Trustees
Jane Beacham, BA (Hons), MA
Jane practiced as a solicitor for nearly three decades, for most of that time as managing partner of a successful legal practice in the city of London. She is also an experienced charity trustee.
Jane has a recent Masters qualification in museum practice from Goldsmiths, University of London, with many years of experience as a hands-on volunteer at small museum in Devon and more recently at the Horniman in south London.
She has had a strong interest in Anglo-Saxon culture, archaeology and architecture since studying old English as an undergraduate. Jane has loved the magical landscape, history and culture of the cheviots and north Northumberland for many years – and now lives in the area.
Hugh Ferrand, MA (Oxon)
My life until recently has been in the financial world and of years living in Sydney, Hong Kong and New York, as well as in London and Edinburgh. In 2020 we returned to Northumberland, home of my mother’s family for generations, and now living in Alnwick.
For nine years I was a Governor of Birkbeck College, part of London University, chairing a number of their committees, and today involved projects in Alnwick and the surrounding countryside. Working as part of the Gefrin Trust combines my great love of history with an ability to make a positive contribution to its rich heritage, especially in the fields of education and tourism, two of the foundational pillars of our economy.
It is my hope to play some small part in making more widely known this Trust’s commitment to better understanding the early Anglo-Saxon world here in the heart of its northernmost kingdom, and in bringing this to life for both local people and visitors.
Professor Christopher Gerrard, BA (Hons), PhD, FSA
Chris studied Archaeology and Geology at Bristol University and completed his doctorate there on trade and medieval communities in south-west England. After a post-doctoral project took him to Spain on behalf of the British Museum, Chris worked first on the commercial side of archaeology at Cotswold Archaeology, then as a consultant, before joining the University of Winchester and subsequently Durham University in 2000.
He has been both a Head of Department there and a Deputy Head of Faculty but continues fieldwork projects in the UK, Spain and in the Azores. He is currently undertaking major excavations at Auckland Castle (County Durham). His interests lie in the study of landscapes and water features, the origins and evolution of medieval settlement, and natural disasters.
He has twice won the Best Archaeological Book award, for Interpreting the English Village (with Mick Aston, 2014) and for Lost Lives, New Voices (with four Durham colleagues, 2018).
Tim Maxwell, MA (Hons)
Tim studied Classics and Ancient History at Oxford. The bulk of his career was in the investment banking sector and included postings in Japan and USA.
Though born in Dumfries he spent some of his childhood in Northumberland and was keen to return on retirement. Since then he has resumed his interest in the early history of the county and also organised the restoration of his Grade II* listed greenhouse, which had been designated by Historic England as a building at risk.
Roger Miket, BA (Hons), MLitt, FSA
Roger discovered archaeology while a schoolboy in the ‘60s, helping on an excavation at the Roman Fort of Arbeia, South Shields, and the twin monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow. Graduating in History at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and later post-graduate studies in archaeology, Roger began work in the Museum of Antiquities/Department of Archaeology, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. In 1976 he was appointed Principal Keeper of Archaeology for Tyne & Wear Museums Service.
In 1986 he was invited to establish a museums service for the Isle of Skye & Lochalsh district in the Hebrides that might communicate something of the incredibly rich and diverse archaeological and historical heritage of these islands to its communities and visitors. At government reorganisation in 1995 he was appointed Manager of Culture & Leisure. In 1998 he took early retirement and in 2002 returned to Northumberland where he served for ten years as a trustee of The Glendale Gateway Development Trust.
In parallel to this, for many years he was a tutor in Archaeology for the Adult Education Departments of the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and later the University of Aberdeen. Subsequently he served for a number of years as an Advisory Member of the Northern Board of Scottish Natural Heritage. In 1990 he was co-founder and director of a small publishing house on the Isle of Skye,Maclean Press (https://openlibrary.org/publishers/Maclean_Press), dedicated to producing works on the heritage, history & archaeology of the Hebrides.
His archaeological research interests and publications range from the mesolithic to the 20th century. He remains fully active and involved in archaeology.
