Wilkswood, Purbeck: A farm fit for a King?

Everything in the Dorset landscape has a story to tell and the countryside is full of clues. Each footpath you use has been a routeway for many centuries. Quite modest buildings can have deep histories. Often they have been rebuilt on the same site time and again. The ground under and around them is rich in layers of archaeology.

The hamlets and farms of the Isle of Purbeck are good examples of this. Many are recorded in the Domesday Book which lists the Saxon occupiers of 1066 and then the new, mainly Norman, lords of 1086. This document describes many Purbeck places for the first time and the names themselves can be a key into a world before 1066. 

Wilkswood Farm as shown on the 1585 map of the manor of Langton Wallis surveyed by Ralph Treswell (Dorset History Centre, Bankes family archive)

Such a place is Wilkswood Farm, tucked away beside a brook on the edge of ancient woodland in Purbeck’s Wealden valley. In medieval documents it is called Wylcheswode, interpreted as Welsh wood. A term which implies that it was named by the incoming Saxons to mark out the British who still dwelt there. Certainly a wooded place even then.

Wilkswood is now tenanted as a private farm. It was given to the National Trust in 1982 as part of the Bankes family’s Corfe Castle Estate. When I needed to visit the property I would sometimes approach along a footpath from Langton village.  This would take me from the Purbeck limestone plateau across pastureland downhill into the woods.

Aerial photograph looking east towards Ballard Down and Swanage, showing the location of Wilkswood Farm in the centre of the picture surrounded by woodland. Langton West Wood is the large area of trees in the lower centre of the picture.

Langton West Wood and Talbot Wood are fascinating places containing the evidence of ancient woodland management. Here, on gnarled oaks, the trunks are scarred where boughs were lopped from the trunk for building timber. Mostly there are wide hazel coppice stools where poles were grown and harvested. Coppices were managed in blocks in rotation so that there was always a plot ready to be cut and used. The great diameter of the Langton West Wood stools demonstrates that they have been coppiced for many centuries.

Trees growing out of the uneven ground of disused medieval quarries of Langton West Wood.

The trees grow out of a moonscape of undulations, the remains of limestone quarries. No wonder this is woodland, the ground is too uneven for any other kind of productive use. But, look carefully, the silted up diggings can be seen to have been cut into the remains of agricultural terraces.. so it was farmland once.

In medieval times, the stone below the fields was too valuable not to use. All along this wooded slope, the geological beds of Burr stone and Purbeck Marble are exposed. These precious types of building stone were used to construct Corfe Castle and to decorate the insides of churches, particularly in the 12^th-14^th centuries. Purbeck Marble is a dark limestone which can be polished to appear like marble and can be seen embellishing the gothic columns  of prestigious places like Salisbury Cathedral.

These quarries cut through the evidence of Wilkswood’s earlier inhabitants. Local mason Trev Haysom told me about Roman items which had been found in the wood, including a Purbeck Marble sarcophagus and fragments of stone mortaria or mixing bowls.

In a clearing beyond the wood lies Wilkswood farmstead. Its buildings are made of durable Purbeck limestone and therefore retain ancient fabric. Particularly the west gable of the farmhouse which has a thicker wall and contains a narrow medieval lancet window.

The west gable wall of Wilkswood Farmhouse with the 1996 trench open and the footings of walls exposed in the excavation.

This is a clue to Wilkswood’s prestigious past, a place fit for a king.

At Domesday, this was a manor worth £4, of much higher value than its neighbours. Two villein farmers, four crofters with two slaves made their living from Wilkswood land. It was held by a lady called Hadawis who was the widow of Hugh son of Grip, one of the Norman incomers who crossed the channel with William I.

Hadawis later married Alfred de Lincoln whose heirs gave Wilkswood to the church. By 1190, a group of Benedictine clerics had established a chapel dedicated to St Leonard here and Wilkswood became known as Wilkswood Priory.

Wilkswood was one of several Purbeck manors that Hadawis brought to the de Lincolns and this combined group of land holdings was to become known as the manor of Langton Wallis, named after Ingelram de Wallis who acquired the land from the de Lincolns in the late 13^th century.

After 1390, the manor passed through the female line by marriage, first to the Filiols and then, in 1528, to the Willoughby family of Nottingham, when Anne Filiol married  Sir Thomas. In 1585, Sir Christopher Hatton purchased Langton Wallis.. and it became Bankes property in 1635 when Sir John Bankes purchased it from Hatton’s heirs.

Wilkswood Farm as shown on William Woodward’s 1775 survey of Langton Wallis, commissioned by the owner of the Kingston Lacy and Corfe Castle Estates, Henry Bankes (Dorset History Centre, Bankes family archive).

Ingelram de Wallis would have lived in a large manor house near Langton village but it is gone now and its location has been forgotten (but perhaps the name ‘Court Pound’ on the 1775 map is a clue to the location). However, we are fortunate that much of his family’s archive survives and is curated by Nottingham University.

The Wilkswood documents are in medieval latin and the palaeography is difficult to read, but  with specialist skills, the hidden histories contained in these parchment scrolls can be unravelled. They cast a spotlight on the lives of the monastic brothers who spent their days at secluded Wilkswood over 750 years ago.

The key role of the Priory, or Chantry as it was later called, was to provide Christian services for the Wallis family. The Priory chapel of St Leonard was the manorial chapel and the clerics were to say mass daily and pray for Ingelram and his relations. In return, the brethren were given land to farm and rights to collect coppice poles and boughs for building repair from the woods. They had rights of arable in the Langton common fields, grazing for their cattle in the meadows and pasture for their sheep on the downs. They were allowed to take the fuel they  needed from the woods at Wilcheswode and the right to cut enough bracken, heather and gorse to make their bread and ale.

In 1370, Roger de Wallis wrote to Roger Typhulle ‘master of the house of Wylcheswode’. The priory was to receive from the manor, ample provisions to prepare for the arrival of the lord king (Edward III). We have no further information. Had the king requested a meeting with Roger and why Wilkswood? Just a short ride from Edward’s newly refurbished royal castle at Corfe.

Underfloor heating and French drains will disrupt any archaeology that might survive beneath and around an ancient building. In 1996, Wilkswood had damp problems and needed a new drain to run alongside its medieval gable wall, so we spent a week there digging the trench for the building department and recording the clues that the past occupants of the farm had left us.

One hot May day we looked up and saw a white Little Egret flying across the farm, back then it was exciting, it still is, but they are far more common now.

Medieval oyster shells found in the excavation trench the remains of meals eaten by the monastic community of Wilkswood.

