Perhaps you got tickets for the British Museum’s “stupefying” Bayeux tapestry exhibition, which opens to the public on Thursday – and bully for you if so. Very likely, though, you didn’t. While tens of thousands of tickets were snapped up in minutes when they first went on sale in July, most of those who joined the frenzied online queue were left with an empty basket and a millennium-sized dose of Fomo.
More tickets for slots in early 2027 will be released next month , though demand is certain to far outstrip supply again. So as narrative embroidery madness seizes Britain in the coming months – with dinner party chitchat and Instagram reels consumed by discussions of medieval couching stitch and the identity of the mysterious Aelfgyva – how will the have-nots cope?
Luckily (and also thanks to centuries of conquest, piety and colonialism), Britain is home to a ridiculous wealth of ancient artefacts that are just there, all the time – no online queues or anything! Here are some less celebrated treasures to check out while everyone else is elbowing through the crowds in Bloomsbury.
If it’s old textiles you’re after, this one’s a cracker. The Orkney hood , found in a peat bog on the Scottish islands in 1867, was made and worn between AD250 and 615 from three separate pieces carefully stitched together, possibly by the child who wore it. Now housed in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Down an unassuming lane between Chelmsford and Harlow in Essex is an equally unshowy wonder – what is thought to be the world’s oldest surviving wooden church. Greensted church has been much added to since its oak trunk walls were built around 1053, but a millennium later they are still there holding up the roof. The church, wonderfully, is thought to have housed the body of St Edmund on his way to be buried at what would become Bury St Edmunds. It still holds weekly services .
Where to begin? The parish churches of Britain have been described as the nation’s greatest art collection, a vast and ubiquitous repository of jaw-dropping wonders that are almost always free and accessible. There are far, far too many to mention, but the ornate 15th-century rood screen at Llananno in Powys, Anglo-Saxon carved beast heads at St Mary’s Deerhurst in Gloucestershire and spectacular angel roofs in Swaffham , Norfolk, and March , Cambridgeshire, will do for starters.
For those who prefer to avoid the coach parties and the A303, the UK has plenty of other Neolithic sites to wonder at. There are, in fact, at least 1,000 stone circles in Britain and Northern Ireland, from the village-swallowing Avebury and spectacularly sited Castlerigg to lesser-known beauties like the Hurlers in Cornwall, made up of three stone circles, or Beaghmore , a modest and lovely monument complex in the hills of County Tyrone that has seven.
The greatest marvel of the 4.4-metre-high, implausibly slender Gosforth cross is perhaps that it’s standing at all, 1,100 years after it was raised in a small Cumbrian churchyard. But its carvings are pretty marvellous too. Made by Vikings that had converted to Christianity, its designs show deities from the Nordic myths alongside the crucified Christ, the sacred Norse tree of Yggdrasil winding stylised roots around the shaft of the Christian cross. The nearby Anglo-Saxon cross at Irton is smaller but older (early ninth century); many other examples are scattered across western Britain and Ireland.
More ancient textiles, and here’s one to really blow the millennium-old Bayeux tapestry out of the water. The Tarkhan dress , a linen garment excavated from an Egyptian cemetery in 1913, has been radiocarbon dated to the fourth century BC, making it more than 5,000 years old, or at least 500 years older than the Great Pyramid of Khufu. It is housed just seven minutes’ walk from the British Museum, at University College London’s Petrie Museum.
More tickets for slots in early 2027 will be released next month , though demand is certain to far outstrip supply again. So as narrative embroidery madness seizes Britain in the coming months – with dinner party chitchat and Instagram reels consumed by discussions of medieval couching stitch and the identity of the mysterious Aelfgyva – how will the have-nots cope?
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Esther Addley. Published 5 Sept 2026, 05:00 am.
