Your article about the truly startling British archaeological finds is a wonderful reminder of the many digs going on around the country (“From Orkney to the Fens, our ancient past is coming to life,” In Focus).

In my area of Folkestone, Kent, we have the now (with luck) annual East Wear Bay Field School run by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust. Close by two Roman villas we have found the first, mainly Iron Age, quernstone (corn-grinding) production site found in Britain. This is located within a settlement above an ancient Channel port site of international importance, which saw trade and people crossing to and from the continent via the Boulogne area on the French coast for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, as well as regular coastal traffic.

A further hugely important site was found at the nearby village of Lyminge just a couple of years ago by a team from the University of Reading working with locals, an early 5th-8th century Anglo-Saxon royal/monastic settlement near the church and under the village green.

However, there is locally, as elsewhere no doubt, rising concern about the future of such excavations after Brexit. The funding for such digs could well dry up as money for science and culture is lost from EU grants or by the UK government diverting money elsewhere. Knock-on effects could also affect the maintenance of such sites.

Thus everyone with an interest in their history needs to press the government and local authorities to ensure they find ways to continue to fund all these wonderful excavations and maintain museums, so that such discoveries are not lost to future generations.

Ray Duff

Folkestone

Besides “cattle rearing”, present-day Orkney has sustainability “in common with those Neolithic ancestors”. Orkney, sitting at Europe’s windy Atlantic fringe, is a green energy powerhouse, generating, from wind and other renewables, considerably more energy than it can use, so it exports to the mainland, thus also, along with tourism, bringing “measurable, substantial economic benefits to the islands”.

Around the Scottish islands, wind, wave and tidal power could, estimates suggest, generate a nominal capacity of 11 gigawatts, the equivalent to three coal-fired power stations.

David Murray

Wallington

What could be more appropriate in the wake of Brexit? Neolithic Orkney was a centre of innovation whose ideas spread south. However, the bigger canvas is the Atlantic coast from Morocco to Norway, along which ideas and skills travelled freely so long ago. We Scots wish that to continue and I’m sure so do most open-minded folk. Orkney’s European Marine Energy Centre continues that outlook today.

Kevin McKenna points up the importance of EU funding for scientific projects amounting to 28% overall in the UK. No result of Brexit could be more inward looking than to lose that wider funding stream, the international partners and the perspective that Orkney is part of an Atlantic cultural and economic zone.

The EU has fostered the European sustainable islands group, the Atlantic Arc, and after the referendum its conference of peripheral maritime regions expressed disappointment that the UK has voted to leave. Archaeology shows us how ancient peoples co-operated; with huge resources in common, the Atlantic coastal communities and islands must strive to keep these links alive today in our common interest.

Rob Gibson

Ross-shire