tom Ingrey-Counter, the interpretation project manager, says Bannockburn has become a place of commemoration, which has its own history, and a number of monuments have been created on the site, making it a tricky landscape to interpret. All this will feed into the interpretation.
Visceral experience
“At the new centre there will be an emphasis on enjoyment and we are using quite high-tech digital means to tell the story of the action over the two days of the battle,” says Ingrey-Counter.
“We will be presenting the most authentic representation of medieval Scottish fighting men that has ever been seen.”
Ingrey-Counter says it will be a visceral experience and might not be to everyone’s liking. “We have quite a singular vision and I don’t think people are going to all love it to the same degree,” he says.
“But one of things about the new centre is that people are going to care about it as it will have that wow factor and they are going to be drawn in.”
However, many places do not have sufficient visitors to justify a multimillion pound visitor centre or museum, so alternatives have to be found.
One innovative solution has been developed as part of the programme to mark the 500th anniversary of the battle of Flodden. The battle took place on 9 September 1513 and featured the Scottish king, James IV, and Thomas Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who was representing Henry VIII.
The battlefield is in a sparsely populated part of Northumberland near the Scottish border. It has a steady flow of tourists and the organisers have created an ecomuseum to bring the sites together (see box).
The concept was first developed in mainland Europe and is a way of uniting sites that have links to a particular topic. For Flodden this has drawn together 40 sites from across the UK that have links to the battle.
“From day one, what nobody wanted was a visitor centre – we are not a Culloden or a Hastings,” says James Joicey, the landowner of the site where the battle was fought and the director of Flodden 1513. The £1m project is supported by a £887,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
“There are professionals involved but essentially it is driven by community interests – that is the thing I love about it,” says Keith Merrin, the director of Woodhorn Museum and Northumberland Archives and a Flodden 1513 trustee.
“The sites themselves are the collective and as a result they can be really diverse.”
Historical agenda
Battlefields often have a diverse range of sites associated with them and as a result they can be difficult places to understand.
“I have always found battlefields very stimulating and moving,” says Nigel Steel, principal historian at Imperial War Museums (IWM). “I find it important to understand the landscape in order to understand the history. It is really rewarding when you get that and you can work it out.”
But Steel, who takes people on tours of world war one sites, says battlefields can be very confusing places. He also says that people need to be aware that visitor centres and museums that interpret battlefields often have a subjective view of events.
“The interesting thing about visitor centres in somewhere like the Somme is that you become very conscious of national perspectives,” Steel says. “There is not one story to tell, that is the difficult thing.”
He gives the example of In Flanders Fields Museum, which tells the story of the first world war in the West Flanders front region, including Ypres.
Ordinary people, extraordinary times
“In Flanders Fields is a powerful visitor experience,” Steel says. “Ypres is a kind of peace city and this was a war that swept over and destroyed their community, then another one came along before it was even rebuilt.
"There are a group of cities destroyed by war, like Hiroshima and Stalingrad, and Ypres will see itself in that mould. So the story told at In Flanders Fields reflects what the citizens of Ypres feel about the war that raged around them.”
There are many ways to interpret battlefields, and new technology is playing a growing part as it is elsewhere in the heritage sector. But it is hard to beat having a guide who can bring a site’s history alive.
Steel says that the personal stories attached to objects are also important and are among the resources that museums can bring to battlefield interpretation, alongside photography, maps and other archive material.
He points to the steel helmet of William Short, a first world war soldier who ignored the severe wounds he received in the battle near Pozières in 1916 and continued fighting.
“Short was an ordinary guy but somehow, in that circumstance, he does this extraordinary thing,” says Steel.
“His hat, with its texture and the dents in it – suddenly it’s real and this is a real man wearing a real hat. That is what they wanted to happen when they put his hat in a box in the summer of 1917 and sent it to London.”
Community approach: the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum
In 2008, five local people on the Scotland/England border met to discuss what should be done to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Flodden, which took place on 9 September 1513. Flodden was Britain’s last great medieval battle and the last time a monarch, James IV, died in battle.
An initial search came up with 33 community groups already planning something and further research found another 87 events were in the pipeline. The strategy quickly changed from creating a centrepiece, to linking together what was already planned.
Five years later there’s a thriving ecomuseum (a community-led museum involving tangible and intangible heritage in its original context).
Money from European Northumberland Uplands Leader+ fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund (£887,000), along with technical support from a number of organisations, has enabled a professional and sustainable ecomuseum to emerge.
At its core are two elements: a diverse programme of hundreds of community events; and a network of places linked to Flodden.
The project was not planned as a national pilot. However, in the context of the big society, it is a good example of genuine community-led development and offers a low-cost model to leverage public service spending.
Alistair Bowden is the project coordinator for Flodden 1513
Finding Bosworth
The battle of Bosworth (22 August 1485) was where Richard III lost his life and crown to Henry Tudor (modelled left), who became Henry VII.
But since the Bosworth Battlefield visitor centre opened in 1974, the location of the conflict has become a battle in itself, albeit a bloodless one. The visitor centre developed by historian Danny Williams offered visitors interpretation, a tea room and guided walks.
But the story was thrown into confusion when historian Colin Richmond questioned whether Williams had correctly identified where the battle took place and the debates have rumbled on ever since.
In 2005, the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded Leicestershire County Council a £1m grant to improve the site’s infrastructure; revamp the exhibition; and carry out an archaeological project to pinpoint the battle’s location.
Right at the end of the project, the archaeologists found the evidence they were looking for – lead round-shot.
“We are at a point where we can categorically say this is where a large part of the fighting took place,” says Richard Mackinder, heritage officer at Leicestershire County Council, who worked with Glenn Foard from the Battlefields Trust on the archaeological project.
“But we don’t know all the answers – it is an ongoing project of discovery.”
King vs Cromwell: the National Civil War Centre
In 2012 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded Newark and Sherwood District Council £3.5m to create a new museum in the Old Magnus Buildings. In addition to interpreting the town’s history, Newark Museum is to become a National Civil War Centre when it opens in September 2014.
The town’s role as a Royalist stronghold in the civil war made it the hub of a communications network and the three sieges of Newark had a harrowing impact on the civilian population, the town’s development and the landscape.
Newark and Sherwood Museum Service holds a rich collection of civil war objects, including items of national significance such as a 1646 siege plan, plus coin hoards, armour, cannon and musket balls, personal items and written tracts.
The collection will be enhanced with objects on loan from partner museums such as the Royal Armouries.
There are many heritage sites that include interpretation on the British civil wars within their local contexts. However, none of them present an overall story of the wars, their causes, or the lasting impacts and significance for the present, on the scale of this project.
Bryony Robins is the development manager for Newark and Sherwood District Council’s Museums and Heritage Service
