This week we look back at three of the most popular history features of the last fourteen months.

In October 2020 we looked for remains of Maldon's ancient burh fortress. King Edward the Elder (son of Alfred the Great) founded a Burh (fortified town) in Maldon in 916 A.D. Designed as a place of sanctuary in the event of attack, it would comprise a ditch, bank and palisade.

Very little remains, but Maldon Archaeological Group did a great piece of detective work in the 1980's, published as 'The Maldon Burh Jigsaw' by member Paul Brown.

You can trace their outline of the route here. In December 2020 we entered lockdown and the Pandemic was approaching its height. We looked back at a time when an even deadlier outbreak, of H1N1 virus was sweeping a population already devastated by four years of war. First observed in the United States amongst soldiers, the Spanish Flu (so called because it was the uncensored Spanish papers that most widely reported it during the war) swept the globe in four waves, killing 228,000 people in the U.K. Unusually, this virus was most lethal in infants and young adults, making it particularly devastating after the loss of so many young people in the war. The details can be found here. Finally, on a more cheerful note, enormous interest was generated by the little-known story of Osea Island's secret World War 1 naval base. The feature can be found here and describes how the island became 'HMS Osea', and was home to a secret new weapons system, the Coastal Motor Boat. HMS Osea had some forty boats, each forty feet long and carrying a torpedo in a trough at the rear. The latter had to be released astern of the boat, which then had to manoeuvre wildly to avoid being sunk by its own torpedo! Too late for the 1914-18 war, the boats were used in action in the Russian Civil War, sinking two Communist battleships and a depot ship.