The team is excited to be featured on BBC’s ‘Digging for Britain’ this week!
Tune in on Wednesday 28 January 2026 at 8pm to see a vivid and comprehensive picture of Bronze Age ‘sky burials’ and settlement in Northumberland more than 4,000 years ago. The episode will reveal our excavations at Harden Quarry last summer, working with Tarmac, where significant finds included the discovery of a sequence of Bronze Age burial cairns on the highest point of Bleakmoor Hill—on what is a volcanic dome. This find suggests Early Bronze Age communities expanded into and started farming these uplands earlier than we imagined, giving us a new timeline for human activity in the Cheviot Hills.
What’s especially exciting about the discoveries is they give us an almost full 360-degree view on people’s lives, whereas until this point we hadn’t really known that much about how people were living in the Bronze Age, particularly in this part of Northumberland. Now, at Harden Quarry, we’ve got where they are living, where they are burying their dead close to the gods, and we have the landscape that they were farming, which is a rare survival in archaeology!
Catch the episode on Wednesday to discover what our hard-working team, dedicated volunteers and Tarmac’s sustainable mineral production got up to on site, as they show you some of the exciting artefacts and features discovered.
All episodes of ‘Digging for Britain’ can be found on BBC iPlayer here. (We make our appearance in Episode 4, around the 38-minute mark.)
You can also find out more about Harden Quarry on our project page here.