Saying sorry to the Vikings (of Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth Relief Road)

With a general election next week, it should be a priority for the new government, as well as for Dorset County Council, to say sorry - and to issue an official apology- to the Scandinavian countries (or Finland), for the killing/execution of 51 or 52 Viking warriors (a raiding party, if the executions weren't a result of ethnic cleansing), and the mass burial of their decapitated skulls (46) and bodies (circa 52), discovered in a site on Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth. The mass burial pit was unearthed on the new Weymouth Relief road.

Oxford Archaeology and the NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory in Nottingham have confirmed that the beheaded young Viking warriors had their places of origin in Norway, Sweden or Finland. The remains are being analysed and have been dated to between AD970 and AD1025.

Perhaps it's also an appropriate time for the countries from which the Vikings came to issue an apology for the Viking raids, which began at Portland (Dorset) in the year 789 (first recorded raid, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the Norwegian raiders slew the Reeve of Dorchester). Portland suffered again from Viking pirate ravages in 982.

How the Danes Came Up the Channel a Thousand Years Ago, 

Herbert A Bone (Russell-Cotes Museum)

For information, see

www.thehumanjourney.net
www.dorsetforyou.com/weymouthreliefroad

See also, St Brice's Day Massacre in Oxford

Secret Knowledge, The Art of the Vikings, BBC IPlayer, The Effect of Viking Culture on the British Isles