The library of ground
Every place Strata has dug, assembled from its sources and filed by locality and era. A place is reviewed again whenever the ground beneath it is dug afresh.
528 places · 215 localities · last reviewed 27 October 2026
Portugal
SintraSintra gathers dolmens older than Rome, a Moorish hilltop fortress, royal palaces that held kings as both residents and prisoners, a dictator's plotting ground, and a jail turned post office, all within one municipality shaped by Moorish governors, Portuguese kings, and the quiet slopes above Lisbon.
32 digs
411 records
183 records United States LehiLehi, Utah, grew from a farming settlement on the old bed of Lake Bonneville into a city of subdivisions and schools, shadowed by the 1849 killings at Battle Creek Canyon and the walled fear that followed, and marked by a flour mill still grinding since 1906. 15 digs
163 records
16 records United States CharlestonCharleston gathers two unrelated grounds under one name: a South Carolina county seat where a burned statehouse became a courthouse that shaped the White House, and a county jail built on a poor burial ground; and a Utah farming town shrunk by a reservoir. Both record ground remade by fire, water and use. 3 digs
37 records United States Township of JeffersonJefferson Township gathers two very different grounds: East Capitol Avenue in Jefferson City, where a warden's house rose beside the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1887–88, and East 1450 Road in Cedar County, rural farmland near Stockton Lake since the Sac River was dammed in 1969. 2 digs
22 records United States DeltaThis record gathers one piece of ground on Delta's edge, a vacant 40-acre parcel along 500 West, into the wider story of Millard County, Utah — land unsettled by the Walker War and Black Hawk War before Delta itself was platted, and surveyed again in 1922. 1 dig
8 records United States BakerBaker, Nevada sits at the foot of the Snake Range, where a Fremont village of pit houses and granaries stood from about 1220 to 1295 CE. The peak above carried a Shoshone name before a soldier renamed it for Jefferson Davis in 1859, and the ground now lies within Great Basin National Park. 1 dig
9 records United States Ralston ValleyRalston Valley, within the Nevada National Security Site, was never settled in the ordinary sense. Between 1979 and 1983 it was surveyed as a candidate basing area for the MX missile system, its alluvium and volcanic rock measured for a weapon that ultimately went elsewhere. 1 dig
9 records United States OurayOuray, Colorado, took shape on ground that was San Juan County before Ouray County existed, from 1875 to 1877. On 6th Avenue, a power company incorporated in 1885 built a plant on the Uncompahgre River that, through near-closure, a $10 rescue and a torn pipe, still generates electricity today. 1 dig
13 records United Kingdom High WycombeHigh Wycombe's record here centres on West Wycombe Hill, where an Iron Age camp and Roman-era activity gave way, in the 1740s, to Sir Francis Dashwood's chalk mine and the secretive Hellfire Club, before the tunnels reopened as a show cave in 1951. 1 dig
15 records Portugal EvoraÉvora grew from Roman Ebora into a walled seat of kings, friars and the Inquisition, its streets still folded over a vanished Jewish quarter and its churches holding the bones of thousands. Manueline building, royal deaths and a nineteenth-century demolition each left their mark on the same ground. 3 digs
39 records Italy RomeRome gathers its past on a scale few towns can match: a Forum where Caesar's body was burned and a temple later raised over his ashes, an amphitheatre built on Nero's drained lake, baths broken by Gothic siege, and squares that still trace the shapes of a buried stadium and bathhouse beneath Baroque fountains and churches. 15 digs
201 records
404 records
39 records
12 records United Kingdom YorkAt Tower Street, beneath Clifford's Tower, York Castle has stood since William the Conqueror raised a timber mound in 1068. Rebuilt in stone for Henry III, besieged, exploded, and turned to a prison, the site carries memory from Roman road to Viking hoard to modern street. 1 dig
15 records United Kingdom Barley-with-Wheatley BoothBarley-with-Wheatley Booth sits beneath Pendle Hill in Lancashire, a sandstone summit worked by named tenants from 1323, shaken by the 1612 witch trials, and later marked by George Fox's 1652 vision that founded the Quakers. 1 dig
13 records United Kingdom LondonLondon is a city of layered ground: a Roman bathhouse beneath a Shadwell monument, a cholera pump traced by John Snow in Soho, a Norman fortress begun by William the Conqueror, and a square of Saxon knights. Plague pits, prisons, markets and cemeteries sit beneath its pavements still. 18 digs
263 records
80 records Italy FlorenceFlorence grew in layers: a Roman city overbuilt by medieval walls and a republic, its central piazza a stage for execution and statecraft, its cathedral raised over an older buried church, and its edges opened into walled gardens and surviving fortifications. Medici dukes, friars, mercenaries and botanists all left their mark on the same ground. 4 digs
35 records United States New York CityNew York City's ground holds Times Square's lit crossroads, a Baptist church of radical causes, parks built over potter's fields and a vanished slum, and a garment-factory floor where 146 workers died. Farmland, burial ground, and world's fair site in turn, the city's shape has changed again and again over its holders. 6 digs
82 records United States WelltonWellton's recorded history centres on Prison Hill Road, site of the Yuma Territorial Prison, a sandstone compound above the Colorado River opposite Fort Yuma. Opened in 1876 and closed in 1909, it held thousands before becoming a schoolhouse, a Depression-era shelter, and finally a state park in 1961. 1 dig
15 records United States Harpers FerryHarpers Ferry grew around a river crossing founded by Robert Harper, buried there in 1782, and became known for the small brick firehouse where John Brown made his last stand in 1859. The town changed hands in the Civil War and was protected as a national historical park from 1944. 1 dig
15 records United States OglethorpeOglethorpe holds the ground of Camp Sumter, the Confederate prison camp known as Andersonville, opened in February 1864 and closed in April 1865. Union veterans bought the site in 1890, the federal government took it over in 1910, and it now stands as a national cemetery and memorial. 1 dig
13 records United States SharpsburgSharpsburg, Maryland, founded in 1763, became the site of the single bloodiest day of the American Civil War on September 17, 1862, when 23,000 men fell near the town. Five years later, the Lodge House rose as gatehouse to the national cemetery that gathered the dead. 1 dig
