Return to Stourhead: Day 5

Tim e-mailed me at Tisbury to say that the long trench G would stay open over the weekend.

Peter needed time to draw the sections and there was no rush to backfill… as long as the deep hole was fenced off at night to protect the unwary.

I drove over at 5 and found that the smaller trenches no longer existed.. the soil had been returned and the machine had compacted it. The turf had been replaced. Soon the scars would be hidden by the new spring growth.

Fantastic May was working its magic at Stourhead and the every plant seemed to be showing off. Particularly the gloriously colourful rhododendrons.

I walked over to Peter.. working with pencil, drawing board and tape measure. Head and shoulders visible. Down the long trench, out in the park.

A pleasantly-mild and over-clouded evening. Perfect for archaeology …. and the ground drying at last… the swallows had returned … and now flitted again… back and forth over the grassland.

‘Lorraine came today. She said the pottery found this week compared well with that from last July’

‘Did she identify anything medieval?’

‘Just the odd piece…the one sherd we were pretty sure about turns out to be Iron Age’

‘ I guess with all the earth moving and landscaping done over the years something earlier must have been disturbed. Martin and Anne, who did the geophysics last year, thought there might be a ring ditch in the park. Perhaps a levelled Bronze Age burial mound ‘

‘Most of the ceramics, as we’d expected, can be dated to the17th-18th century. A nice tobacco pipe bowl circa 1650’

‘Anything new today?’

‘Very little digging, mostly cleaning for photographs and recording the archaeology in the trenches.. before things got buried again. The Greensand lumps in Trench I might just be a land drain. One of the visitors suggested it.’

‘That makes sense’

‘None of the stones were mortared and it doesn’t follow the alignment of the other walls’

‘Did you check the line of the wall corner in trench H with the long wall in this trench?’

‘Yes we marked it out.. ‘old-school’.. with ranging poles, and found that the walls align with each other. It seems likely that they mark the west edge of a through route’

‘Then the 2025 sewage pipe will follow the trackway line abandoned 300 years ago.. between the North and South gates of Stourton Castle. It works for the archaeology…. can’t be certain …but it’s a good story.’

Peter smiles.

‘It’s always good to have story. It can be flexible and can be revised if anyone goes deep enough to see the Castle again. Anyway, we’ve proved that all the Stourton Castle remains will be protected below the line of the new sewage pipeline when it goes through next year. Only the top of Colt Hoare’s brick sewage culvert will be breached by the pipeline’

‘Thanks Peter. That’s what we needed to know… and you found the northern edge of the Castle’

‘Just as well we shifted the original trench location to the north’

‘Well.. it’s been brilliant. Do you need the tools any more?’

‘No, we’ve finished with them now. They’re stacked by the railings’

So I walked across the park….loaded up the car and drove away.

Return to Stourton Castle: Day 4

It rained a lot last night. It made the trenches pools of water and the clay stuck… changing everyone’s footwear into moonboots

I got to the site by 5pm and found Peter drawing.

Trench J in the Stable Yard.. a pond. The dig is finished there fortunately.

Trench I in the grass triangle outside the Stable Yard gateway, nicely cleaned the wall footings clear. They were being drawn.

Trench H by the railings the wall corner clear. Good blocks of dressed stone turning at a right-angle, the core-work poor, just clay and gravel. Perhaps the edge of a gateway.

Trench G, to the north, the long trench in front of Stourhead House.

A transformation and against what seemed likely yesterday.

The line of a wall foundation 0.7m wide could now be seen running the length of the trench, along its west side. It is cut by the earlier 19th century brick culvert but continues to the south where it is cut at the end of the trench by a feature filled with black soil, oysters, animal bone and pottery.

Trench G is just long enough to define the north end of the wall cutting the natural clay and presumably this means it marks the hoped for northern limit of Stourton Castle.

Despite the doubts yesterday. My trench placing instincts have held true.

Peter thinks it likely that the wall in G aligns with the wall corner in H and will check this by marking out the line with ranging rods tomorrow.

Friday’s the last day.

Return to Stourton Castle: Day 3

Today there was a 3pm meeting of the sewage pipe project team.

I brought my tape measure to check the depth of archaeology.

Peter showed us around and we chatted to everyone working on the site..some working on finds in the finds tent, some giving guided tours for visitors, some working in the trenches.

The diggers need ladders now… the trenches are deep.

If they work hard…. they can have the ladders back for tea break 🙂

From south to north. Here are the results from the trenches for day 3.

The 1.5m square trench J in the stable yard: Below the turf, a band of compacted gravel and stone, then a 20cm layer of clay and rubble then the natural clay. Chris, the engineer was pleased… no archaeology to get in the way of the sewage works there.

