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.
125 places · 53 localities · last reviewed 12 September 2026
United Kingdom
North LeighNorth Leigh holds a Roman villa of some sixty rooms above an Iron Age settlement, a Saxon church tower a thousand years old, and Eynsham Hall, a Georgian hunting lodge torn down and rebuilt grander by the Mason family, later a wartime maternity ward and police training college.
4 digs
47 records United States LehiLehi, Utah, took shape after the March 1849 killings of Timpanogos men at Battle Creek, an event that led American Fork to wall itself in fear of reprisal and that shadows ground later given over to farmland, subdivisions and, in 2016, Skyridge High School. 5 digs
47 records
35 records
20 records Spain VigoVigo's Praza da Independencia holds the memory of 1809, when fishermen, farmers, and townsfolk forced occupying French troops out of the city without any garrison of Spanish regulars to lead them, an episode still called the Reconquest of Vigo. 1 dig
3 records Portugal CascaisCascais grew from a fishing town into King Luís I's summer court in the 1870s, then sheltered exiled royalty and wartime couriers through the Second World War, while nearby Alcabideche holds Roman remains and ancient granite beneath ground that later records have yet to fill in. 4 digs
27 records Portugal PenichePeniche, on the coast of Portugal, is defined by its fortress, raised from 1557 against pirate raids and later turned into the Estado Novo's most feared political prison, holding dictatorship opponents until 1974, and before that a place of internment and, once, disaster at sea. 1 dig
8 records Ireland DublinDublin's ground carries siege, rebellion and argument in close quarters: a corner near Dublin Castle that saw a collapsed 1649 siege and 1922 street fighting, and a spot on O'Connell Street where a column stood, fell to a bomb, and gave way to the Spire. 2 digs
24 records
52 records France ParisParis has grown across two thousand years from a walled Gallo-Roman island to a capital of kings, revolutions and world's fairs, its ground layered with fortresses, convents, tollgates and battlefields, each stratum still traceable beneath the boulevards Haussmann drew over them. 30 digs
289 records
23 records Italy Porto - SaragozzaVia Giacomo Venezian, in Bologna's Porto - Saragozza district, runs close to Piazza del Nettuno, where Palazzo Re Enzo held Enzo of Sardinia, son of Emperor Frederick II, prisoner from 1249 until his death in 1272 — twenty-three years within a building still standing. 1 dig
12 records Italy MonzaMonza sits on clay laid down by a drowned Pliocene sea, and has carried a medieval commune, a Habsburg and Savoy villa, a murdered king, wartime torture, and one of the world's oldest motor-racing circuits, each leaving its own mark on the town's ground. 6 digs
48 records
25 records Vatican City RomeBeneath the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica lies a second-century funeral monument amid a Roman necropolis of roughly a thousand graves. Tradition and a 1968 papal declaration name it Peter's tomb, though the excavation's own lead archaeologist doubted that identification throughout his life. 1 dig
12 records United Kingdom Tower HamletsTower Hamlets holds a Roman bath house buried beneath Wapping's streets and the Norman keep William the Conqueror began at the Tower of London in the early 1080s. Between them lie centuries of upheaval: murder on Ratcliff Highway, executions at Tower Green, and a 1974 bomb in the White Tower's mortar room. 2 digs
27 records Italy ComoComo grew from Novum Comum, the Roman colony whose arena and baths once stood near what is now Viale Carlo Cattaneo, before medieval walls rose partly over those older foundations, carrying the ground through Romanesque building, Renaissance rebuilding and twentieth-century Modernism. 1 dig
4 records Spain MadridPuerta del Sol has long been the square where Madrid's public life gathered: a convent's steps for gossip, a lost fountain, the point from which every Spanish road is measured, a post office turned seat of government, and, on 13 September 1974, the site of a bombing that killed thirteen people. 1 dig
7 records United Kingdom City of WestminsterThe City of Westminster's record here gathers around Monmouth House, near Broadwick Street, where a contaminated pump caused the 1854 cholera outbreak that killed 616 people and changed how disease itself was understood. 1 dig
4 records Portugal MisericordiaMisericórdia is a Lisbon parish shaped twice by disaster — the 1755 earthquake and the 1988 Chiado fire — where a poet's uncertain grave, a ruined convent, and rebuilt shopping streets sit together around Praça Luís de Camões and Largo do Chiado. 2 digs
26 records
3 records Italy FernoFerno, a comune in the province of Varese, Lombardy, rests on Pliocene clay laid down beneath ancient seas over Cenozoic bedrock. Once a quiet stretch of the Lombard plain, it became linked to Malpensa Airport when a nearby railway station opened in 1999, later renamed in 2016. 1 dig
3 records Austria Innere StadtInnere Stadt is Vienna's old core, ground first held by the Roman camp of Vindobona and since layered with medieval churches, Habsburg burial, sieges, a Baroque palais, a synagogue and a wartime Gestapo headquarters — each holding its place beneath the streets. 1 dig
18 records Italy CremonaCremona rests on Pliocene clay within the Cenozoic fill of the Padana basin, a colony fought over in 200 BC and besieged in AD 69, later marked by a Romanesque baptistery, the towering Torrazzo, a rebuilt opera house and a small square that was once a plague cemetery. 1 dig
24 records
47 records United States LehiLehi, Utah, took shape after the March 1849 killings of Timpanogos men at Battle Creek, an event that led American Fork to wall itself in fear of reprisal and that shadows ground later given over to farmland, subdivisions and, in 2016, Skyridge High School. 5 digs
47 records
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
HighlandHighland, Utah, sits on the old bed and shoreline sand of Lake Bonneville, ground once farmed and later platted into subdivisions such as Dry Creek Highlands and Blessing Rock at Beacon Hill. Builders raised houses there through the 2000s and 2010s, and ownership since has passed through families, lenders, and trusts.
