DEGREESTThe Archaeology of Alderley Edge DEGREESD

In 1953 the schoolboy Alan Garner rediscovered a wooden shovel originally found in the Alderley copper mines in 1875. In 1991 he presented it to the Manchester Museum in the University of Manchester: this - and the discovery of a hoard of over 500 Roman coins - inspired the creation of the Alderley Edge Landscape Project, a multi-disciplinary research programme of the Museum and the National Trust, who own of most of the Edge, that aimed to study the entire history of Alderley, from geology to entomology, mining to oral history. No other village has enjoyed such a comprehensive study of its story: the list of chapter-headings reads like a roll-call of everything you ever wanted to know about this or any place. The book concludes with Alan Garner's retelling of the famous legend of the sleeping king, setting a familiar tale told him by his grandfather in a whole other world of prehistoric ritual and sacrifice.

Alderley Edge is a sandstone ridge rising 180 metres above the Cheshire plain, a dozen miles south of Manchester. The Edge itself, now owned by the National Trust, has become a honeypot for Mancunians, and the village below, formed by the railway as a commuter dormitory for Manchester cotton-kings, is now nicknamed the champagne capital of England. Beneath lie copper and lead mines and, according to legend, a sleeping king and his knights ready to save England in the last battle of the world. In 1953 the schoolboy Alan Garner rediscovered an old wooden shovel found in the mines; nearly forty years later - and by now a world-famous author - he presented the shovel to the Manchester Museum in the University of Manchester, thereby inspiring a research project that called on every discipline in the museum's armoury and many more besides. The Alderley Edge Landscape Project, a joint venture by the Museum and the National Trust, set out to study every aspect of Alderley's story. Its first report, in 2005, was The Archaeology of Alderley Edge. This second volume covers everything else, from the natural world to the story of the mines, from social and oral history to conservation. The list of chapter-headings reads like an encyclopedia, for thanks to its position in the university the project could call on specialists of the highest calibre, and many of the approaches and techniques used were ground-breaking at the time. Alderley's story includes the discovery of two new species of bramble, and a retelling of the legend by Alan Garner that takes the story back into prehistory - and his shovel was radiocarbon-dated to the Bronze Age.No other project and so no other book has covered the entire, complex story of a single village and the landscape in which it is set in such detail. It will be read not just by landscape historians but by students and scholars in all those disciplines and at all levels, and by anyone interested in any aspect of history and of the countryside, whether out on the Edge or in the comfort of an armchair.

Susan and her brother Colin are catapulted into a battle between good and evil for possession of a magical stone of great power that is contained in her bracelet. Reissue.