13 records United States Sierra VistaThis record gathers two points of ground in Tombstone, Arizona, near present-day Sierra Vista: the O. K. Corral, a livery founded in 1879 whose name attached to the 1881 gunfight fought nearby, and Boothill Graveyard, a cemetery opened in 1878 that holds the men who fell that day. 2 digs
28 records
25 records United States DonnerDonner, near Truckee, California, holds ground long used by the Washoe before it became the winter camp where the Donner Party was trapped by snow in October 1846. The site later became a tourist attraction, a memorial park, and a place still marked by the region's railroad and Chinatown history. 1 dig
14 records United States Township of AdamsThe Township of Adams holds the remains of the South Fork Dam, built in 1836 for the Pennsylvania Canal and later weakened by a private fishing club, whose failure on May 31, 1889 sent twenty million tons of water into Johnstown, fourteen miles below. 1 dig
14 records United States WashingtonThis record gathers one point of ground in Washington: Ford's Theatre on 10th Street Northwest. Built in 1833 as a Baptist meeting house, it became a theater, the site of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, then government offices, and now a working theater and museum. 1 dig
12 records United States New OrleansNew Orleans gathers its past in close quarters: a French Quarter townhouse built for an architect's own family, and a walled cemetery on Basin Street holding tombs of a voodoo queen, a chess champion and a mayor. Fire, flood and epidemic shaped both grounds in turn. 2 digs
29 records United States Salt Lake CitySalt Lake City holds ground stretched from an 1824 ambush on the Jordan River to a 2026 stabbing at a shopping mall, passing through farming villages, a house that ended a war without battle, and founding families — Mormon settlers, mining senators, railroad men — whose houses, schools and cemeteries still mark its streets. 18 digs
177 records
7 records United States OremOrem, a city in Utah Valley founded in 1877, holds ground once part of Lakeview and bordering older Provo. Its record includes a bishop who once served time for bigamy, a 1934 farmhouse platted into its own lot only in the 1980s, and transit and commerce built and lost across the decades. 2 digs
25 records Portugal CascaisCascais grew from Roman farm estates and a Visigothic burial ground into a chartered fishing town, then a royal summer court after the 1870s, and finally a refuge for exiled kings and secret couriers during the Second World War. Forts, chalets and a 1755 tsunami all left their mark on its shore. 29 digs
380 records
228 records
43 records United States Saint GeorgeSaint George, Utah, founded in 1861 as the Mormon cotton mission's base, holds ground that runs from an 1860 burial field to a 1990 shopping mall. Its roads, graves and storefronts have each been rebuilt in turn, while what they carry has stayed harder to erase. 2 digs
27 records United States Cedar CityCedar City, Utah, was founded by Mormon settlers in 1851 on ground later shadowed by the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Black Hawk War. Centuries on, it became home to Cedar High School, where student Gordon Church studied before he was murdered for being gay. 1 dig
11 records United States BeaverBeaver, Utah grew on an alluvial fan by the Beaver River, established as a city in 1856 and marked in turn by conflict, a federal fort, a federal highway, and the ordinary rebuilding that followed each of these. 1 dig
10 records United States GoshenGoshen, Utah began in 1857 as a Mormon farming settlement on the dry southern edge of Utah Lake's basin, surviving Ute raids and a lower-ground abandonment before settling uphill. Nearby, Genola's forty acres were only surveyed out of farmland in 1981, a far later and quieter beginning. 2 digs
20 records United States Las VegasThis record gathers ground connected to Las Vegas through Long Iron Lane, near Mesquite, Nevada, where the Virgin River once flooded the original 1890s townsite, forcing its people to higher ground and later routing the Las Vegas Freeway through the same flood-prone stretch. 1 dig
1 record Portugal LouresLoures gathers traces from ice age hunting camps to a Roman villa struck by a road crew in 1990. Named in a document of 1118, held later by Templar lands, shaken by the 1755 earthquake, and marked today by finds at the Municipal Museum of Loures. 1 dig
15 records United Kingdom South LuffenhamSouth Luffenham grew around its church and its railway cutting, a village marked by refusal as much as record: Rose Boswell, a Romani teenager, was denied a churchyard grave in 1794 and buried instead within the church, near the corner where a well was later disputed and where the Syston and Peterborough line ran from 1848 to 1966. 1 dig
13 records United States MapletonMapleton, Utah, began as farmland settled around 1850 under the name Union Bench, an extension of Springville, before disputes over water rights led to its incorporation as a town in 1901. Its Roswell Darius Bird Sr. House, raised in 1892, later became the town's own museum of pioneer memory. 1 dig
13 records United States HighlandHighland, Utah, was incorporated as a city in 1870 on bench ground above old Lake Bonneville, later farmed before subdivisions such as Dry Creek Highlands and Blessing Rock at Beacon Hill covered it with houses built from the 1990s onward, held since by successive families through sales, mortgages and liens. 7 digs
58 records
15 records United States SteinauerSteinauer grew from German-immigrant farm families who opened Rinne Cemetery in 1868 and Salems Cemetery in 1869, then raised Salem United Church of Christ in 1879. The settlement later endured a shooting on its road and the 1918 influenza pandemic. 1 dig
4 records United States CelinaCelina grew up on Collin County prairie once broken by early farm families, whose burial grounds still mark the land. Bush Cemetery, laid out in 1862, and the George McGarrah Cemetery, set aside by a farming family in 1879, remain fixed points as the farms around them became ranches, subdivisions and roads. 2 digs
17 records
12 records France Le Mesnil-AmelotLe Mesnil-Amelot lies on Eocene and Oligocene rock of the Paris Basin, a place once marked by a royal coach road toward Reims and Flanders, and now by the edge of an airport, where a jet-age hotel and a high-speed rail station beneath Terminal 2 have reshaped the ground. 1 dig
3 records United States ChelseaChelsea, Alabama sits near Highland Lakes, a subdivision atop Double Oak Mountain defined not by a founding event but by a 2020 census count of 5,239 people, its ground older than its name, resting on Pennsylvanian-age rock and bordered by cemeteries reaching back to 1843. 1 dig
