I’m delighted to announce my latest peer-reviewed journal article is out today! This is the penultimate original article to be published in the Offa’s Dyke Journal 2 for 2020.

The piece is sole-authored by me and is entitled ‘Living after Offa: Place-Names and Society Memory in the Welsh Marches’. By my reckoning, it is my 41st published peer-reviewed academic journal article.

Access it here: http://revistas.jasarqueologia.es/index.php/odjournal/article/view/274

The article is the first attempt to consider the naming practices of the Welsh Marches in relation to the early medieval linear earthworks: Wat’s Dyke and Offa’s Dyke. The article explores how houses, streets, schools, parks and businesses are named after, and in close spatial proximity to, Offa’s Dyke and Wat’s Dyke. Such naming practices are particularly popular in Wales. I argue that the commemoration and integration in social memory of the dykes are a dimension of local identities and perhaps a nascent borderland identity, discrete from concepts of Welshness and Englishness.

This is my first endeavour to consider naming practices as heritage in the Anglo-Welsh borderlands and it has been particularly challenging getting the research completed during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. I hope you enjoy reading the article!