We found a heap of oyster shells, the remains of meals, as well as fragments of medieval pottery near the footings of demolished walls. Nothing spectacular was discovered but we had touched fragments discarded by the Wilkswood clerics and it was good to spend time at this quiet and secluded place and to imagine all those lives that had been lived here… particularly the feverish preparations for the arrival of the King Edward III and his retinue.

After 300 years Wilkswood Priory was closed, part of the early 16^th century turmoil caused by Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monastic houses. The last prior was Hugh Filiol, perhaps a relation of the then lord of Langton Wallis. By 1540, he and his brethren had been expelled from Wilkswood.  Richard Taverner had taken the tenancy, the first of many generations of secular farming tenants who have worked this land down to the present day.

Wilkswood, one of many ancient farms dotted about the Dorset countryside, each with its own unique story.

Further Reading:

Papworth, M., 1989, ‘Wilkswood Farm, Langton Matravers’ Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 111, 114

Papworth, M., 1996, ‘Excavations at Wilkswood Farmhouse, Langton Matravers’  Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 118, 157-159

Copies of the Dorset Proceedings are now being uploaded to the Dorset Museum website. Search on Dorset Proceedings https://www.dorsetmuseum.org/proceedings/

Finding a Romano-Celtic Temple

This summer, like the dry summers of 1975 and particularly 1976, will be a good time for archaeological discovery. The grass dies over buried walls revealing the outlines of long forgotten buildings.

Just outside the outer rampart of Badbury Rings, lies a roughly circular area of hollows, humps and bumps. Nobody was quite sure what they could be. One suggestion was that these earthworks marked the site of a ‘fancy’ type of Bronze Age burial mound known as a disc barrow. A spread platform in the middle surrounded by a low bank measuring about 60m across.

Photo of the parch marks beside the hillfort of Badbury Rings taken by Bryan Pybus in the summer of 1975

That was until 1975, when Bryan Pybus visited Badbury and noticed that the lack of rain had parched the outline of a clear rectangular building onto the central mound and revealed the surrounding bank to consist of a series of straight lines forming a rough octagon with an entrance facing the hillfort. Bryan thought that this site might be a Romano British temple because he had recovered small fragments of building stone and Roman pottery during his visit.

He sent his sketch map and notes to the Ordnance Survey archaeological records department and there they stayed until 1986 when I found them during the archaeological survey of the National Trust’s Kingston Lacy Estate.

I went to Badbury to see what I could find to support Bryan’s theory, and as I walked across the grass I found objects in mole hills which seemed to confirm that the remains of a Roman building might lie buried here.

There were fragments of Purbeck limestone, brick, animal bones, oysters and Roman pottery. This could be a very exciting discovery, so I carried out further research and uncovered in the Dorset Museum archive, records of small trenches dug near this spot in 1900 and again in 1952. From these investigations, many Iron Age and Roman objects were recovered including coins covering a time span stretching from the pre-Roman Durotriges tribe to the end of the Roman period.

This led to fieldwork across the site, including mapping and geophysical survey, which confirmed the location of buried walls. Soon we had a good plan of the enclosure and buildings.

The plan of the site showing the results of earth resistance and magnetometry surveys

However, the many Roman objects turned up in the mole hills attracted metal detectorists to the scheduled monument. As we surveyed the site we saw the signs that items were being taken from the monument. There were small spade holes, the turf cut and placed to one side. There was no way of knowing what these finds might have been and separating an artefact from its location without record is a loss of valuable potential archaeological information.

The solution was to move the moles from the site and to cover the monument with chain-link fencing. The fencing would act as armour plating to prevent digging and also affect metal detector signal. The fencing would be pegged down and in a few years would grow over and its presence would not be visible.

Laying the chain-link fencing over the site in 2002

Before this conservation covering was to be installed, English Heritage (now Historic England) gave National Trust permission to carry out an archaeological excavation to discover whether this place really was the site of a temple.

In September 2000, using the evidence from our geophysical survey, we dug a long trench from the central platform to the northern edge of the enclosing bank. We decided to camp on site and my dad lent me our old blue family tent which formed the hub for a small tented village.

A time before drones.. the Kingston Lacy building department built us a scaffolded photographic tower to enable overhead shots of the site.

Our scaffold tower on a wet day decorated for Helen’s birthday with our row of damp tents in the background

The fortnight of excavation began in torrential rain and ended with a storm which almost felled the tower…. but there were good memories… as the sun began to set, we had the place to ourselves… One evening, I walked Badbury’s ramparts in twilight and was surprised by the white ghost of a barn owl gliding towards me from the hillfort’s centre.

We cut the deep turf and below the casual losses of recent visitors, the ring-pulls and silver paper, we uncovered several large lead bullets.  These were explained by the 1880s Ordnance Survey map which showed a rifle range located in the fields west of our excavation.

Then we started finding chunks of rubble mixed with Roman pottery and near the centre of the site, fragments of painted plaster and clay tile. It became clear that the buildings had been completely demolished and even the foundation trenches had been cleared with just patches of flint and mortar left in place. Beside each robber trench was a little heap of debris where the best stone had been selected and the bits and pieces chucked to one site.

Looking from the robbed centre of the temple floor (bottom pile of chalk) across the remains of the wall of the cella (second pile of chalk). Just above the centre of the picture is the robbed ambulatory wall marked by a faintly visible white and red ranging rod. Between these two wall would be the walkway/cloister around the temple building (beside the upper pile of chalk from the ambulatory floor). The gravel temple courtyard lies beyond and the white area at the far end of the trench is the chalk boundary bank of the temple enclosure.

Once the building rubble was removed we could see that there had been a square building here measuring about 15m wide and this had been surrounded by a corridor. Beyond this was a gravel yard and against the northern stone enclosure wall was another small building.

This evidence could be compared with known Romano-Celtic temples which typically consist of a square tower-like shrine or cella surrounded by a roofed walkway known as an ambulatory. The building on the north side of the temenos or temple enclosure could be for storage or accommodation for a priest.

There were a few cubes of stone and tile found but no mosaics. The floor surfaces were of packed gravel or rammed chalk and had been left in place by the post-Roman temple robbers. The central chalk floor area had been dug into… perhaps there had been something worth taking there, like a stone altar or possibly a lead water tank.

Whatever deity had been worshipped here had involved the donation of money and votive offerings. Our finds included many tiny blue and green glass beads and fragments of little jars. There were also interesting objects including a bronze ring which included a key, a pewter horse harness terret and an iron bridle bit.

Some of the finds from the temple including a horse bit, fragment of a pewter harness terret, a ring key and a pair of tweezers.

Most numerous were coins, small change offerings which were concentrated within the central building. The last chalk floor was associated with later 4^th and one or two 5^th century coins which had been discarded above it. When the chalk was lifted, an earlier gravel floor was uncovered which contained the larger coins of the 2^nd century. Our list of coins covered many of the emperors from Claudius to Honorius. We also found a single pre-Roman Iron Age stater of the type used by the Durotriges.