9 records United States PinedalePinedale, Wyoming, sits near Fremont Lake in Sublette County, ground marked by ancient hunting sites and a modern memorial alike. A 1993 federal phytoplankton survey of the lake, dedicated to biologist Robert C. Averett, shares its waters with the buried evidence of a 1980 family murder. 1 dig
7 records United States DraperEast Longbranch Drive in Draper, Utah, traces a single suburban lot from farmland to subdivision to family home, set a mile and a half south of the Draper Utah Temple, dedicated in 2009, which gave this end of the valley its only landmark name. 2 digs
14 records United States SedaliaSedalia's recorded ground centres on Castle Pines Village, a gated community platted from 1981 around Castle Pines Golf Club, once neighboured by The International, a PGA Tour event built for its thin mountain air that ran from 1986 until the Tour cancelled it outright in 2007. 1 dig
9 records United States Castle RockCastle Rock, United States, grew from a scatter of ground whose record begins not in any town chronicle but in a soil surveyor's notebook and a vanished hamlet's name. Founded in 1871, it absorbed the nearby settlement of Douglas and was later mapped, clay and sand, by the 1974 Soil Survey of Castle Rock Area. 2 digs
13 records
3 records United States ClearfieldClearfield, Utah began in 1877 as a rail siding platted onto farmland east of the Great Salt Lake, in Davis County. It grew slowly around a church, store, grain elevator and depot, then changed again as Hill Air Force Base expanded through the 1960s and 1970s and drew new population and housing to the area. 1 dig
10 records Spain MurciaMurcia grew from a Muslim emirate's walled palace-fortress into a Castilian city, its citadel surrendered by treaty in 1243 and its ruling family displaced within a generation. That stronghold later became a church, a Templar hospital, and a museum, while a cathedral, bridges, and a flour factory marked the centuries after. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom North LeighNorth Leigh carries an Iron Age fort, a sixty-room Roman villa, a vanished medieval village at Tilgarsley, and a Georgian hunting lodge rebuilt as Eynsham Hall. Saxon burials, a chantry chapel endowed by a grieving widow, and a wartime maternity ward all mark ground later turned hotel and private club. 5 digs
71 records
81 records
16 records United Kingdom OxfordOxford grew up around the crossroads at Carfax, where the city's medieval walls, its castle and its town hall now stand close together. Students and townsmen, judges and monarchs all passed through this ground, and a single tavern quarrel in 1355 reshaped who held power in the city for five hundred years. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom Stoke-on-TrentStoke-on-Trent's record here centres on Hanley, where a Methodist congregation expelled in 1779 built its own chapel, rebuilt it larger in 1819, and watched it rise as the so-called Cathedral of the Potteries before closing for worship in December 1985 and passing to the Historic Chapels Trust in 2002. 1 dig
14 records United States WindsorWindsor, Connecticut, grew from a founding settlement into a town of brick farmhouses and family burying grounds. Across two centuries it held tobacco wealth, brickmaking trade, and the lives and deaths of its earliest settlers, leaving behind the houses and gravestones that still mark its ground. 2 digs
20 records Spain VigoVigo's Praza da Independencia takes its name from the 1809 Reconquest, when townspeople without a regular garrison drove occupying French forces from the city during the Peninsular War. A monument there still honours them, while the square has since seen more modest changes to its fabric. 1 dig
3 records Portugal PenichePeniche, Portugal, is marked above all by its fortress, raised from 1557 against pirate raids and later turned, from 1934 to 1974, into one of the Estado Novo's most feared political prisons. Across four centuries it held Brazilian rebels, Boer prisoners of war, wartime internees and dissidents. 1 dig
8 records Portugal Santa Maria MaiorSanta Maria Maior, a Lisbon parish, holds ground that saw royal court and religious authority rise and then fall in a single morning. It was where kings resided, monks worshipped, and in 1974 a dictatorship ended — all reshaped by the 1755 earthquake that struck the heart of the city. 2 digs
23 records Italy Porto - SaragozzaPorto-Saragozza in Bologna is anchored by Piazza del Nettuno, where Palazzo Re Enzo held Enzo of Sardinia captive from 1249 until his death in 1272. Around this square gathered civic power, war memory and deep ruins, each layer still legible in stone. 1 dig
12 records Vatican City RomeBeneath St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City lies a Roman cemetery of roughly a thousand burials, at whose centre a modest second-century monument was declared in 1968 to mark Peter's grave — a claim its own excavator, Antonio Ferrua, never accepted. 1 dig
12 records Italy ComoComo grew from Novum Comum, the Roman colony whose arena and baths lie buried near Viale Carlo Cattaneo, through to a medieval walled town built partly over those foundations, later adding Romanesque basilicas, a Modernist landmark, and a 1932 museum to Garibaldi. 1 dig
4 records Spain MadridThis record gathers the ground around Puerta del Sol in Madrid, where a 1547 convent traded gossip, roads were measured from a central marker, a post office became a seat of government, and a 1974 bombing on Calle del Correo killed thirteen people and wounded seventy-one. 1 dig
7 records Portugal MisericordiaMisericórdia is a parish at the heart of old Lisbon, holding the square where the Camões Monument was raised in 1867 over disputed remains, and the Chiado quarter rebuilt first after the 1755 earthquake and again after the 1988 fire. 2 digs
26 records
3 records Austria Innere StadtInnere Stadt holds Vienna's long memory in a few hundred metres of ground: Roman Vindobona's gate, medieval churches and the Habsburg crypt, Ottoman sieges, a synagogue built and later attacked, and a hotel turned Gestapo headquarters all press together here. 1 dig
18 records Italy CremonaCremona rests on Pliocene clay that shaped it into a brick city, fought over at Roman and medieval battles, crowned by the Torrazzo and the Baptistery, and marked in its streets by a small square, Sant'Omobono, once used as a plague cemetery. 1 dig
24 records
411 records
A Romantic palace on a mountaintop ruin
Palácio da Pena · 700–1979
A Dutch consul's mansion in Sintra
Seteais Palace · 4500 BC–1966
The king locked in his own family's house
· 9222 BC–2016
Near a parish church outside Sintra
Rio de Mouro · 500 BC–1989
Hungary
BudapestBudapest's ground spans a royal castle hill taken by the Ottomans and shelled in two sieges, a Danube promenade and palace built for insurers and emperors, and city districts holding synagogues, Lutheran churches, mills, and sites of wartime killing and resistance along the river.
