What A Find!

How poignant. The very month the first non-fiction book on Hilda of Whitby, the first lady of the first millennium, is published a major new find is made. If this had been known last year I would have included it in my book.

The Whitby Gazette reports: A 1,300-year-old chapel has this week been discovered within the grounds of Whitby Abbey, and the Gazette can exclusively reveal what it may have looked like. Archaeologists working at Whitby have identified the building at the centre of an ancient Anglo-Saxon graveyard, where the remains over 300 people have been discovered.The small sandstone chapel measures just 10m by 5m and was previously unknown to historians.“This could have been a building that was familiar to St Hilda,” said English Heritage lead archaeologist Tony Wilmot. Radio carbon dating of a rare cremation burial in the cemetary places the structure in the middle of the 7th Century.