Trench I in the grass triangle on the north side of the stable yard gateway: There had definitely been a north to south wall here. It ran across the east half of the 2m by 1.5m trench. The footings were all Greensand rubble but the upper courses had been robbed out down to 1.1m below the surface.

The cutting of the robber trench through the natural clay was clear in the section. The 1720s demolition gang had removed the upper structure of the wall that might have impeded the 2025 pipeline. Chris gave this trench a thumbs up too.

Next we walked to Trench H at the park railings. This was 1.4m deep at the south end and 1.1m at the north edge of this 6m long by1.5m long trench. At the north end was a right-angled piece of cut stone walling bonded with white lime mortar.

This might be one side of a gateway leading from the outer to the inner courtyard but the trench is too small to be sure. Tomorrow’s excavation will reveal more details.

The main thing is that these structural remains of the Castle are over 1m deep so beyond the depth of the proposed sewage pipeline.

The last long trench which was located to pick up the northern boundary of Old Stourton House …had come down onto a trackway it seems… gravel and chunks of stone at a consistent level 1.1m-1.2m down from the surface and directly below a layer of black soil which contained lots of occupation debris.

Oysters, animal bone, stone roof tiles mixed with some pottery and window glass.

The brick culvert that was revealed yesterday cut through this surface but there were no walls in this long trench.

On Monday morning I’d wavered and decided to shift trench G to the north. The aim was to capture the original position of the north gateway…

I think I should have left it where it was…. general agreement from the assembly. It now seems that it lies under the grass a couple of metres to the south….

But the layers can be seen dipping in the section (perhaps sinking into a robber trench?) at the south edge of G.

The trench may just have clipped it.

We’ll find out tomorrow.

Return to Stourton Castle: Day 2

I arrived at Stourhead Park early and Peter was watching the mechanical excavator which was about to start Trench J within the Stable Yard.

In the 17th century, this was the outer courtyard of Stourton Castle.

The main late medieval and Tudor buildings were demolished in 1720 and their location forgotten, buried under over a metre of clay and rubble.

They were rediscovered last July under Stourhead Park, directly in front of Stourhead House.. which had been built by 1722.

The next trench I, cut into the triangle of grass in front of the Stable Yard had the line of the rubble footings of a robbed Greensand wall could now be seen here cutting the natural clay just over 0.5m down. The archaeology is much shallower on this southern end of the proposed sewage pipe route.

At the park railings, trench H had just come down onto a trackway cobbled with stone. This was probably the route from the courtyard to the now demolished Dairy and Home Farm shown on the 1785 map.

I was interested in the big trench G and as we walked toward it I could see that this had been dug almost a metre deep by the machine.

Across the centre had been cut a feature containing a round brick culvert about 0.8m diameter. Peter had carried out a watching brief for the ground sourced heat pump installed at Kingston Lacy House a couple of years ago and this culvert looked very similar to the brick structure encountered there.

The culvert in trench G headed straight for Stourhead House and fell away to the east. We agreed that we had probably come across the early 19th century sewage conveyance for the mansion.

Sewage seems to be the theme of this dig. All very necessary of course.

The circular brick culvert had cut through black soil with large numbers of oyster shells mixed with animal bone.

I feel that, in G, the dig is now poised above Stourton Castle.

Sewage & the Return to Stourton Castle

Last July, when we located the site of Stourton Castle.. saw the footings of this once great medieval house… demolished in 1718-1721… found it over 1m deep beneath the grass in front of Stourhead House in Wiltshire.

Last July, when our excavation trenches were backfilled by machine and we replaced the blocks of turf…. just 2 weeks after we began the dig.

We thought it would be unlikely that the site would ever need to be disturbed again in our lifetimes.

That was before the January meeting in front of Stourhead House with Chris the engineer and Sarah the project manager.

Sewage is a thing this year. National Trust houses that are not linked to the mains are non-compliant … and Stourhead has an ancient dispersal system that leaks into the park along old soakaway channels.

Chris said that the mains linkage route is much needed and should take a direct line across the park through the north gateway of the stable yard.

‘That route runs right down the middle of the demolished Old Stourton House. Could you deflect the line east of the stable yard or… west of it’

‘To the east it cuts through the roots of too many parkland trees and to the west the gradient is wrong and there are other trees to negotiate’

‘How deep does the trench need to go’

‘With a gravity based system and widest diameter pipe.. just over 3m as it approaches the park railings’

‘That’s 2m into the archaeology…. could you design the pipeline so that it doesn’t need to penetrate beneath 1m? ‘

‘Annoying’

A telling silence

‘But yes we can design it to avoid the structural archaeology’

Though…can we be sure that the all the building remains are over 1m deep?

