I am an archaeologist by training, a tour guide by trade, and a travel writer by happy accident. For nearly two decades I have been making my living by walking through ancient cities with curious people first in the UK and Italy as a field archaeologist, kneeling in trenches and arguing about stratigraphy; For ten years I worked as guide on the streets of Rome, where I learned that the best history is the kind you tell standing next to it.
Most of that guiding work was with Through Eternity Tours and a few other select partners. I have been associated withThrough Eternity since 2006 and still write and consult for it today. Through Eternity is where I sharpened the voice I now use on the page: half archaeologist, half storyteller, allergic to the bland.
These days I write from Lisbon, where I run a small content creation and marketing company (Saltmark). For the last nine years I have been quietly obsessed with this city’s urban landscape and its long, salt-tinged relationship with the sea. The Roman fish-salting tanks under modern bars, the Moorish street plan still legible in Alfama, the Age of Discoveries footprint along the Tejo. The maritime kid from Liverpool in the end, found his way back to the water. Just by a much longer route than expected
Areas of Expertise
These are the subjects I genuinely know, either because I dug it up, walked clients through it for a decade, or have been researching it for the last nine years from my desk in Lisbon.
• Roman imperial architecture (temples, baths, fora, infrastructure)
• Urbanisation and city planning in the ancient Mediterranean
• Roman engineering: aqueducts, harbours, roads
• Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Bay of Naples
• Vatican and early Christian Rome Maritime and Atlantic
• Maritime archaeology and harbour-town development
• Lisbon’s urban history and its relationship with the Tagus and the Atlantic
• The Age of Discoveries and its physical legacy in Portugal
Credentials at a Glance
- Education: MSc (Hons) Archaeological Sciences
- Field experience: Working archaeologist across sites in Italy and the United Kingdom
- Guiding: 10 years as a tour guide in Rome and 10 years guiding in Lisbon and Portugal
- Current base: Lisbon, Portugal. 9 years and counting, researching the city’s urban and maritime history