The section showing the chalk floors of the ambulatory/cloister walk (bottom), the robbed foundation trench of the temple wall and top right, the chalk floor of the temple. Below these late Roman chalk floors were 1st-2nd century floors made of gravel.

We had confirmed that this was a sacred site which lay beside the hillfort near the Roman road to Dorchester. Rituals were performed here for almost 500 years, though we found no statues or other votive objects which  would give us an idea of which deities were venerated at this temple. Usually, the original native god was linked to a deity in the Roman pantheon and both were venerated. For example, we know that the gods worshipped at the temple complex built beside the hot springs at Bath included the celtic god Sulis and the Roman god Minerva.

We invited Mr Pybus back to Badbury to see the excavation while we were there, and he was pleased that his interpretation of the site, back in that dry summer, had now been confirmed.

Further Reading: Papworth M. 2014. ‘The Romano-Celtic Temple at Badbury Rings, Dorset’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 135, 242-271.

Copies of the Dorset Proceedings are now being uploaded to the Dorset Museum website. Search on Dorset Proceedings https://www.dorsetmuseum.org/proceedings/

The Lost Brick Kilns of Brownsea

If you were to take the ferry from Sandbanks or Poole and arrive at the Brownsea jetty, close to the tower-like profile of Brownsea Castle, a short walk would take you past the church and the Victorian farm buildings…then on towards the beaches of the south shore. Even in high summer these are peaceful places to sit and experience the lapping of the sea and become immersed in the surrounding wildlife.

The south shore of Brownsea littered with the eroded remains of the brick and tile industry

Look behind you and notice the bricks jutting from the cliff line. Pull back some of the tumbling vegetation to investigate, bright soil colours will be revealed. Bands of black, red, orange and  yellow mixed with burnt clay, brick and lime mortar. In front of you, as the tide retreats, notice the lines of parallel timber post-stumps running out into deeper water.

This is the archaeological evidence which enables you to imagine this beach when it was a place of active industry. Back then, this would not have been a quiet place to sit at all. Kilns blazing behind you and labourers hacking the raw material for bricks and tiles from the shore-side clay quarries.. boats moored at the jetty in front of you and workmen barrowing the finished product for export to the mainland.

The geology of Brownsea provided the clay for brick making but also for chemical works producing alum and copperas. Alum was used in the leather and tanning industries and copperas was essential for fixing coloured dyes in cloth. The late 17^th-century traveller and writer Celia Fiennes described Brownsea with its population ‘all being taken up with copperas workers; they gather the stones and place them on ground raised like beds in gardens’ . Fiennes then explains how the green liquor was created, boiled in vats hanging like grapes from scrap iron placed in these containers to aid the chemical process.

This is an industry that fluctuated depending on the profitability of the business; sometimes it was productive but at others the works were abandoned. An early 17^th-century Brownsea map shows ‘copperas mines now decayed’, though Celia Fiennes found copperas production booming in 1698.  Presumably active copperas works are labelled on an early Victorian map, but by 1857 the industry was gone. The writer Philip Brannon describes the abandoned vats and troughs eroding from the cliff faces of the south and south-west shores…

From personal experience, though I’ve  worked on Brownsea as an archaeologist for over 35 years..I have never seen evidence of the industry.. all traces have now been washed out to sea.

Brownsea south shore beach looking towards Green and Round Islands in Poole Harbour

The beach is a tranquil place to sit on a summer’s day… but in winter, when the storms drive the waves onto the south shore, it is a wild place. The cliffs are scoured by the force of the sea.. and year by year the shoreline retreats, the pine trees and the brick ruins are undermined and tumble onto the sand to be carried away by the next powerful tide.

When I began here, I felt my job was to protect the remains of Brownsea’s coastal industries.. to enable the conservation of the industrial archaeology. The solution was to build protective timber gabions filled with old brick and tile debris to hold back the effects of the sea. This did the job for a few years but soon the waves cut round the edges of the sea defences.

18th to 19th century Barnes Brick Kiln cleaned for recording protected by its gabions filled with brick and tile debris.

The National Trust’s conservation philosophy is now to allow natural coastal processes to take their course. The Brownsea brickworks could only be preserved by making an archaeological record of them. It became clear that, like the copperas industry, the evidence for brickmaking would soon be lost from the beaches of Brownsea. Preservation by record was the only practical solution. What remained must be photographed, drawn and described.

In 2005, a team of volunteers was assembled and we spent two weeks on the beach, working along the cliff face cutting back the gorse and bracken… under the gaze of the red squirrels and oyster catchers, while the Poole Harbour sailing boats glided by.

We wanted to understand the periods of brickmaking here. There were good records and maps dating to the later 19^th century when Victorian entrepreneurs had looked for profits based on the urgent demand for bricks. These were required for new homes being built for the expanding towns of Bournemouth and Poole.

We cleaned up and recorded the Barnes brick kiln which was still a substantial structure back then ..but also Hitchcocks further along the coast.. which was almost gone, just a few fragments of wall survived.

Late 19th century map of Brownsea Island showing the railway and brickworks along the south and west shores. Barnes and Hitchcocks kilns are bottom right.

However, these 18^th and 19^th century named structures, shown on historic maps, overlay and cut through  earlier features.

Bricks can be roughly dated by their form and size, so bricks with ‘frogs’ or indentations in their upper and lower surfaces tend to be later. Before that there are unfrogged handmade bricks and for a while, from 1784, bricks were taxed. This led to bricks being made thicker so that more could be built with fewer bricks for less tax. Before then, the general rule had been.. the thinner the brick the older it is likely to be.

A Tudor brick kiln visible in the cliff where it has been cut away by coastal erosion. The flue for the kiln is to the right.

The Romans produced baked clay products: bricks for walling; tiles for roofing; as drains; flues for wall cavity heating and as pillar tiles for supporting mosaic floors above hypocaust heating systems. All of these sorts of tiles have been found in Dorset but the last vestiges of Roman Brownsea were lost to the sea in the late 1970s so any evidence for their production on the island has now gone.

After the Romans, brick production in Dorset seems to cease until the Tudor period.. though in eastern England, brick making was common in the medieval period.. particularly where good local building stone was lacking. In Dorset, most of the earliest surviving brick buildings are found in the east. The earliest recorded building in the county is Witchampton House which has been dated to the reign of Henry VIII.

When we cleaned back the south shore cliff face we found a kiln complete with a brick lined flue and the kiln chamber full of very narrow handmade bricks mixed with broken clay roofing tiles. Beside it was a firing floor buried under similar debris.