In 2023, two of our trenches lay west of the pipeline route and one to the east and all consistently struck building remains 1.0-1.2m deep below the turf.

What if a Castle iceberg survives at a higher level on the line of the proposed pipeline?

We don’t want any surprises when the pipeline is installed in September 2025.

That’s why, four evaluation trenches are to be dug across the park next week to reveal the depth of the Castle footings along the pipeline route.

This time, Peter of Terrain Archaeology will supervise the work backed up by the Stourhead HART team, volunteers and staff.

I’ll string out the trench locations, bring the tools and watch the work begin on Monday.

In the furthest trench from the stables I’m hoping to find the northern boundary of the Castle. Our July trenches found a fireplace and walls in Trench B but 30m north in Trench C.. just black soil with no building remains.

Our new 12m long trench lies between the two and hopefully will find the northern edge of the building complex….

We’ll see.

Civil War Finds at Corfe Castle

Stephen and I have settled at the corner table in the National Trust tea room.

Outside is Corfe market square and the tower of the church. From here I can see the flow of visitors approaching the bridge to the Castle.

We are considering the new evidence which Stephen has found concerning the1640s sieges. The individuals who were involved in various ways on both sides of the English Civil War. Their various points of view and their descriptions of this tragic time. Witnesses & partakers of the conflict.

There are two well known documents, though they tell a small part of the story.

The first, is the account of the first siege (May to August 1643) written in the Mercurius Rusticus… a Royalist propaganda publication.

The second, was written on 27th February 1646 by John Fitzjames, a Parliamentarian Captain who describes the fall of Corfe Castle as the last defenders are laying down their arms (see below).

These documents leave many questions unanswered .. and Stephen is opening dusty documentary doors and walking through 17th century archive corridors to find hidden accounts… new angles… to get closer to the truth of what happened.

Beyond the history of course is the archaeology. What can be said of the conflict from what has been left behind.

Below the turf….the detritus of generations of visitors…the lolly sticks and the Twix wrappers (pre and post decimalisation…we have a great typological sequence). Under this, the mortar droplets and stone chippings of 19th-20th century conservation masons… At a deeper level lies the robbing rubble of the 17th-18th centuries…when much good stone was repurposed to rebuild Corfe Village.

I look out of the tea shop window again and remember the quirky, larger than life inserts into humble cottages …nicked from the ruined Castle. Huge fireplaces and finely dressed chunks of medieval ashlar.

Beneath all this lies the great Parliamentarian earthquake event of 1646 ..when the Castle was demolished by a team led by the ‘Roundhead’ Captain Hughes of Lulworth.

The undermined and collapsed demolition debris seals a rich archaeological layer… the dark black loamy silt left behind by the besieged Royalist defenders of Corfe.

Fragments…. not always immediately understandable, but as we are revisiting what we excavated 1986-1993… and as Jackie places each item on the National Trust Collections Management System .. the digital database….new information is revealed.

For example……

The three handled dark grey jar Nancy excavated at the Outer Gatehouse.. turned out to be a powder filled hand grenade. The fuse lit, then swung on a cord fitted between the handles and then lobbed over the curtain walls.

The cannon balls we found.. most whole but one split in two through impact and lying on the path to the West Bailey. They are different diameters and range in size from the 6 inch calibre Demi-cannon siege gun to the more manoeuvrable 2 inch Falconet.

Lead pistol and musket shot was scattered everywhere. Some flattened by impact on walls. There were also strips of lead which had been left over from the process of making musket balls. The regularly spaced blobs along the strip revealed where balls had been detached for use after being cast in a mould.

We excavated two musket balls linked by a bar which turned out to be examples of ‘dumb-bell’ shot designed to spin in flight and inflict greater damage.

A crook shaped piece of iron was a musket rest to hold the heavy 1640s hand guns in place. These were fixed in the upper end of a wooden stave which rested on the ground to steady the gun to enable careful aim.

A strange lead object found in the stone demolition debris at the Outer Gatehouse is interpreted as part of a fuse and this may be related to two curving jagged fragments or iron over 2.5cm thick.

One found in the rubble beside the East Guard Chamber had split along the line of a 2cm diameter hole (to take the fuse). Another piece was excavated against the curtain wall in the West Bailey.

‘They’re from mortars’ Stephen said.

I imagined the barrel of this squat form of artillery breaking apart in a poorly made or overenthusiastically charged firing.