5 digs35 records
Some ground has only ever been ground
5942 West Southern Cross Court · 2004–2021
A lakebed sold as farmland became a subdivision lot
Highland · 2005–2019
A lake bottom platted, sold, and refinanced
West Broadleaf Hollow Circle · 2014–2020
United States
WindsorWindsor, Connecticut, holds two brick houses raised a generation apart: one built by a brickmaker from clay dug across the road around 1825, the other by a tobacco farmer whose crop made him rich enough to outbuild the town's wood-framed houses, around 1860.
2 digs20 records Spain VigoVigo's Praza da Independencia holds the memory of 1809, when fishermen, farmers, and townsfolk forced occupying French troops out of the city without any garrison of Spanish regulars to lead them, an episode still called the Reconquest of Vigo. 1 dig
3 records Portugal CascaisCascais grew from a fishing town into King Luís I's summer court in the 1870s, then sheltered exiled royalty and wartime couriers through the Second World War, while nearby Alcabideche holds Roman remains and ancient granite beneath ground that later records have yet to fill in. 4 digs
27 records Portugal PenichePeniche, on the coast of Portugal, is defined by its fortress, raised from 1557 against pirate raids and later turned into the Estado Novo's most feared political prison, holding dictatorship opponents until 1974, and before that a place of internment and, once, disaster at sea. 1 dig
8 records Ireland DublinDublin's ground carries siege, rebellion and argument in close quarters: a corner near Dublin Castle that saw a collapsed 1649 siege and 1922 street fighting, and a spot on O'Connell Street where a column stood, fell to a bomb, and gave way to the Spire. 2 digs
24 records
The pillar Dublin argued about for 157 years
Spire of Dublin · 377 BC–2003
A siege collapsed and a civil war opened near this corner
Castleview · 600–2016
Italy
RomeRome's ground carries layers rather than a single story: an amphitheatre ordered by Vespasian for public death, an imperial bathhouse now outlined by a piazza's colonnade, a fountain that once scandalised the city, and a Forum chasm and pyre tied to Caesar's own end.
4 digs52 records France ParisParis has grown across two thousand years from a walled Gallo-Roman island to a capital of kings, revolutions and world's fairs, its ground layered with fortresses, convents, tollgates and battlefields, each stratum still traceable beneath the boulevards Haussmann drew over them. 30 digs
289 records
Wine-tax cheats and a phone-bomb on the same corner
Rue Friant · 1721–1972
A chapel built for a crown of thorns still stands
Siege of Paris · 250 BC–2014
Egyptian coffins rest beneath a fortress that became a palace
Louvre Castle · 100 BC–1794
A teenager died feet from Citadium's door
Citadium · 1783–1999
Ravel wrote Daphnis et Chloé near this Paris kiosk
Le Kiosque de Paris · 1836–1944
A crossroads named after wartime allies
Charles de Gaulle · 1667–2024
An orientalist theatre for four thousand vanished within a decade
Keolis · 1779–1951
Cinema was born in a café cellar near the opera
Café de la Paix · 1600–2025
Poincaré unveiled a playwright's monument here
Hôtel Marcel Dassault · 1768–2002
A hotel rises on ground once walled for a royal arsenal
SO/ Paris Hôtel · 1254–2022
Chaillot hill has been rebuilt for two centuries
Carlingue · 1794–1980
A hotel corner where cinema itself began
InterContinental Paris le Grand · 1600–2025
A processional line binds this ground to the Louvre
Axe historique · 1682–2015
Portugal
Santa Maria MaiorSanta Maria Maior, a parish in central Lisbon, holds ground once ruled by kings and monks alike. The Ribeira Palace stood here for around 250 years before the 1755 earthquake destroyed it, and Carmo Convent, founded in 1389, still stands roofless from that same morning.