Our problem was that the brick workers left a lot of brick debris but no other artefacts. A few  nicely placed tobacco pipe bowls, coins or fragments of distinctive pottery would have been helpful for dating what we were finding. There was a lot of charcoal for radiocarbon dating but this would not be accurate enough for such a recent industrial site.

The solution was a dating technique called archaeomagnetism which can reveal within decades the last time a hearth was fired. This depends on the changing alignment of the earth’s magnetic field. The heat of a fire causes fluidity of magnetic particles in the soil which, after cooling, set at the magnetic pole of the earth at the time of the fire.

Following our excavations, a specialist from Historic England came to measure our hearth and he discovered that it had been last used at the end of the 15^th century.. making it the earliest recorded brickmaking site in Dorset after the Roman period.

The earliest kiln floor is covered in circular white compasses to measure the archaeomagnetic alignment frozen in the cooling clay after the last firing of the kiln. The measurement gave a date of late 15th century which is the earliest date for a brick making kiln in Dorset.

We were sad to leave the archaeology of the south shore. The weather was kind to us and we had enjoyed our time together on the beach, sharing the discoveries we had made.

In the years to come, when conservation meetings occasionally drew me back to Brownsea, I would always revisit the site and see the progress of the shifty shoreline on the crumbling brickworks.

It’s a good thing we spent the time in excavation and detailed recording here because much of the evidence is gone now.

The National Trust volunteers of Brownsea have maintained their vigilance of the coast over the years, photographing and sending yearly reports as new archaeological information is revealed by the erosion of the sea into the cliff face.  They are part of a group of volunteer archaeologists who are members of the Heritage Archaeological Ranger Team (HART), who monitor the condition of historic sites across the National Trust’s properties.

Information can be found on how to volunteer for the National Trust in this way by looking at the National Trust Heritage Records Online website.

Papworth, M.2005. ‘Brownsea Island, South Shore: Industrial Archaeology’ Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 127, 145-147

Young, D. 1971. ‘Brickmaking in Dorset’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 93, 213-242

Copies of the Dorset Proceedings are now being uploaded to the Dorset Museum website. Search on Dorset Proceedings https://www.dorsetmuseum.org/proceedings/

Too Far West. The Anglo Saxon warriors of Hardown Hill, Dorset

One day during 1916, high above the village of Whitchurch Canonicorum, a boy was hunting rabbits amongst the earthen mounds of Hardown Hill. He discovered a pointed metal object lying in a spoil heap dug from a burrow. Excited by his find, he knew that Dr Virtuvius Harold Wyatt Wingrove lived nearby and that he would be interested and be able to identify this rusty piece of iron.. so he took it to his house.

A rainbow over one of the low burial mounds on Hardown Hill

Dr Wingrave was able to tell the boy that he had discovered an ancient spearhead and asked him to show where he had found it. An excavation was arranged and soon, 30cm below the ground surface, a second spearhead was unearthed. The excavations continued and eventually seven spears, an axe head, a knife and a domed shield boss were uncovered. There was also a brooch amongst the finds indicating that, if this was a burial site, the remains of both men and at least one woman were once interred here.

Photograph of a 5th-6th century spear found on Hardown Hill in 1916. This one has a drawing of a fish inscribed on it.

Wingrave often came to the area on holiday but he was a Midlander, born in Coventry, and was based in London during  WWI, where he was engaged in vital research on the treatment of infectious diseases. After the war, he settled in Lyme Regis and in 1920 founded the Lyme Regis Museum.

The mounds across the summit of Hardown Hill were thought to have originated as Early Bronze Age burial mounds constructed up to 4000 years ago, but these were often chosen and reused as burial places by early Saxon communities.

A plan of the barrows on Hardown Hill. The five mound ‘Jonny Viser’s pits’ on the left and a line of four barrows on the right. Drawings of the early Anglo Saxon finds from one or more of the barrows. Spearheads and a brooch on the right abd a shield boss, knife and axe head on the left.

The finds were later brought from Lyme Regis to Dorchester and are now within the collection of Dorset Museum and Art Gallery. Dr Wingrave did not publish the informaion on Hardown Hill until 1931, and his report provides insufficient detail to help us understand how the objects were arranged. They all seem to have come from a single mound and he mentions that it had already been dug into when the boy made his find.

Wingrave believed that the finds were Saxon grave goods accompanying burials and dated from the early medieval period. In 1968, the objects were studied again by Vera Evison and she compared them with finds from other warrior burials. She found an engraved representation of a fish on one of the spear blades and believed that the finds dated from just after the Roman period, AD 450-550, and that the location of this discovery was extraordinary for Dorset.

Although these objects are very similar to other grave goods accompanying early Germanic settlers, these comparable artefacts were concentrated in eastern Britain, none had previously been found in West Dorset. The closest examples of similar groups of grave goods are at the eastern edge of Dorset at Bargates in Christchurch, or towards Salisbury, at Winterborne Gunner in Wiltshire.

They are far outside their normal distribution so how did these weapons arrive in a remote barrow mound far from the nearest early Saxon occupation evidence. In this part of Dorset, Romanised British people continued to govern until the early 7^th century. Their burials are in the Christian tradition, aligned east to west in cemeteries without grave goods.

In 1977, Hardown Hill was one of the first pieces of fieldwork I was involved with while training to be an archaeologist at Weymouth College. We spent a Saturday on the hilltop measuring the heather covered earthworks, walking with ranging rods and survey equipment. Our finished plan showed a line of four small round barrows on the east side of an unusual feature.. a group of mounds arranged like a four dot die, linked to one another by a low earth bank forming a circle. At the centre of this group was a hollowed mound surrounded by a shallow circular ditch.

All the mounds had been dug into and it is likely that this had happened long before the 1916 discovery. Nobody knows now which barrow contained the Saxon iron objects. No photographs or plans are known that survive from that time. In 1977, our college lecturer wondered whether the place name element, ‘Har’, might indicate the location of a Saxon pre-Christian sacred site and that the circular feature with its five hollowed mounds might be a Saxon temple. However, many years later,  I came across a 1769 map of the hill which shows the five hollows as ponds. The map gives the name of this feature as ‘Jn Devizes Pits’. Perhaps they were not Saxon at all but part of some sort of 18^th century folly. Later Ordnance Survey maps call them ‘Jonny Vizer’s Pits’.

Forty years after my initial survey of the hill, I was asked to carry out an archaeological landscape survey of the National Trust’s Golden Cap Estate. Hardown Hill was part of this and had been gifted to the conservation charity in 1967. I wondered whether a geophysical survey of the hill top might indicate where these rare Saxon objects had been found.