12 digs183 records United States LehiLehi, Utah, grew from a farming settlement on the old bed of Lake Bonneville into a city of subdivisions and schools, shadowed by the 1849 killings at Battle Creek Canyon and the walled fear that followed, and marked by a flour mill still grinding since 1906. 15 digs
163 records
A platted road in Highland City
Highland Boulevard · 1850–2025
The railroad that ran where you're standing, then vanished
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1849–2016
A falcon named Flash and ten years of state titles
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1848–2016
A hamlet named for a president, then erased
Kern Avenue · 1878–2024
A school with no past to tell
Highland · 1972–now
The house that has no story to tell
Highland · 1972–2024
A bond built the school, the town supplies the names
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1849–now
United States
RooseveltRoosevelt, Utah, grew from the 1905-1906 homesteading rush into the Uinta Basin, beginning life as 'Dry Gulch City' before taking its present name. Out along 5000 West, a grid road named for the rare Uintah Special Meridian survey, open Duchesne County farmland stood undeveloped until a house rose there in 2012.
2 digs16 records United States CharlestonCharleston gathers two unrelated grounds under one name: a South Carolina county seat where a burned statehouse became a courthouse that shaped the White House, and a county jail built on a poor burial ground; and a Utah farming town shrunk by a reservoir. Both record ground remade by fire, water and use. 3 digs
37 records United States Township of JeffersonJefferson Township gathers two very different grounds: East Capitol Avenue in Jefferson City, where a warden's house rose beside the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1887–88, and East 1450 Road in Cedar County, rural farmland near Stockton Lake since the Sac River was dammed in 1969. 2 digs
22 records United States DeltaThis record gathers one piece of ground on Delta's edge, a vacant 40-acre parcel along 500 West, into the wider story of Millard County, Utah — land unsettled by the Walker War and Black Hawk War before Delta itself was platted, and surveyed again in 1922. 1 dig
8 records United States BakerBaker, Nevada sits at the foot of the Snake Range, where a Fremont village of pit houses and granaries stood from about 1220 to 1295 CE. The peak above carried a Shoshone name before a soldier renamed it for Jefferson Davis in 1859, and the ground now lies within Great Basin National Park. 1 dig
9 records United States Ralston ValleyRalston Valley, within the Nevada National Security Site, was never settled in the ordinary sense. Between 1979 and 1983 it was surveyed as a candidate basing area for the MX missile system, its alluvium and volcanic rock measured for a weapon that ultimately went elsewhere. 1 dig
9 records United States OurayOuray, Colorado, took shape on ground that was San Juan County before Ouray County existed, from 1875 to 1877. On 6th Avenue, a power company incorporated in 1885 built a plant on the Uncompahgre River that, through near-closure, a $10 rescue and a torn pipe, still generates electricity today. 1 dig
13 records United Kingdom High WycombeHigh Wycombe's record here centres on West Wycombe Hill, where an Iron Age camp and Roman-era activity gave way, in the 1740s, to Sir Francis Dashwood's chalk mine and the secretive Hellfire Club, before the tunnels reopened as a show cave in 1951. 1 dig
15 records Portugal EvoraÉvora grew from Roman Ebora into a walled seat of kings, friars and the Inquisition, its streets still folded over a vanished Jewish quarter and its churches holding the bones of thousands. Manueline building, royal deaths and a nineteenth-century demolition each left their mark on the same ground. 3 digs
39 records Italy RomeRome gathers its past on a scale few towns can match: a Forum where Caesar's body was burned and a temple later raised over his ashes, an amphitheatre built on Nero's drained lake, baths broken by Gothic siege, and squares that still trace the shapes of a buried stadium and bathhouse beneath Baroque fountains and churches. 15 digs
201 records
Assassination of Julius Caesar
Tempio B · 500 BC–2012
A 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk in a Roman square
Obelisco Flaminio · 1290 BC–1980
Public death was staged for spectacle on this ground
Colosseum · 64–2007
France
ParisParis grew from a besieged island fortress in the Seine into a capital rebuilt by kings, revolutionaries and Haussmann's planners alike. Its streets hold a demolished medieval castle, toll gates turned into grand squares, wartime executions and liberations, and theatres, cafés and cabarets layered over Roman and Eocene ground.
