Blueaxe Reproductions

09/08/2026

Picked up a new toy today from ! Over the moon with it, and had a good yack, coffee, and a nosey at the workshop too!

04/08/2026

I think that will do; I can't really base it until I get home! Not my best work, but it's was a LOT more fun painting it than usual! I wonder what the family of the buried person, or the person themselves might have thought of all this?

04/08/2026

So I have nearly finished my kit bash of the little Roman chicken nugget found on the A66 excavations by Oxford Archaeology and created and sent to us by Louise Sugden

I figured that seeing as how all the pro painters were heading in the archaeologically accurate direction, I'd head the other direction and it back towards the Games Workshop universes. Not strictly from one or copying anything in particular, but deffo inspired by!

Will post some proper pics when I am done and back off holiday!

20/07/2026

We had a go at enamelling this weekend at Heysham Viking Festival which was pretty successful! Thanks to Pauline for the pics and videos and Jenny for enthusing me to have a go!

14/07/2026

Sailing a replica Gokstad viking ship in Norway is something else!

07/07/2026

As part of my full time job at Oxford Archaeology I am lucky enough to coordinate the video work we undertake, particularly on the A66 project in Cumbria as part of Oxford Cotswold Archaeology.

We found an amazing site outside Kirkby Thore which we currently believe to be an early medieval farmstead.

This particular site is one of a few that also aligned my professional career with my specialism and personal interest. All our videos are a collaboration with my excellent colleagues, but with this one I may have done quite a chunk of the editing and fiddling about and I am calling directors privileges here!

Watch the full video below! Oxford Archaeology Cotswold Archaeology

Join archaeologists on the A66 Northern Trans-Pennine Project as th...

25/06/2026

Think I am mostly done with this sheath now for my Cumwhitton Seax! The brass back strip fits the evidence we had from the excavation, but with some inevitable speculation to make it function on an object, rather than just scraps in the ground! The leather decoration itself is from York, as the most appropriate design for the milieu the seax was found in!

20/06/2026

Reconstructing 9-10th Anglo-Saxon material culture can be difficult. Despite being such a large a powerful part of early medieval Britain and Ireland, parts of their world are hard to recreate. We have thousands of strap ends, but no shield bosses, tons of stone sculpture but little idea what a shoe looked like? In a lot of ways, it is very like reconstructing Brythonic Pictish culture. They are huge powerful kingdoms, with clear history and a wealth of some forms of evidence, yet huge gaps in some of the most obvious and simple parts of their lives.

Anyway, all that is a preamble to say I totally made a thing up I think *probably* existed. I will do a longer video on these when I am done for those interested.