The National Trust rangers agreed to prepare the hill top where the barrows were located so that it could be traversed easily, I gained scheduled monument permission from Historic England and persuaded fellow archaeologist Dave Stewart to help me survey the site.

An overcast March day in 2017. I parked at the National Trust base at Filcombe Farm, Chideock and asked for advice on the best way to drive my car, loaded with the survey equipment, to the top of the hill. The rangers shook their heads, the track was too rough and steep, so they loaned us their four-wheel drive Land Cruiser for the day. I had a reasonable grip on the controls by the time I crossed through Morcombelake, found the narrow road beyond and then negotiated the steep track up to the site.

We divided the ground into a 20m grid and then set up the earth resistance meter and the magnetometer device. Throughout the day, we walked systematically up and down the survey area to record what lay beneath the ground. My feeling was that if quantities of Saxon iron still lay within the barrows then the magnetometer would highlight their location easily. However, any readings of that sort turned out to be bits of rusting modern metalwork jutting from the soil, perhaps remains of fencing or leftovers from WWII. Our survey findings turned out to be inconclusive.

The view south across Whitchurch Canonicorum with its church tower in the foreground and Hardown Hill top left.

That day, Hardown was a lonely gloomy place. From time to time the mist cleared enough to reveal the church tower at Whitcombe but the coast to the south was hidden. On a good day, the views are wonderful and during my visit in February, it had been decorated by a rainbow arching across the landscape.

On such a cold bleak day we could feel the grimness of Hardown and perhaps the mood of a group of Saxon pioneers who had grounded their boat in enemy territory too far west, and ended their days here. The acid soils of this area mean that their bones would have completely disintegrated long ago. It is a mystery why this group of items ended up here, apparently found together in a heap rather than spaced around the bodies of the dead. One theory is that this is a hoard of items captured in conflict and buried up on the hill for retrieval at a later date. I suppose we may never know.   

Further Reading:

Austin, M. 2014. ‘Rethinking Hardown Hill’, The Antiquaries Journal 94, 49-69

Evison, V.I. 1968. ‘The Anglo Saxon Finds from Hardown Hill’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 90, 232-239

Wingrave, Dr V. H.W. 1931. ‘An Anglo Saxon Burial on Hardown Hill’ Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 53, 247-249

The Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society are being digitised and many can be found on the Dorset Museum web site. Proceedings – Dorset Museum & Art Gallery https://www.dorsetmuseum.org/proceedings/

Corfe Castle: Bringing up the Bodies

The National Trust excavations at Corfe Castle mainly dealt with the archaeological evidence left during this citadel’s last occupation as a residence during the English Civil War. Specifically the leftover debris from the sieges of May to August 1643 and May 1645 to February 1646.

In the first siege, the castle was held by by the owner’s wife, Lady Mary Bankes with her servants and tenants together with a few local Royalist troops. A remarkable defence given the numbers of Parliamentarian soldiers ranged around the medieval walls. The siege was raised by the advancing Royalist army which put the enemy to flight via ship to Poole.

The second siege was like a tightening screw, which, by October 1645, had turned Corfe Castle into a prison with diminishing supplies. The Royalist cause was becoming increasingly hopeless and the weather pitched into a severe winter.

We found pistol and musket shot, jagged iron fragments from at least two exploded mortar bombs, fragments of a grenade and various calibres of cannon ball strewn around the castle.

Who was in the castle during the sieges and how did they live? … and how did they die?

Before the National Trust excavations there had been two previous digs both in Corfe’s Middle Ward/West Bailey. One took place in the 1880s and was supervised by local historian and Corfe Castle expert Thomas Bond. The other lasted from 1949-1954 and during this time officers of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments dug the trenches.

Thomas Bond had noticed an ancient and unusual ‘herring bone’ wall built using numerous slates of Purbeck limestone arranged in zig-zag fashion. This ancient wall had survived because, in 1202, King John gave an order for the West Bailey to be enclosed by a new thick curtain wall and the south wall of this new design was built against the herring-bone wall holding it in place, though the rest of this building was demolished. Bond wanted to know the extent and age of this earlier building and dug a trench to follow the wall foundations to determine its plan. RCHME found that his excavations had removed much of the archaeology. However, publication of the RCHME dig in an archaeological journal, in 1960, was able to supply plans and elevations of this ancient building and a record of the surviving stratigraphy… but much was excluded from this report. The clue being that the title of the journal they published in was Medieval Archaeology .

In a couple of throwaway lines the published report noted that human remains had been found and these were probably early 17th century in date because fragments from tobacco pipes had been found beneath the bones.

This evidence for a burial ground was important information and I assumed that these excavated bodies belonged to Royalist soldiers killed during the defence of the castle.

When Corfe was surrounded by the enemy, the defenders were denied access to the consecrated ground of the parish church graveyard, and therefore a quiet corner of the castle needed to be utilised.

I have been using my time to finally write up and publish the National Trust Corfe Castle excavations and have just come across the RCHME archive held at the Historic England library in Swindon. This includes excavation notebooks dating to 1950 when trenches A1, A2 and B1 were dug in that secluded piece of ground at the west end of the West Bailey.

It was good to discover more detail from these excavations. I began to read the summary account of trench A1 which had been located above the demolished west wall of the ‘herringbone’ building. ‘The top layers were unstratified and disturbed’ (understandable I thought….that was Thomas Bond digging through the archaeology without record, the horror of his Victorian investigation) ‘A1 layers (1) and (2) contained flints, charcoal and other burnt material, animal bones, disturbed human bones, and mixed pottery.

Disturbed human bones… I wondered whether there were other references to these burials. The notebook for trench A2, which was dug at the north-west corner of the ‘herringbone’ building, described the excavation of an almost undisturbed skeleton. The body had been placed on its back aligned east to west with hands placed over the pelvis. The skull had been to the east but was missing because the 1949 trench had uncovered it, and, ‘Mr Chambers had presented it to the art master at Corfe’. … What!?

The ground west of this burial had been disturbed by past excavation and contained ‘heaps of human bones’ including another skull which was thought to belong to a woman. When trenches A1 and A2 were joined together the skeleton of a young child was found in the baulk.

Trench B1 lay at the angle between two standing walls, the south ‘herringbone wall and the cross-wall, which, it seemed, formed the east boundary of the graveyard. Here, the skeleton of a woman was found, laid east to west on her back within a wooden coffin ‘fixed with large iron nails’.

The section drawings of the trenches reveal the positions of human bones, one shows the cross-section of a rib cage another the profile of an extended east to west skeleton. The excavator’s reaction to this graveyard indicates that it was of no interest… ‘the coffined skeleton can be dismissed as post-medieval in date’… a curious reaction given that these remains represent evidence of a human story not recorded in military records. Considerable additional information concerning the age, sex, medical history, aDNA profiles and cause of death might have been determined from these discarded remains.