39 digs404 records
A small park over the Barrière d'Enfer
Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol Tanguy · 1765–1991
Innkeepers near this corner were fined for smuggled wine
Rue Friant · 1721–1972
A reliquary and a courthouse share one walled island
Siege of Paris · 250 BC–2014
Egyptian dead lie beneath the Louvre's old fortress yard
Louvre Castle · 100 BC–1794
A teenager died at this Paris street junction in 2013
Citadium · 1783–1999
Ravel composed Daphnis et Chloé near this kiosk
Le Kiosque de Paris · 1836–1944
A bronze general strides past a headless saint
Charles de Gaulle · 1667–2024
An orientalist theatre vanished after fifteen years here
Keolis · 1779–1951
Cinema was born in the basement of a café boulevard
Café de la Paix · 1600–2025
Poincaré unveiled a monument to Sardou here
Hôtel Marcel Dassault · 1768–2002
A hotel stands where an arsenal once armed the crown
SO/ Paris Hôtel · 1254–2022
Chaillot hill has been cleared and rebuilt for two centuries
Carlingue · 1794–1980
A hotel of spectacle stands where cinema was born nearby
InterContinental Paris le Grand · 1600–2025
A straight royal line gathers singers, surrealists and circuses
Axe historique · 1682–2015
Ireland
DublinDublin's ground carries siege, rebellion and civil war in close company: a royalist army turned back at its walls in 1649, a British admiral's pillar stood and fell on O'Connell Street, and a gaol on Inchicore Road held and shot the men who tried to remake it.
3 digs39 records
The pillar Dublin argued about for 157 years
Spire of Dublin · 377 BC–2003
A siege, a civil war and a castle met on this corner
Castleview · 600–2016
United Kingdom
Berry PomeroyBerry Pomeroy, in South Devon, grew from a manor named 'Berri' in the Domesday Book of 1086 into a castle raised by the Pomeroy family in the late fifteenth century, then an Elizabethan mansion built by the Seymours within its walls, left to ruin after 1688.
1 dig12 records United Kingdom YorkAt Tower Street, beneath Clifford's Tower, York Castle has stood since William the Conqueror raised a timber mound in 1068. Rebuilt in stone for Henry III, besieged, exploded, and turned to a prison, the site carries memory from Roman road to Viking hoard to modern street. 1 dig
15 records United Kingdom Barley-with-Wheatley BoothBarley-with-Wheatley Booth sits beneath Pendle Hill in Lancashire, a sandstone summit worked by named tenants from 1323, shaken by the 1612 witch trials, and later marked by George Fox's 1652 vision that founded the Quakers. 1 dig
13 records United Kingdom LondonLondon is a city of layered ground: a Roman bathhouse beneath a Shadwell monument, a cholera pump traced by John Snow in Soho, a Norman fortress begun by William the Conqueror, and a square of Saxon knights. Plague pits, prisons, markets and cemeteries sit beneath its pavements still. 18 digs
263 records
A red phone box, Grade II listed
K6 Telephone Kiosk In Central Markets · 900–2001
The Father who walked into the cholera ward
Roman Bath House · 1508 BC–1983
United States
BostonBoston's ground holds more than one century at once — colonial byways and burying grounds, a corner where soldiers fired on a crowd in 1770, a park carved from a harbourside slum, and a nightclub lot where 492 died in 1942. Each place kept its own record; together they trace a city remade by fire, grief and reform.
6 digs80 records Italy FlorenceFlorence grew in layers: a Roman city overbuilt by medieval walls and a republic, its central piazza a stage for execution and statecraft, its cathedral raised over an older buried church, and its edges opened into walled gardens and surviving fortifications. Medici dukes, friars, mercenaries and botanists all left their mark on the same ground. 4 digs
35 records United States New York CityNew York City's ground holds Times Square's lit crossroads, a Baptist church of radical causes, parks built over potter's fields and a vanished slum, and a garment-factory floor where 146 workers died. Farmland, burial ground, and world's fair site in turn, the city's shape has changed again and again over its holders. 6 digs
82 records United States WelltonWellton's recorded history centres on Prison Hill Road, site of the Yuma Territorial Prison, a sandstone compound above the Colorado River opposite Fort Yuma. Opened in 1876 and closed in 1909, it held thousands before becoming a schoolhouse, a Depression-era shelter, and finally a state park in 1961. 1 dig
15 records United States Harpers FerryHarpers Ferry grew around a river crossing founded by Robert Harper, buried there in 1782, and became known for the small brick firehouse where John Brown made his last stand in 1859. The town changed hands in the Civil War and was protected as a national historical park from 1944. 1 dig
15 records United States OglethorpeOglethorpe holds the ground of Camp Sumter, the Confederate prison camp known as Andersonville, opened in February 1864 and closed in April 1865. Union veterans bought the site in 1890, the federal government took it over in 1910, and it now stands as a national cemetery and memorial. 1 dig
13 records United States SharpsburgSharpsburg, Maryland, founded in 1763, became the site of the single bloodiest day of the American Civil War on September 17, 1862, when 23,000 men fell near the town. Five years later, the Lodge House rose as gatehouse to the national cemetery that gathered the dead. 1 dig
13 records United States Sierra VistaThis record gathers two points of ground in Tombstone, Arizona, near present-day Sierra Vista: the O. K. Corral, a livery founded in 1879 whose name attached to the 1881 gunfight fought nearby, and Boothill Graveyard, a cemetery opened in 1878 that holds the men who fell that day. 2 digs
28 records
Tombstone's old pioneer cemetery, now a roadside memorial
State Route 80 · 1878–1991
Tombstone's livery turned gunfight shrine
East Fremont Street · 1877–1964
United States
ChicagoChicago's ground carries two hard records close together: North Desplaines Street, where a bomb killed seven police officers in 1886 and set off a trial that hanged four anarchists, and West Randolph Street, where a 1903 theatre fire killed over 600 before a 1926 movie palace rose on the same site.
