The six hundred years after the Romans left Guernsey are known as the Dark Ages. It wasn’t dark, but the world did get colder than it was before. The Huns, the Saxons, the Goths and the Franks came from the East looking for new lands. The Roman Empire fell apart trying to fight these peple [...]
By 56BC (we think) the Channel Islands were part of the Roman Empire. That doesn’t mean that the islands were full of Italians, it was the same people living here as before but Rome was in charge. Guernsey was first to take to Roman ways and there are over 50 places in that island where [...]
During the Iron Age, the small town of Rome grew in power so that by 100 BC it ruled most of the countries around the Mediterranean sea. The people who lived in France at that time were known as Gauls. We think the Channel Islanders were in one of the tribes of Gauls who lived [...]
So we come to the Iron Age, which in our corner of Europe began around 700BC. The people who lived in the islands were probably the same ones who had been here since the stone age. New ideas came here from Europe including the use of Iron to make weapons, tools and useful things. “Celtic” [...]
The Bronze Age is the beginning of proper history. It was the time when writing was invented so we start to know the names of people, and learn what they are up to. What they were up to most of the time it seems was farming and fighting wars. This was the age when the [...]
If you have been watching the puffincams recently you will have noticed there's a lot more activity at the moment. That's becuase the chicks will have hatched! The parent pair are bringing fish back and forth to the burrow to feed their chick, often carrying 10 or even 20 fish at a time (we have [...]
Now things begin to get more exciting in the Neolithic. This is the ‘New Stone Age’ when men were making fine flint tools including arrowheads. For the first time, people came to live permanently in the islands. They started farming and raising domestic animals instead of hunting. So, archaeologists find a lot of Neolithic sites [...]
In the beginning… The Channel Islands were not always islands. A million years ago we were in the middle of the Ice Age. The world was very cold and most of Britain was covered by a sheet of ice a kilometre thick. So much water was turned to ice that the sea was over 100 [...]
We have sadly come to the end of our two weeks with you. Here are the answers to the questions we set in the first week. Questions: Can you name three insects choughs love to eat? Acceptable answers include ant larvae and eggs, dung beetles, cranefly larvae (leatherjackets), beetles, flies, worms. Why are choughs [...]
We have mentioned Mauritius quite a few times over the past two weeks. So today we will show you some of the work we do over there. We are going to join Alex Field, a recent student on Durrell's diploma course in Endangered Speceis Recovery. The course is run in Mauritius and allows students [...]