The only recorded deaths amongst the defenders of Corfe Castle are of soldiers.

In describing the end of the first siege, Royalist propaganda publication The Mercurius Rusticus records ‘the loss of only two men’ …. and in his account of the second siege Parliamentarian commander John Fitzjames was pleased to report that the castle was captured ‘with the loss only of one common soldier on our side and a Lieutenant and Cornet of the enemy’.

If these deaths took place towards the end of fighting (as is implied) their burial in the church graveyard would have been possible… so perhaps none of these reported casualties were interred within the West Bailey burial ground.

Though the RCHME trench notebooks largely refer to disturbed piles of human bones… of the remains that could be identified, none were identified as men but instead belonged to at least two women and one child. It seems that this burial ground was largely occupied by the wives, mothers, children and perhaps servants of the garrison. Presumably they died during the deprivations of the sieges and particularly through the long cold winter of 1645-1646.

Archaeology provides the evidence for previously unconsidered stories of ordinary people whose identities are lost from history. These badly recorded burials are a last testimony of the besieged women and children, the unknown, tragic, non-combatant casualties of Corfe Castle’s Civil War.

Please let me know if you can provide information on similar burial grounds associated with English Civil War besieged places.

New Clues to Chedworth’s Lost 1860s Archive

Chedworth in Gloucestershire is one of the best preserved Roman villas in the country…. perhaps the very best. For many centuries it lay hidden in the woods, the remains settling under the annual fall of leaves as the years passed.

It would have been so good to have been there at its discovery.

The trouble has always been the lack of understanding of the archaeology which was swept away during its excavation.

When one of Lord Eldon’s keepers came across it, in June1864, there was great excitement. Eldon’s uncle James Farrer, was attending a shooting party at the Stowell Park Estate. He was an antiquarian, and when the discovery of tesserae was brought to his notice he immediately proposed an excavation.

Within weeks the trees were cleared and the dig began and by 1868 the layout of the site, which the National Trust visitors see today, had been created. The capped walls marking the layout of the villa rooms, the lodge (built for the villa’s custodian) and the museum built beside it to house the finds from the excavation.

From this 1860s excavation we have a short article in the Journal for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland but it contains no plans or photographs. This reported description without images is all we have… apart from a few other scraps of information.

That was until Jeannette told me about her research.

The 1860s are not prehistory.. and in all the years I excavated at Chedworth I rather hoped that something would emerge from contemporary printed sources. Particularly as so many historic books, newspapers and magazines from that time are gradually being digitised and placed online. Jeannette is writing a dissertation on the history of the Chedworth excavation and has gradually worked through the back copies of many publications.

It just goes to show that diligent and systematic detective work can tease out significant new information.

The first surprise came from a piece in the ‘Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucestershire Graphic’ published April 19th 1930. A journalist had been sent to cover recent excavations at the Listercombe Bottom Roman villa (Chedworth’s neighbour to the west) and his guide was 82 year old Frederick Norman a retired keeper.

Mr Norman mentioned that he had been part of the Chedworth dig. ‘Perhaps the only man still alive who was part of it. I was 15, there have been lots of stories about how it was found but I can tell ye’.

Mr Farrer identified the bits the keeper had found and he said ‘there is a building somewhere in that wood and in the summer I’ll come back and we shall see what is buried there’.

The retired woodsman continued ‘We began on the Monday morning and Mr Farrer didn’t come till the morrow’. He said that they first found stones in rows like staddle stones. He was probably describing the monolithic pilae for a hypocaust, most likely those still visible in Room 26 in the North Range.

Then the steward of the Stowell Park Estate, Thomas Joachim, arrived and told the diggers about a wall he’d seen in the wood and they went over to dig there. This turned out to be the site of Chedworth’s wonderful dining room mosaic, decorated with its scenes of the story of Bacchus and Ariadne .. with the images representing the four seasons surrounding them.

The shocking revelation from this eyewitness account was that this mosaic seems to have been complete when found but subsequently…partially collapsed…it seems through visitor pressure, losing precious detail.

Mr Norman described the excitement as the news of the find got out and huge numbers came to the dig. They had to be stopped as they were damaging the mosaic by poking it with sticks and umbrellas. The younger children earned pocket money by ‘holding the horses’ while the visitors crowded round the excavations.

Jeannette’s discoveries in ‘The Builder’ magazine were the most exciting. The August 1865 edition reports on a lecture given in Dorchester by Mr Farrer and quotes him directly.

Farrer describes the detail of what was being found while the excavations were still taking place in Chedworth Wood. In his report he references specific finds made within numbered rooms.. as though a numbered plan existed which he was referring to.

I asked Jeannette if she had found such a plan.. no… but this piece of writing gave us hope that there might be one somewhere.

The December 1866 edition of ‘The Builder’ supplied it. This was a great moment of discovery. The locations of some finds could now be pinpointed but this plan was created before the Lodge and Museum were built and before the North Range baths had been fully excavated. It shows additional doorways and walls which were previously unknown.

Jeannette’s research has opened up new avenues of research where fresh archival discoveries might be found.

We now know that Mr David Brandon was the architect responsible for designing the buildings at Chedworth. A reasonably well known Victorian architect who specialised in the fashionable Neo-Gothic…. Is his archive still available anywhere?

Then there is Mr Franks of the British Museum.. who Mr Farrer describes examining the famous silver spoon found in the West Range. It had the words Censorine Gaudeas inscribed upon it which translates as ‘may you rejoice or take pleasure Censorinus‘. Perhaps a gift to the Roman owner and the only named person we can link to Chedworth Villa.

This is probably one of the objects taken to London according to an 1868 issue of ‘The Builder’. It is likely to reside in the vaults of the BM and it would be wonderful if it could be returned, after its 150 year exile, to be displayed within the Chedworth Villa Museum.

One particular research path which must be examined, arises from a letter published in the ‘Cheltenham Examiner’ 6th July 1870 by Chris F. Hensley Land and Engineering Surveyor. He writes to say that he was commissioned by Sir Thomas Phillips to make drawings and surveys of the villa while it was being excavated and that these now reside at Sir Thomas’s home at ‘Thirlestaine’ Cheltenham.

Unfortunately, after the death of Sir Thomas, his archive was sold and the uncatalogued documents are now scattered across England, Ireland and America.

We now have a mission.. to try to track down Hensley’s drawings. It would be so good to find them.. but now..at least.. we know that they once existed and that they may still be out there … somewhere.

Perhaps, someone reading this, with links to a part of Sir Thomas’s archive, will be able to help. Can you imagine the potential… perhaps a drawing of the complete West Range dining room mosaic.. before its collapse.. WOW!