2 digs25 records United States DonnerDonner, near Truckee, California, holds ground long used by the Washoe before it became the winter camp where the Donner Party was trapped by snow in October 1846. The site later became a tourist attraction, a memorial park, and a place still marked by the region's railroad and Chinatown history. 1 dig
14 records United States Township of AdamsThe Township of Adams holds the remains of the South Fork Dam, built in 1836 for the Pennsylvania Canal and later weakened by a private fishing club, whose failure on May 31, 1889 sent twenty million tons of water into Johnstown, fourteen miles below. 1 dig
14 records United States WashingtonThis record gathers one point of ground in Washington: Ford's Theatre on 10th Street Northwest. Built in 1833 as a Baptist meeting house, it became a theater, the site of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, then government offices, and now a working theater and museum. 1 dig
12 records United States New OrleansNew Orleans gathers its past in close quarters: a French Quarter townhouse built for an architect's own family, and a walled cemetery on Basin Street holding tombs of a voodoo queen, a chess champion and a mayor. Fire, flood and epidemic shaped both grounds in turn. 2 digs
29 records United States Salt Lake CitySalt Lake City holds ground stretched from an 1824 ambush on the Jordan River to a 2026 stabbing at a shopping mall, passing through farming villages, a house that ended a war without battle, and founding families — Mormon settlers, mining senators, railroad men — whose houses, schools and cemeteries still mark its streets. 18 digs
177 records
A railroad corridor turned city block
700 West · 1847–2021
A college built on ground with no past
South Jordan · 1859–2023
A village that outlived its own name
West Valley City · 1849–2022
The village that became a shopping center
West Valley City · 1000 BC–2022
A pioneer teacher's name on a schoolhouse a filmmaker saved
Draper · 1849–2025
The brothers who came home to South Jordan
1385 West · 1859–2023
United States
Zephyr CoveZephyr Cove sits on Lake Tahoe's eastern Nevada shore, its ground tracing Washoe fishing grounds, 1860s settler cabins, and a named town after its 1930 post office opened. On March 1, 1964, Paradise Airlines Flight 901A crashed nearby, killing all 85 aboard, one of Nevada's deadliest air disasters.
1 dig7 records United States OremOrem, a city in Utah Valley founded in 1877, holds ground once part of Lakeview and bordering older Provo. Its record includes a bishop who once served time for bigamy, a 1934 farmhouse platted into its own lot only in the 1980s, and transit and commerce built and lost across the decades. 2 digs
25 records Portugal CascaisCascais grew from Roman farm estates and a Visigothic burial ground into a chartered fishing town, then a royal summer court after the 1870s, and finally a refuge for exiled kings and secret couriers during the Second World War. Forts, chalets and a 1755 tsunami all left their mark on its shore. 29 digs
380 records
Open coastal ground near Cascais
· 100 BC–1992
Open ground on Portugal's Lisbon coast
Alcabideche · 100 BC–2025
The name that stayed small while the coast grew up around it
Alcabideche · 1873–2020
The walls that named this town
Colégio Marista de Carcavelos · 1400–2013
A fishing village becomes a king's chosen court
Chalet Monte Real · 1520–2018
United States
ProvoProvo, Utah, grew from a Timpanogos fishing ground into a Mormon settlement, then a school town and mining-money city. Its record runs from the 1850 siege at Fort Utah through a condemned man's slow death, a burned tabernacle rebuilt as a temple, and a derelict academy reborn as a library.
18 digs228 records
A siege that ended in beheadings on the Provo River
· 1849–now
The two-day fight that ended in beheadings
· 1849–now
A Provo lawyer argued 59 cases before he lost his life
· 1849–2002
The condemned man who chose the bullet over the rope
2230 North · 1849–now
United States
HurricaneHurricane, Utah, was founded in 1896 after settlers finished a canal carrying water through solid lava rock to the Virgin River valley. From that farming settlement grew a city, its cemetery, schools and bridge, and later the subdivisions and commercial lots recorded here.