2 digs23 records Italy Porto - SaragozzaVia Giacomo Venezian, in Bologna's Porto - Saragozza district, runs close to Piazza del Nettuno, where Palazzo Re Enzo held Enzo of Sardinia, son of Emperor Frederick II, prisoner from 1249 until his death in 1272 — twenty-three years within a building still standing. 1 dig
12 records Italy MonzaMonza sits on clay laid down by a drowned Pliocene sea, and has carried a medieval commune, a Habsburg and Savoy villa, a murdered king, wartime torture, and one of the world's oldest motor-racing circuits, each leaving its own mark on the town's ground. 6 digs
48 records
The Chimera guards a square that has seen worse
Arengario (Monza) · 1200–1961
Twenty-two Italian Grands Prix have crossed this exact straight
2000 Italian Grand Prix · 1922–2023
A king was shot near his own summer palace
Royal Villa of Monza · 1750–1986
United Kingdom
City of LondonThe City of London holds Aldgate, breached by rebels in 1381 and 1471, and the Tower of London, raised by William the Conqueror in the early 1080s, where three queens were beheaded and a 1974 bomb killed a visitor. Sieges, executions and modern violence have all left their mark here.
2 digs25 records Vatican City RomeBeneath the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica lies a second-century funeral monument amid a Roman necropolis of roughly a thousand graves. Tradition and a 1968 papal declaration name it Peter's tomb, though the excavation's own lead archaeologist doubted that identification throughout his life. 1 dig
12 records United Kingdom Tower HamletsTower Hamlets holds a Roman bath house buried beneath Wapping's streets and the Norman keep William the Conqueror began at the Tower of London in the early 1080s. Between them lie centuries of upheaval: murder on Ratcliff Highway, executions at Tower Green, and a 1974 bomb in the White Tower's mortar room. 2 digs
27 records Italy ComoComo grew from Novum Comum, the Roman colony whose arena and baths once stood near what is now Viale Carlo Cattaneo, before medieval walls rose partly over those older foundations, carrying the ground through Romanesque building, Renaissance rebuilding and twentieth-century Modernism. 1 dig
4 records Spain MadridPuerta del Sol has long been the square where Madrid's public life gathered: a convent's steps for gossip, a lost fountain, the point from which every Spanish road is measured, a post office turned seat of government, and, on 13 September 1974, the site of a bombing that killed thirteen people. 1 dig
7 records United Kingdom City of WestminsterThe City of Westminster's record here gathers around Monmouth House, near Broadwick Street, where a contaminated pump caused the 1854 cholera outbreak that killed 616 people and changed how disease itself was understood. 1 dig
4 records Portugal MisericordiaMisericórdia is a Lisbon parish shaped twice by disaster — the 1755 earthquake and the 1988 Chiado fire — where a poet's uncertain grave, a ruined convent, and rebuilt shopping streets sit together around Praça Luís de Camões and Largo do Chiado. 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
France
Le Mesnil-AmelotLe Mesnil-Amelot, a village on the eastern edge of the Île-de-France plain, rests on clay, gypsum and limestone laid down by Eocene and Oligocene coastal seas. Marked in 1745 as a waypoint on the royal road to Reims, it later found itself beside a TGV station and airport terminal.
1 dig3 records Italy FernoFerno, a comune in the province of Varese, Lombardy, rests on Pliocene clay laid down beneath ancient seas over Cenozoic bedrock. Once a quiet stretch of the Lombard plain, it became linked to Malpensa Airport when a nearby railway station opened in 1999, later renamed in 2016. 1 dig
3 records Austria Innere StadtInnere Stadt is Vienna's old core, ground first held by the Roman camp of Vindobona and since layered with medieval churches, Habsburg burial, sieges, a Baroque palais, a synagogue and a wartime Gestapo headquarters — each holding its place beneath the streets. 1 dig
18 records Italy CremonaCremona rests on Pliocene clay within the Cenozoic fill of the Padana basin, a colony fought over in 200 BC and besieged in AD 69, later marked by a Romanesque baptistery, the towering Torrazzo, a rebuilt opera house and a small square that was once 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.