‘No, these are from mortar bombs fired from mortars’.

This large, thick walled, hollow type of ammunition was filled with gunpowder, the fuse lit and then fired in a high arc over the walls.

A skilled operative could time the fuse to explode in mid-air causing awful injury and sapping the morale of the Castle defenders. An alternative was to fill the bomb with musket shot and jagged metal this was ‘murthering shot’ … not very nice at all.

‘The women of the besieged defenders were sometimes put on mortar bomb watch so that they could dowse the bombs with buckets of water before they exploded’

Surely not !

Such items …found in the excavations…give a horrific sense of reality to the history of the months long struggle of the Royalists within Corfe Castle.

No wonder Captain Lawrence let the Parliamentarians in. The game was up and the King’s cause was lost.

But then the Papworths are from Cromwell’s country in East Anglia and Stephen is on the King’s side.

Nevertheless, we leave the cafe’ as friends and pass through the defences of the Outer Gatehouse, cross the Bailey and stand where the Fourth Tower is linked by a wall to the South-West Gatehouse.

This must be a Civil War wall. It’s not shown on the 1586 map. The four loops wide enough for muskets. I climb up to one …and squint through it towards the west where I see the siegeworks known as ‘Cromwell’s Battery’

Who stood here to defend this place 380 years ago…..watching the Royalist sun set in the west.. their troubled thoughts….what were they thinking.

Corfe Towne, February 27th 1646. To the Honourable William Lenthall Esquire. Speaker of the House of Commons.

Honoured Sir,

Pardon, I beseech you, my lateness & my haste. My good newes is the cause of both. This morning ‘ twixt 4 & 5, a party of six score firelocks gott into the Castle. Two hundred was our number intended and agreed on. But ‘ ere all could be gott in, the enemy discovered it & shutt their Sally-post against us. But as god would have it, the six score within posses’d theirselvess of the King’s and Queene’s Towers (where the greatest pte. of the ammunition lay) which are the two strongest Wards of the Castle. Then the dispute began ‘twixt us & the enemy (who only possesses the dungeon & 2 or 3 small Towers on the outmost wards). The dispute held 2 howers. How they cry quarter & run over the walles to us soe that the castle is like to bee youres within this hower. The Particulars shall bee withall speed presented unto you. My hast enforces me to recommend the relation of the Particulars at lardg to the bearer an eye wittness thereof. I am sir

Your most humble servaunt, John Fitzjames

Flight along the Roman Road to Badbury

A room of people.

The last speaker is about to finish …

Giving talks was once traumatic …. it has become easier.

and there is backup.. Amanda has created some great site distribution plans and Keith has created an extraordinary terrain model from the LiDAR point cloud.

20 minutes scheduled… to pitch for the extraordinary archaeology of the Kingston Lacy Estate.

Around and across the tables.. are various maps…a range of sources for KL’s woodland design day.

and the new powerpoint lights the screen. I’m on… but where to start.

A five minute piece on the wider Estate and then a cross-section through time.

A taste of what lies beneath the fields here. That which is largely invisible.. though the evidence is packed below us. All that potential to tell.. the many, many stories of past lives.

A rapid flight through time…along the Roman Road to Badbury.

It’s like an island… though with a northern land link into Cranborne Chase.

Think of two triangles and three stripes. The outer triangle forms the boundary of rivers. The Stour to south.. with its tributaries… to the west the Tarrant and, to the north-east the Allen.

The corners of the inner triangle are marked by three archaeological hubs. At the highest point to the north.. Prehistory and Badbury Rings, Roman Shapwick to the south-west and Medieval Kingston Lacy to the south-east.

The stripes? They’re dictated by the terrain of the land. The sheep pasture downland around Badbury on the high ground; the arable, in the middle, on the downslope.. and the lush cow pasture beside the rivers.

Land use divisions that have dictated over 6000 years of farming here.

Things are flagging. I need to crank up a gear.

A high 3D LiDAR view… from Sturminster Marshall meadows across the Stour to Badbury.

A straight, clear line scored across the landscape… aimed at the distant western edge of the hillfort.

1500 years on.. and only Shapwick High Street still uses the road… but the line is still clear in the landscape.

This was like a Late Roman motorway. Imagine the timber bridge crossing. Its waterlogged timbers may still survive in the mud.. and .. think of the palaeoenvironmental evidence here… the pollen preservation in the river deposits. A deep record of the changing vegetation patterns and the increasing influence of farming communities back to their very start….

That agricultural revolution as we closed out of the Mesolithic.

We fly over sleepy Shapwick and switch on the geophysics plot. This.. once the second Roman town of Dorset, packed with streets and houses built over its Iron Age predecessor.

