Mudlarking

Close-up searching at Greenwich also reveals the remains of the fruit and nuts that were eaten between courses and at the end of meals. Ancient hazelnut and walnut shells survive miraculously well encased in oxygen-free mud. They are delicate, softened and waterlogged though, and dissolve quickly as soon as they are exposed to the tides. The apples

wooden barrel back into the land of the living. Queenhithe, known as Aethelred’s Hythe in the ninth century, is the grande dame of the tidal Thames. It appears on the earliest of maps and illustrations of the river and is a useful orientator along a foreshore that has changed dramatically over two millennia. It is likely to have existed as a harbou

The Thames is England’s longest archaeological landscape and thousands of the objects that fill our museums have come from its foreshore. Among them are numerous Bronze and Iron Age swords, shields and spears that were found along the stretch between Vauxhall and Teddington and include the famous Battersea Shield.