heritage lottery fund

This week a group of archaeologists and volunteers from Colchester Archaeological Trust and Destination Colchester  attained their goal to raise £200,000 to buy a plot of land that covers the remains of part of what was once the only known Roman Circus in Britain. The appeal started as recently as December 2009, and was quickly won, with the help of celebrity endorsements and public goodwill. We spoke to Philip Crummy, Director of the Colchester Archaeological Trust about the achievement.

If in the last 18 months you’ve passed by the Royal Museum of Scotland on Edinburgh’s Chambers Street – the grand glass-roofed, Neo-Romanesque Victorian building adjoining the contemporary sandstone structure of the National Museum of Scotland – you’ll have noticed that the place is a great big building site at the moment. That’s because it’s currently subject to the Royal Museum Project (RMP) – a massive £46-million-pound face-lift that by 2011 will see it reopened, bigger, better, ultra-modern and among Britain and the world’s top museum facilities.

The oldest museum in the world reopens its doors tomorrow, after a mammoth five-year revamp. Oxford's Ashmolean Museum has enjoyed a £61million cash injection into its ageing building, recasting all but its Victorian Cockerell building facade. Rick Mather's new creation allows the museum's myriad treasures much more space, adding 39 galleries and 10,000sq metres of exhibition space.

Earlier this month the Vindolanda Trust won funding of £4 million towards the cost of refurbishing their two existing museums at the fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall. The new extended museum space will enable the trust to secure a loan of the Vindolanda Tablets from the British Museum – but it will also allow it to put many other objects on display, some of them on public view for the first time.

A date has now been set for the return of some of the Vindolanda Tablets to the museum at Vindolanda in Northumberland, following an announcement this week that the UK's Heritage Lottery Fund is to donate £4 million towards the costs. The date now set for some of the tablets to be housed at the Vindolanda museum is spring 2011 – they will come on loan from the British Museum for a period of five years, after which the loan can be renewed.

The tablets – a collection of 1,600 documents etched on thin wooden boards – represent the earliest forms of written language in Britain. The Latin incriptions were found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda in 1973 and include records of the Roman army's expenses as well as personal letters.