His research interests have led him to undertake survey and excavation of sites of all periods from the mesolithic to the later 19th century, and a number of books and publications on the history and archaeology of north Britain. Some of his Scottish titles were published by Maclean Press, a publishing company he founded and ran for over twelve years on the Isle of Skye
Professor Sarah Semple, BA (Hons), MSt Hist Res, DPhil
Sarah is former Head of Department in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University. After studying at the Institute of Archaeology in London (UCL) she spent several years working in commercial archaeology in the UK before completing DPhil in Archaelogy at The Queen’s College, Oxford and a research fellowship at St Cross College, Oxford.
She took up a permanent lectureship at the University of Chester in 2004 before moving to the Department of Archaeology at Durham in 2006. As an early medieval archaeologist Sarah focuses on the landscapes and material culture of Britain and northern Europe, and her research is particularly connected to ways of understanding past human interactions with natural and human altered environments.
Her recently republished single-authored monograph Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England explores the centrality of the physical remains of the past in the shaping of early medieval identity and power, while Negotiating the North: Meeting Places in the Middles Ages in the North Sea Zone, provides the major outcomes from The Assembly Project, a collaborative international project that explored the development of administrative and assembly practices in northern Europe from AD 300-1500.
Long-running research interests in death and burial, landscape and identity, also promoted a successful bid for a major Leverhulme-funded project People and Place. The Making of the Kingdom of Northumbria which is using the burial records of northern Britain to explore the health, wealth, ethnicity and lifestyle of the first Northumbrians, charting the emergence of one of the largest kingdoms in early medieval Britain in terms of migration, mobility, social stratification, and political aggregation AD 300-800.
Christina Cowart-Smith, BA (Hons), MLitt, MA, PhD
Though she grew up in the Pacific Northwest, Christina spent most childhood summers in northeast England. Some of her earliest memories involve playing in the ruins of Fountains Abbey, sketching chevroned piers at Durham Cathedral, and sitting in a car backseat driving through the atmospheric, changing light of Northumberland.Peter Topping, BA (Hons), PhD, FSA, MCIfA
Peter gained his first degree in archaeology at Durham University, and went on to do doctoral research at Newcastle University.
He previously worked as a landscape archaeologist for almost thirty years, employed firstly by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and then English Heritage. This involved research and fieldwork on sites ranging from Neolithic flint mines and causewayed enclosures, the Stonehenge World Heritage Site landscape, the multi-period landscapes of the south-east Northumberland Cheviots, the Hadrianic Frontier, medieval settlements, and industrial monuments and military sites of all periods.
In addition, he has been an active member of the Northumberland Archaeological Group since 1973, and recently published their major excavation report on the hillfort and its environs on Wether Hill in the Breamish Valley.
Peter has also participated in fieldwork projects led by the US National Park Service in Ohio and Minnesota, and at the Hoshikuso Pass Jomon obsidian quarries at Nagawa-machi, directed by The Obsidian Museum of Archaeology. Currently, Peter is co-editing an Oxbow Books series focussing upon the archaeology of American landscapes with Dr Julie Gardiner.
He was awarded the Prehistoric Society’s Baguley Prize for his paper ‘Early Cultivation in Northumberland and the Borders’. Peter now works as an independent researcher.
Kate Wilson, BA (Hons), PGDip, FSA
Kate studied Architecture at the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), Archaeology at Durham University and postgraduate studies in Building Conservation at Bournemouth University with the late John Ashurst.
She recently retired after 35 years in the heritage sector working for various organisations including Historic England, where she led multidisciplinary teams that provided advice, skills and services to support local communities looking after historic places and landscapes in the north of England.
Kate continues to work in the north as a Trustee with the Tyne & Wear Building Preservation Trust helping to care for heritage by supporting change in favour of the adaptive reuse of local assets to maintain and protect our valuable heritage places and spaces. She is also a Professor in Practice with the Department of Archaeology at Durham University. This is a new role that will enable her to share her skills directly with staff and students and to bring her practical experience to the classroom.