One last blog or perhaps another one day..

So this is my last day as a National Trust archaeologist and so it’s time for my last blog.

It is the 464th post on the Archaeology National Trust SW site.

Go back and look. There’s lots to read. Think of somewhere and type the name in the search bar. There’s much on Badbury… Chedworth (each excavation year 2013-2018 and 2023 …there are blogs for every day of each excavation) Cerne Giant and Corfe Castle where it all began. Bottle Knapp and the burials, Max Gate and the archaeology under Thomas Hardy’s House… the discovery of the lost 18th century mansion of Killerton, the Killerton Roman fort and then last year the finding of Stourton Castle.

Though the ones that move me still come from a deeper experience: Upon Cley Hill, Upper Bugle Street and From the Temple to the Palace.

The blog was begun by Nancy in the January of 2013. I asked her at the time why she would do this but she said that blogs were the up and coming thing and it would raise the profile of archaeology in the region. She was right of course.

Nancy started writing posts and encouraged me to do the same.

Eventually, I joined in and on 26th Jan wrote something on a Victorian ornamental dairy at Tyntesfield.

Who knew? There was a writing style beyond the scientific, cool and academic. I was hooked. Though we didn’t have much success in persuading others to join in ..

But now, Cat has expressed an interest in carrying this on and perhaps my successor Stephen will do the same when he joins the regional team in November.

Most recently.. I had ideas of writing something more on the cave excavation in Ebbor Gorge. Danielle’s excavation there has now reached down almost 60,000 years… wolf bones have been found below the hyaenas;

Or perhaps something on the last dig I was involved with a couple of weeks ago at Oldbury Camp… in the wrong place… on the edge of a thunder storm.

I also toyed with the idea of writing about my long search through the many boxes of pottery dug from the Shapwick Roman fort ditches, back in 1995…perhaps too boring… but there’s a kind of beauty in a handled Black Burnished beaker… perhaps… Were there later 4th century pot forms mixed with the late 2nd?

But ….time has run out …and if these blogs ever materialise it will be on martinpapworth wordpress rather than on this site… but who knows, I may pull the ivy and undergrowth away from the blog door … and unlock it again at some stage.

Corfe Castle and the Mystery Arch 3

Pam picks up a psychedelic football sized ball of water and places it in the sling. Hands me a rope and tells me to stand by the ticket office.

Gemma’s camera is on the Bastion looking down from the Inner Ward, Steve is covering from the Outer Gatehouse and Cress stands just in front of me. Pam says ‘Pull!’ and I yank the rope, the weight drops, the arm swings up and the trebuchet catapults the ball the length of the Outer Bailey to strike the upper terrace and erupt in a watery explosion.

Very 13th century… very satisfying.

Back to work.

As we lower the ground surface in front of the East Turret arch, we have peeled off the 1996 spoil, the 1992 topsoil, a rubbly layer representing the picked over remains of the 1646 demolition rubble … and beneath that… a mortary mix of debris containing exclusively 16th-17th century pottery.

Our scheduled monument consent from Historic England allows us to drop the ground surface by 0.5m.. enough to empty part of the arch to test whether it continues through the thickness of the 11th century Inner Ward curtain wall.

This morning I brought up the dumpy level and a blue tarpaulin to enable the lowering of the ground surface on the outside edge of the East Turret.

The tarpaulin is to stop spoil and stones spilling through the railings and bouncing down the hill into the traffic.

The level is to check the height of the arch and compare it with the ground surface at the outside face of the Turret.

Jon’s strimming yesterday has shown solid Tower stone corework and no archway visible on the south, east and north faces. There is a bit of an overhang and a void at ground level on the north side so Allan and I dig down in front of Cress’s camera. Just a blip… the solid mortared stone continues below the overhang.

From here it can be seen that the Tower has been built up against the face of the curtain wall. It’s punctured by just one or two long tie stones which the the 17th century masons used to anchor this addition to the earlier defence line.

We stop for an ice cream break.

Stephen says that his new research has demonstrated that the plot to take the Castle had been brewing for some weeks. Morale was low and Corfe’s commander Colonel Lawrence had gone over the wall to the enemy on 10th February. Lt Col Pitman had arrived a few days before, complete with his plan to betray the Castle. Parliament approved the plan on 16th and the Parliamentary soldiers entered the Castle through a sallyport on 27th.

Stephen adds that a historian, writing in 1902, had stated that the sallyport was on the north-east side of the Castle. This would fit nicely for our East Turret arch but the historian gives no 17th century reference for his claim.

Back to work.

We are sieving the spoil as it comes out of the arch. We find remains of meals, oyster and cockle shells, mutton and beef bones and even crab shell. We find white plaster and fragments of earthenware bowls and jugs with bright shiny yellow and green mottled glaze.

All looks pretty good for 1575 to 1645…though we find no musket shot or any other military hardware.

A sheep jaw full of teeth causes a stir among the onlookers.

This archway is not an alcove. The architecture and structural evidence demonstrate that it is a late construction punched through the Norman wall.

I set up the dumpy level on the ruins of the Gloriette and Stephen holds the staff.. first on the apex of the internal arch and then outside the Castle on the grass around the footings of the Turret.

The exterior ground surface is over 1m deeper than the vault of the arch. If the arch continues through… we should be able to see it on the outside.

The day is nearly over, Steve and Nicky have taken the soil out of arch top and a 2m long ranging pole is hammered through the remaining soil. It continues 2.2m from the interior arch face. It proves that this is not an alcove, the wall is 2m thick and the ranging pole has continued through and not juddered against a wall face.

We have to conclude that the arch runs through the width of the curtain wall without deviating. It does not slope downwards but runs through at a level for this distance. No window tracery to strike against….

This does seem to be an opening… a doorway… a sallyport ? Whatever.. it is blocked by the turret.

It’s tempting to make up stories…Is there a flight of steps within the Turret that allows a buried external sallyport entrance below the modern ground surface. No, unfortunately the terrain does not really allow for that.

Cress raises her camera. ‘Martin…how do you feel following the excavation’

‘Disappointed, it’s all been a complete waste of time.’

She looks perplexed and shakes her head.

‘Excited! We have improved our archaeological knowledge of Corfe Castle. Our dig has found a lost doorway… though its blocking by the construction of the later Turret has proved it to be late Tudor rather than Civil War. The Roundheads got in somewhere else… their entry point is still a mystery waiting to be unravelled.’

And after they did… on 5th March 1646, Parliament voted for Corfe Castle to be destroyed. By the end of that year, this ancient stronghold had been transformed into the ruin that so many thousands of visitors enjoy when they visit each year.

I wonder how many have passed through the Outer Gatehouse since Nancy, David and I began our archaeological work there back in 1986.

