In 2020 construction workers in the Netherlands made a gruesome discovery. While working in the city of Vianen they came across an enigmatic mass burial. Were the 82 skeletons victims of war, a plague, or something more sinister? Now archaeologists have an answer, but it’s not what they expected – the mass grave contained the remains of British soldiers.
Discovering Vianen’s Mysterious Mass Grave
Workers were excavating Vianen’s historic moat when they made the startling discovery. They were excavating a filled-in section that would be re-joined to the rest of the city’s canal, and while working outside the grounds of Batestein Castle they came across the skeletons. This castle was built in the 1370s by Gijsbrecht van Beusichem, when Vianen was largely a self-governing city-state.
