This book reports survey work at the monastic sites of Wearmouth and Jarrow and makes a spirited attempt to provide them with a shared hinterland. The latter is founded on a landscape proposed by Brian Roberts, here enhanced with Historic Landscape Characterisation (Chapter 2). While the twinned settlements each had pre-existing farmland to exploit, they appear to have remained separated by a band of moorland, and the most convenient pathway tying them together was via the estuaries and the sea. Chapter 3 applies pollen analysis and geophysics to the sites without great revelation, but Chapter 4, the study of the buildings, is a marked success, thanks to laser scanning and a mapping of the building stones by their petrology. Twelve different sources of stone are identified, most of the ashlar, jambs and voussoirs reaching Monkwearmouth and Jarrow via Roman sites, and from Arbeia in particular. In addition, a ground penetration radar traverse may have detected a vault under the east end of St Paul’s, Jarrow. Chapter 5 invites us to consider the public perceptions of the sites and landscape in their current industrial settings and Chapter 6 offers a research framework, which is new, albeit local and traditional in its outlook.

There are some nice ideas here, pursued by some promising techniques. Nevertheless the reader might have difficulty understanding their context. After all, the subject is one of the best-known sites in Britain and one of the most deeply researched. As well as providing the fundamental storyline, Rosemary Cramp’s publication has already explored the geology and cartography of both sites and discussed the prospects of enhancing knowledge in key areas, such as the integration of the monasteries with their wider communities (Cramp Reference Cramp2005, 360–4). It emerges that the point of departure for the present book was not so much previous research as a bid for World Heritage status, which may account for its holistic enthusiasms and heritage homilies (relieved by children’s drawings). This reviewer would have bid for the world’s appreciation by claiming primacy for an area of international research. There is some will to do this, but citations of recent archaeological studies of monasteries are thin, especially from Ireland, not to mention France and Italy. The field study of the monastic hinterland of the (World Heritage site of) Anuradhapura was a gift-wrapped analogy left on the table (Coningham et al Reference Coningham, Gunawardhana, Manuel, Adikari, Katugampola, Young, Schmidt, Krishnan, Simpson, McDonnell and Batt2007). The broader question of when, and why, closed colleges of faith-driven intellectuals succeed in dominating the political agenda of an incipient nation is one of global interest and modern relevance.

If heritage status is the issue, perhaps the strangest omission is an in-depth analysis of the performance of Bede’s World, the centre created to provide public engagement and promote historic Northumbria on a world stage. Considering it stood to combine the assets of Europe’s primary historian, the earliest English church still standing and archaeological investigations by the century’s most eminent Anglo-Saxon scholar, it is hard to see how it could fail. But the challenge of marrying an international academic hotspot into a family of local orthodoxies offers, here as elsewhere, a priority subject for heritage research.