4 digs43 records United States Saint GeorgeSaint George, Utah, founded in 1861 as the Mormon cotton mission's base, holds ground that runs from an 1860 burial field to a 1990 shopping mall. Its roads, graves and storefronts have each been rebuilt in turn, while what they carry has stayed harder to erase. 2 digs
27 records United States Cedar CityCedar City, Utah, was founded by Mormon settlers in 1851 on ground later shadowed by the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Black Hawk War. Centuries on, it became home to Cedar High School, where student Gordon Church studied before he was murdered for being gay. 1 dig
11 records United States BeaverBeaver, Utah grew on an alluvial fan by the Beaver River, established as a city in 1856 and marked in turn by conflict, a federal fort, a federal highway, and the ordinary rebuilding that followed each of these. 1 dig
10 records United States GoshenGoshen, Utah began in 1857 as a Mormon farming settlement on the dry southern edge of Utah Lake's basin, surviving Ute raids and a lower-ground abandonment before settling uphill. Nearby, Genola's forty acres were only surveyed out of farmland in 1981, a far later and quieter beginning. 2 digs
20 records United States Las VegasThis record gathers ground connected to Las Vegas through Long Iron Lane, near Mesquite, Nevada, where the Virgin River once flooded the original 1890s townsite, forcing its people to higher ground and later routing the Las Vegas Freeway through the same flood-prone stretch. 1 dig
1 record Portugal LouresLoures gathers traces from ice age hunting camps to a Roman villa struck by a road crew in 1990. Named in a document of 1118, held later by Templar lands, shaken by the 1755 earthquake, and marked today by finds at the Municipal Museum of Loures. 1 dig
15 records United Kingdom South LuffenhamSouth Luffenham grew around its church and its railway cutting, a village marked by refusal as much as record: Rose Boswell, a Romani teenager, was denied a churchyard grave in 1794 and buried instead within the church, near the corner where a well was later disputed and where the Syston and Peterborough line ran from 1848 to 1966. 1 dig
13 records United States MapletonMapleton, Utah, began as farmland settled around 1850 under the name Union Bench, an extension of Springville, before disputes over water rights led to its incorporation as a town in 1901. Its Roswell Darius Bird Sr. House, raised in 1892, later became the town's own museum of pioneer memory. 1 dig
13 records United States HighlandHighland, Utah, was incorporated as a city in 1870 on bench ground above old Lake Bonneville, later farmed before subdivisions such as Dry Creek Highlands and Blessing Rock at Beacon Hill covered it with houses built from the 1990s onward, held since by successive families through sales, mortgages and liens. 7 digs
58 records
A DuPont chemist who bet his own basement over his boss
· 1849–now
A knight for a mascot, a title for real
Lone Peak High School · 1849–2025
Some ground has only ever been ground
West Southern Cross Court · 2004–2021
A lakebed lot in Highland became a subdivision house
· 2005–2019
A lake bottom platted, sold, and refinanced
West Broadleaf Hollow Circle · 2014–2020
United States
PlanoPlano began as prairie that twice drove settlers off before 1844, then held when Henry Cook arrived in 1845 and buried his son Daniel in 1847. That burial ground, later named for Rachel Cook Baccus, still receives burials today, outlasting the church, highways and malls built around it.
2 digs15 records United States SteinauerSteinauer grew from German-immigrant farm families who opened Rinne Cemetery in 1868 and Salems Cemetery in 1869, then raised Salem United Church of Christ in 1879. The settlement later endured a shooting on its road and the 1918 influenza pandemic. 1 dig
4 records United States CelinaCelina grew up on Collin County prairie once broken by early farm families, whose burial grounds still mark the land. Bush Cemetery, laid out in 1862, and the George McGarrah Cemetery, set aside by a farming family in 1879, remain fixed points as the farms around them became ranches, subdivisions and roads. 2 digs
17 records
A cemetery outlasted the family farm around it
Singletree Court · 1848–2019
Where the first settlers of this prairie still lie
McKinney · 1862–now
United States
American ForkAmerican Fork, Utah, incorporated as a city in 1850, holds a record that runs from an early pioneer burial ground through a farmstead preserved from 1883 to the rock-walled cemetery, built in 1937, where physicist Harvey Fletcher and congresswoman Reva Beck Bosone were laid to rest.
1 dig12 records France Le Mesnil-AmelotLe Mesnil-Amelot lies on Eocene and Oligocene rock of the Paris Basin, a place once marked by a royal coach road toward Reims and Flanders, and now by the edge of an airport, where a jet-age hotel and a high-speed rail station beneath Terminal 2 have reshaped the ground. 1 dig
3 records United States ChelseaChelsea, Alabama sits near Highland Lakes, a subdivision atop Double Oak Mountain defined not by a founding event but by a 2020 census count of 5,239 people, its ground older than its name, resting on Pennsylvanian-age rock and bordered by cemeteries reaching back to 1843. 1 dig
9 records United States PinedalePinedale, Wyoming, sits near Fremont Lake in Sublette County, ground marked by ancient hunting sites and a modern memorial alike. A 1993 federal phytoplankton survey of the lake, dedicated to biologist Robert C. Averett, shares its waters with the buried evidence of a 1980 family murder. 1 dig
7 records United States DraperEast Longbranch Drive in Draper, Utah, traces a single suburban lot from farmland to subdivision to family home, set a mile and a half south of the Draper Utah Temple, dedicated in 2009, which gave this end of the valley its only landmark name. 2 digs
14 records United States SedaliaSedalia's recorded ground centres on Castle Pines Village, a gated community platted from 1981 around Castle Pines Golf Club, once neighboured by The International, a PGA Tour event built for its thin mountain air that ran from 1986 until the Tour cancelled it outright in 2007. 1 dig
9 records United States Castle RockCastle Rock, United States, grew from a scatter of ground whose record begins not in any town chronicle but in a soil surveyor's notebook and a vanished hamlet's name. Founded in 1871, it absorbed the nearby settlement of Douglas and was later mapped, clay and sand, by the 1974 Soil Survey of Castle Rock Area. 2 digs
13 records
The town that vanished under the county's own word for it
Hickory Oaks Street · 1871–1986
The survey that mapped you instead of a story about you
Green Fern Point · 1902–1986
United States
HerrimanHerriman, Utah, grew from open field into subdivisions such as Rosecrest Place, where houses on West Larawood Lane were built in 2006. Nearby, Providence Hall Charter School, originally intended for neighbouring Bluffdale, relocated to Herriman before it ever opened.
1 dig3 records United States ClearfieldClearfield, Utah began in 1877 as a rail siding platted onto farmland east of the Great Salt Lake, in Davis County. It grew slowly around a church, store, grain elevator and depot, then changed again as Hill Air Force Base expanded through the 1960s and 1970s and drew new population and housing to the area. 1 dig
10 records Spain MurciaMurcia grew from a Muslim emirate's walled palace-fortress into a Castilian city, its citadel surrendered by treaty in 1243 and its ruling family displaced within a generation. That stronghold later became a church, a Templar hospital, and a museum, while a cathedral, bridges, and a flour factory marked the centuries after. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom North LeighNorth Leigh carries an Iron Age fort, a sixty-room Roman villa, a vanished medieval village at Tilgarsley, and a Georgian hunting lodge rebuilt as Eynsham Hall. Saxon burials, a chantry chapel endowed by a grieving widow, and a wartime maternity ward all mark ground later turned hotel and private club. 5 digs
71 records
The mansion built to replace itself
Eynsham Hall · 800 BC–1981
A mosaic survived fifteen centuries, then a week
Eynsham Hall · 800 BC–1981
Italy
MonzaMonza grew up around a Lombard queen's chapel and a thirteenth-century town hall where councils once debated grain prices. It later held a Habsburg villa, the ground where King Umberto I was shot dead in 1900, and a racing circuit built in 1922 that still carries the Italian Grand Prix.
