The layout of my article on history teaching in our schools (G2, 9 November) – including the highlighting of six exemplary topics I believed, under the constraints of the national curriculum, pupils seldom study – seems to have given the wholly misleading impression that the present disconnected modules should simply be replaced by alternative and equally discontinuous fragments. Nothing could be further from my thoughts. As the text of the article I hope made clear, like many teachers and historians I should like to see any revision of the curriculum to be based on a commitment to a continuous, coherent and chronological account of our nation's history and its impact on the rest of the world. That such an ambitious shift of priorities presupposes the expansion of classroom time for history, and less iron-clad constraints imposed by pressures of exams and assessments, doesn't seem to me to make the goal any less worthwhile.
Columbia University, New York
• Your editorial (16 November) on the need to conserve Sunderland Point and its unique slave grave is timely. I take educational parties there from all over the world and I am always struck by how Sambo's Grave is an emotional and educational touchstone for them to understand the horrors of the slave trade. Placed as it is, beside the beach, separated from human habitation and requiring a slow walk across the peninsula, it allows ample space for contemplation. Many experts on the history of the transatlantic slave trade have remarked how features like the new memorial made by Cumbrian schoolchildren in 2009, from sticks and stones and resembling white flowers, make it a dynamic memorial site and one of the most effective they have come across. We should make all efforts to preserve the grave and the community that has sustained it.
University of Central Lancashire
• The "inquisitive Victorian" who opened Richard II's tomb in 1871 (17 November) was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, dean of Westminster. He later wrote "there were some who maintained that it was the body of his chaplain, Maudlin". Be that as it may, when the skull was removed, "a hard brown knobby thing like two walnuts united fell out of the skull through the round hole at its base into my hand. It was the shrivelled-up double-lobed brain."
Chris Birch
London