Good to have had the opportunity to have come back one last time.

Corfe Castle and the Mystery Arch 2

It’s a hot day. I’ve trampled the nettles and thrown down my National Trust waterproof. We’re sitting in the shade of the ruined Gloriette. Grateful for the ice creams Nicola has brought us.

From here there’s a view through the slighted curtain wall.. out across the heathland to Poole Harbour. A strip of blue on the horizon.

Stephen is telling us that he’s found the records to prove that the myth is wrong. Dame Mary didn’t stay in the besieged Castle until the end. Her husband John had died in Oxford in December 1644 and in the following July Mary had been granted passage to London through the Parliamentary lines.

Steve and Nicky have digitised the monitoring of the Castle ruins and will continue the work of Dawn and John documenting the changing conservation needs of this intricate and significant monument Dorset S.A.M No 1. This is great news.

Pam has been talking about the excavation to visitors who are watching intently from the fence-line around the hollow… it marks the location of the medieval Inner Ward well. Dame Mary is said to have thrown her silver down there but I’m sure that’s just another myth.

Gemma and Cress set up the cameras and ask me to call a halt to tea break and get people back to work. As ever, I do this with the authority of Sergeant Wilson in ‘Dad’s Army’.

The main finds tray holds the plastic of sweet wrappers and discarded cartons, the detritus of recent visitors…though Stephen has found 17th century pot and bone along the garden wall that has just been uncovered below the turf.

I have miscalculated…the 1992 archway is deeper than I had thought. I had forgotten that in 96 we’d redistributed the spoil from the Keep excavation around the well. So… we have to dig through this to reach the old ground surface.

I hop the fence and walk through a gap in the curtain wall to see the outside of the East Turret.

If our mystery arch is the inner face of the traitor’s gate sallyport then the external face should be visible within the turret structure. Nothing can be seen in the east where a roughly dressed stone face survives.. but on the north and south sides of the turret the stonework is hidden by ivy and Jon has come to strip the vegetation back so that any archway can be seen.

Nothing so far on the north side…. it all looks like mortared stone core-work to me. I ask Jon to strim the south side. Perhaps the route into any gateway once followed the strip of level ground against the face of the curtain wall … and then turned a right-angle within the tower .. this kink preventing a direct rush from an attacking force if the gate was opened.

The letter to Parliament by John Fitzjames, written on 27th February 1646, states that at 4-5am 200 men were supposed to get into the Castle but after 120 gained entrance, the Royalists smelled a rat and shut their sallyport against them. Who knows why that was .. perhaps someone let something slip …but it suddenly became clear that the Royalist reinforcements were really the enemy in disguise and the gate was blocked by the defenders.

Perhaps the entrance has some kind of portcullis mechanism that could be lowered quickly when necessary. This could be incorporated within a turret construction. It would be more difficult if it was just a gate through the wall. There are two simple gates like this in the West Bailey and another two in the Outer Bailey. A new 17th century sallyport built into the Inner Ward would make the Castle very vulnerable. Incorporating it into a turret with a barrier which could be dropped from above…would give it added security.

I go back to the trench and pick up my favourite mattock with the yellow fibre handle. We only have two days and I need to hack through the 90s into the 17th century.

We create a terrace, pushing the spoil from the east downslope to the south and west into the well shaft hollow.

The day is almost over before the trowel slips under the wall face and scribes the upper curve of the arch. I was beginning to think the whole thing was an illusion but there it is.

We have now reached the ground surface of 92 and here the masons dripped the mortar on the turfline and built a foundation block against the arch to fix the safety railings.

We would need to work hard tomorrow.

Pam said she would get me to fire the trebuchet at 9am.

Cress set up the camera to ask me my thoughts after the first day.

‘So far, so good… all to play for’….. but I have doubts.

Corfe Castle and the Mystery Arch

I can feel the judder of the limestone setts beneath my tyres as I drive up to the metal gates padlocked across the Outer Gatehouse.

The deep Castle ditch drops away below me on either side.

It’s been a long time since I drove into the Castle. It was tarmac back then…so.. before 94.

Cress and Gemma had asked me to get there for 8am and I was taking the tools up to the top terrace.

It’s no longer possible to drive into the West Bailey through the South West Gatehouse. I did it in 87 but the new steps have stopped vehicles since 89.

Their cameras cover everything as we lug the tools up to the Inner Ward.

We are heading to the East Turret which was added to to the curtain wall c.1610-1620. It’s not shown on Ralph Treswell’s detailed map of the Castle of 1586 but it’s there by the time of John Hawsteed’s survey.

We bumped into the top of the arch in 1992.

That year we had lowered the ground surface against the east curtain wall to dissuade people from a sudden risky climb up to view the tooting Swanage steam train. Bit of a visitor management failure.

All we did was reveal that the mound covered a ruined flight of steps making it easier to scale the wall.

The next plan was to block access to the East Turret by building a railing and it was during the construction of this that the top edge of the arch was revealed.

So, 32 years later, a new conservation project ‘Caring for Corfe Castle’ has been launched. Frost, heat, rain, ivy and wind have taken their toll and the walls of the Inner Ward are to be consolidated. Ruins need regular attention. A falling stone could take out one of the many thousands of cars negotiating the road through the Corfe gap… far below.

This work will be covered by BBC ‘Hidden Treasures of the National Trust’ but as well as conservation.. the programme covers past events and personalities and Dame Mary Bankes is a key Civil War personality at Corfe Castle. She and her family stayed in their Corfe Castle home while her husband Chief Justice Sir John Bankes attended the court of King Charles I in Oxford.

In the early part of the war, May-August 1643, Mary is documented as defending her fortress home from the Parliamentarians until the advancing Royalist army caused the attackers to retreat to Poole.

What about the end?

The story goes that when Corfe was finally captured on February 27th 1646. Brave Dame Mary Bankes was allowed to keep the keys of the Castle in honour of her brave defence. These can still be seen, ranged above the library fireplace at Kingston Lacy House… which had been built to replace Corfe in the 1660s.

The final capture was not through assault but through subterfuge. Soldiers pretending to be Royalist reinforcements were let in through a sallyport or side gate.. and by the time they were discovered.. it was too late because they had already taken the principal buildings in the Inner Ward (the Keep and Gloriette) where most of the ammunition was housed.

A good story… but where was the gate? Could it be the arch we’d discovered in 1992. The BBC were keen to cover an investigation.

A small excavation could clear up the mystery and Sasha and Kate the Historic England Inspectors were supportive ..but asked for a Written Scheme of Investigation to set out the proposal before scheduled monument consent could be granted.

Could the 1992 arch really be a gateway or would it just turn out to be merely a garden alcove?

We will see.