Meetings & Events: Annual Conference, Conferences

2015 Annual Conference in Peterborough

Peterborough Cathedral and the Soke of Peterborough

Date(s)
10 – 14 Jul 2015
Venue
Rooms will be reserved at The Bull Hotel, Peterborough, which is located a 3-minute walk from the John Clare Theatre at which the conference lectures will be held. Both the hotel and lecture theatre are within a short walking distance of the Cathedral.
Conference Convenors
Ron Baxter, Jackie Hall, and Claudia Marx

The British Archaeological Association’s 2015 annual conference will be held at Peterborough. The focus of the conference will be architecture, art and archaeology throughout the Soke of Peterborough, especially that of Peterborough Cathedral and its precincts from the earliest period through the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Trips will include visits to the Bronze Age site Flag Fen; Barnack Church and the Hills and Holes, originally a quarry for Barnack limestone, now managed as a nature reserve; and the churches of Peakirk, Northborough and Castor. Other highlights include visits to Thorpe Hall, built in the 1650s, and nearby Longthorpe Tower, with its celebrated fourteenth-century wallpaintings, and to the remains of the early seventeenth-century Wothorpe Towers, built by Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter, the son of William Cecil advisor to Elizabeth I.

There will be eight sessions of lectures. We begin on Friday 10 July with an introductory session and a session on Anglo-Saxon Peterborough. On Saturday we concentrate on the architecture and architectural decoration of the cathedral itself. Sunday is entirely devoted to visits around the Soke. On Monday we will continue with lectures on the cathedral and its precincts, in preparation for the precinct tours in the afternoon. Tuesday is devoted to lectures on the Soke, concentrating on Longthorpe and Barnack.

Receptions will be hosted by the Dean of the Cathedral; by the church of St John the Baptist in Cathedral Square (where we will be treated to a recital by Zachary Taylor on medieval instruments like those depicted on the cathedral nave ceiling); and by Paul and Janet Griffin, owners of Wothorpe Towers). The Conference dinner will be held in the New Building of the cathedral – the spectacular Lady Chapel added by Abbot Kirkton in the early sixteenth century.