8 digs81 records
The king who did not see it coming
church of San Biagio · 100 BC–1965
The Chimera has watched Monza's square for centuries
Arengario · 1200–1961
Monza's start-finish straight carried a century of racing
2000 Italian Grand Prix · 1922–2023
A corridor runs from a palace to its own regicide
Royal Villa of Monza · 1750–1986
United States
NaugatuckNaugatuck, Connecticut, grew up in a narrow valley floodplain where mills turned on the Naugatuck River's current, built over Waterbury Gneiss more than 500 million years old. Charles Goodyear's vulcanized rubber and later Naugahyde founded its industry, but the same river that powered the town twice tore through it, most fatally in 1955.
2 digs16 records United Kingdom OxfordOxford grew up around the crossroads at Carfax, where the city's medieval walls, its castle and its town hall now stand close together. Students and townsmen, judges and monarchs all passed through this ground, and a single tavern quarrel in 1355 reshaped who held power in the city for five hundred years. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom Stoke-on-TrentStoke-on-Trent's record here centres on Hanley, where a Methodist congregation expelled in 1779 built its own chapel, rebuilt it larger in 1819, and watched it rise as the so-called Cathedral of the Potteries before closing for worship in December 1985 and passing to the Historic Chapels Trust in 2002. 1 dig
14 records United States WindsorWindsor, Connecticut, grew from a founding settlement into a town of brick farmhouses and family burying grounds. Across two centuries it held tobacco wealth, brickmaking trade, and the lives and deaths of its earliest settlers, leaving behind the houses and gravestones that still mark its ground. 2 digs
20 records Spain VigoVigo's Praza da Independencia takes its name from the 1809 Reconquest, when townspeople without a regular garrison drove occupying French forces from the city during the Peninsular War. A monument there still honours them, while the square has since seen more modest changes to its fabric. 1 dig
3 records Portugal PenichePeniche, Portugal, is marked above all by its fortress, raised from 1557 against pirate raids and later turned, from 1934 to 1974, into one of the Estado Novo's most feared political prisons. Across four centuries it held Brazilian rebels, Boer prisoners of war, wartime internees and dissidents. 1 dig
8 records Portugal Santa Maria MaiorSanta Maria Maior, a Lisbon parish, holds ground that saw royal court and religious authority rise and then fall in a single morning. It was where kings resided, monks worshipped, and in 1974 a dictatorship ended — all reshaped by the 1755 earthquake that struck the heart of the city. 2 digs
23 records Italy Porto - SaragozzaPorto-Saragozza in Bologna is anchored by Piazza del Nettuno, where Palazzo Re Enzo held Enzo of Sardinia captive from 1249 until his death in 1272. Around this square gathered civic power, war memory and deep ruins, each layer still legible in stone. 1 dig
12 records Vatican City RomeBeneath St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City lies a Roman cemetery of roughly a thousand burials, at whose centre a modest second-century monument was declared in 1968 to mark Peter's grave — a claim its own excavator, Antonio Ferrua, never accepted. 1 dig
12 records Italy ComoComo grew from Novum Comum, the Roman colony whose arena and baths lie buried near Viale Carlo Cattaneo, through to a medieval walled town built partly over those foundations, later adding Romanesque basilicas, a Modernist landmark, and a 1932 museum to Garibaldi. 1 dig
4 records Spain MadridThis record gathers the ground around Puerta del Sol in Madrid, where a 1547 convent traded gossip, roads were measured from a central marker, a post office became a seat of government, and a 1974 bombing on Calle del Correo killed thirteen people and wounded seventy-one. 1 dig
7 records Portugal MisericordiaMisericórdia is a parish at the heart of old Lisbon, holding the square where the Camões Monument was raised in 1867 over disputed remains, and the Chiado quarter rebuilt first after the 1755 earthquake and again after the 1988 fire. 2 digs
26 records
Fire took the Chiado twice, and the poets stayed
Largo do Chiado · 1147–1988
A nation buried the wrong bones and called it certain
Palacete Loures · 1147–1988
Italy
FernoFerno, in the province of Varese, Lombardy, rests on Pliocene clay laid beneath an ancient sea over Cenozoic sedimentary bedrock. The ground itself records little further until the railway station serving Malpensa Airport opened nearby in 1999, carrying the place into the jet age.
1 dig3 records Austria Innere StadtInnere Stadt holds Vienna's long memory in a few hundred metres of ground: Roman Vindobona's gate, medieval churches and the Habsburg crypt, Ottoman sieges, a synagogue built and later attacked, and a hotel turned Gestapo headquarters all press together here. 1 dig
18 records Italy CremonaCremona rests on Pliocene clay that shaped it into a brick city, fought over at Roman and medieval battles, crowned by the Torrazzo and the Baptistery, and marked in its streets by a small square, Sant'Omobono, once used as a plague cemetery. 1 dig
24 records
A record of ground, not a magazine.
Nothing here was commissioned. Each place is assembled from its own sources, published at the resolution of the ground rather than the point, and reviewed again when the record changes. No page reports a person.