Did you know that the Bayeux Tapestry has almost – but not quite – been loaned to the UK five times in the last century? These persistent but fallen-through plans make its current exhibition in the British Museum particularly impressive, and it’s no wonder tickets up to December 31 have sold out. Booking reopens on 21 October for visits between 1 January and 31 March 2027, and I’m very much looking forward to viewing the embroidery in person after extensively reading about it this summer, including the two books reviewed on page 13. 

Back in April I attended a fantastic talk by Senior Curator of Archaeology Dr Tim Pestell on the six-year restoration of Norwich Castle’s Norman Keep. This included tens of thousands of volunteer hours recreating Romanesque textiles, which you can read about in this issue’s Heritage Crafts column. 

You may spot other nods to Norman archaeology throughout the magazine, including a casefile on the rare Grade I listed Hatfield Manor in Doncaster. However, as usual there’s a good range of dates and subjects, spanning high-status Iron Age cremation burials, the most commonly found Roman coins, mysterious crannogs, creative interpretations of landscape data, and a discipline-shaping discovery that for decades excavators may have failed to recognise (and have therefore discarded) important Stone Age tools.