Author: Ms. R.

Mantua Township is like a lot of South Jersey—15,000 people, the look of sleepy crossroads village combined with the chain stores and restaurants of a typical American suburb. One seemingly unremarkable spot in Mantua Township is a Lowe’s hardware store on Woodbury Glassboro Road. But it hides something extraordinary. Out back, there’s a an old quarry that’s now a giant mud pit. Descending into it, every step takes you back in time 400,000 years. All around are the lines……

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The Montevergine Sanctuary is a religious complex located at a height of 4,170 feet above sea level, on the limestone massif of Montevergine, among the Appenine mountains of Campania, in southern Italy. The sanctuary was founded by the hermit Saint William of Vercelli (known also as William of Montevergine) in 1119, along with the monastic Order of Montevergine. The main area of the complex, the abbey later called Territoral Abbey of Montevergine, soon became the most important religious center in……

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Just outside the town of Cervantes, in Western Australia, there is a lake that doesn’t seem like much at first sight, but it happens to be home to a very precious life form, cyanobacteria. These very primitive bacteria were among the very first life forms present on Earth, more than three billion years ago. They are even thought to be responsible for producing the oxygen that later enabled more complex life forms to thrive on Earth. These colonies of……

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Cedarcrest Regional Hospital was a 128-bed state hospital located in Newington. Its doors closed in 2010, and the residents were transferred to other facilities across Connecticut. Cedarcrest Hospital was founded in 1910 by the State Tuberculosis Commission and named Hartford County Home for the Care and Treatment of Persons Suffering from Tuberculosis. In 1912, it was renamed the Hartford State Sanatorium. From 1924 to 1976, Cedarcrest continued to change names and institutional purposes. In 1976, the facility finally became known……

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Callendar House is a sprawling, 14th-century French chateau surrounded by over 170 acres of lawn and forest. Heavily frequented by joggers and dog-walkers, the expansive grounds are home to magnificent flora, fauna, and a glistening pond.  Unbeknown to most, however, is the abandoned mausoleum that lies deeper within the forest. Dating back to 1816, Forbes Mausoleum is a circular, Classical monument memorializing the death of William Forbes I. Designed by Archibald Elliot, it boasts twelve fluted columns that emerge……

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Next to a road and a large Tesco’s seems like an unlikely place to find a pioneering mapmaker and geographer whose name is known the world over. But the churchyard of St Andrew’s Church, Hove contains the family gravestones of George Everest. Yes, that Everest.  Born July 4, 1790, in either Brecknockshire, Wales, or Greenwich, London, Everest joined the East India Trading Company at the age of 16. He  was part of the Great Trigonometric Survey, a project that……

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After an intense storm pummeled Bermuda in February 2011, the island’s custodian of historic wrecks Philippe Max Rouja went to do a coastal survey and spotted a partially exposed bow of a boat. The bow belonged to the Civil War blockade runner Mary Celestia, which was en route to North Carolina’s Confederate forces when it sank in 1864. The Mary Celestia is far from alone: Bermuda’s treacherous underwater reefs sank many a ship. In fact, over 300 vessels are……

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There’s enough old stuff in England that many things get overlooked. Take the several white spots in Stonehenge’s old parking lot. Drivers there had long treated them as traffic markers, when in fact they actually marked the locations where Mesolithic wood posts once stood, thousands of years before the region’s main attraction rose from the Salisbury Plain, some 5,000 years old itself. Now, another monumental site has been discovered in the area, and though it’s much, much bigger than……

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