Here is the triple ditched fort but the road smashes across everything. Those imperial compulsory purchase orders as occupants of the town were displaced.

In 2004, we found a well under the road. Full of stuff, including a cluster of mid 4th century coins… so the road must be later than that.

Here’s something made of granite. A Cornish Neolithic polished axehead. Found by a Roman and tossed in the well. How did that reach Kingston Lacy…?

And now we are beyond the town, flying over the geophysics for two long ditched rectangles. Neolithic burial mounds ploughed flat by medieval open field farmers.

Here is the Roman amphitheatre. Said to be a WW2 bomb crater though shown on an 18th century map .. but Bronze Age. Here is the skeleton of the cow in calf carefully laid on the floor of its inner ditch.

The road ghost has reached the B3082 Blandford Road, flanked by William Bankes’s majestic Beech Avenue, planted in 1835.

On its north side I point to a blue dot where the cars turn to enter Badbury car park

‘Here, in 1988, something green and heavy fell from a drainage ditch’.

I open a plastic box and place a bronze, 3000 year old palstave axe in Ellie’s hand. It gradually travels round the room.

Here, the Roman road crosses a huge earthwork, contemporary with the axe.

‘In 1989, during the planting of the second beech avenue we excavated a ‘V’-shaped ditch ..3m deep and 3m wide. Its embankment was on the Wimborne side. Some long forgotten threat towards Blandford in the later Bronze Age?

Beyond the Beech Avenue, we’re almost at Badbury but here the road is at its best. Almost 30m across..outer bank, ditch, berm, agger, berm, ditch, outer bank. A huge construction project built across the land.

A great LiDAR view shows the road hacking through a group of Early Bronze Age burial mounds. Some were levelled by it, two are pristine, unexcavated with their burials intact. The largest, lost its east side during the Road’s construction.

And.. beyond this lies the Roman temple and then the hillfort. Neolithic and Bronze Age before the Iron Age occupation. Abandoned when the legions came but occupied again when they left… when things were breaking down…towards the end of the 5th century.

Surely the Road and the outer rampart are contemporary…and the ‘Devil’s Footprint’ cuts the road then is built again. Hidden clues in the landscape about sub Roman conflict… and if there was time enough.. then surgical incisions at rampart and road and ‘Footprint’ and road would answer the questions.

And now we are at the Roman crossroads… From here there is a choice… Ilchester, Bath, Old Sarum or Hamworthy.

‘This needs to be in pasture to link High Wood with the Oaks’

‘We’re almost there’ says Amy…. and the road heads north towards Sorviodunum.. across the Estate boundary into Cranborne Chase.

The Corfe Castle Arrowheads

We found our first arrowheads in the West Bailey in 1987… deep beneath the 1970s concrete base… made for the telescope which once gave visitors a magnified view of the Dorset countryside.

Back then, the ground surface continued over the curtain wall. The edge of the Castle was lost. Our mission was to show off this 13th-century structure by lowering the ground by a metre.

We started in April and finished in June… digging through Twix wrappers and Victorian coins, traces of an 18th century garden… then, through thick 1646 demolition rubble.

Once, on a wet day, a visit to Swanage hospital.. a block of stone slipped from my hand and crushed it against the wheelbarrow.

Beneath the rubble… were the musket shot of the 1643-5 Civil War sieges …and then, below theTudor roof tiles…. we were ready to lift the lid on the medieval period.

It was then that we found our first arrowheads.. two on a gravel surface and one in a dark soil. They lay just above the cutting of the foundation trench for King John’s curtain wall. 

Royal accounts describe the building of this wall between 1201-1204… so our arrowheads came to rest in the later 13th century and lay undisturbed until we dug them up 700 years later.

In 2023, the Corfe Castle collection was photographed and catalogued and placed on the National Trust’s collections management system.

………..

It is now available for anybody… which tends to be someone with a specialist interest …and a desire to examine Corfe artefacts to link them with evidence from the wider world…joining the pieces, to build our knowledge … about all sorts of things.

That’s why Will contacted me and introduced me to Hector who together came to our Tisbury office on Friday …to examine our seven arrowheads and a crossbow bolt.

They are both arrowsmiths. Will brought a set of replica arrows he’d created from the finds drawings and photographs. However, nothing like seeing the real thing they said.

‘Wow. These are so good to see’. Each is medieval and different.. but only the 1987 arrowheads come from a medieval context, the rest were found in ground churned up by the English Civil War.

First our 1987 ones.

1.A long needle bodkin .. an armour piercing military arrowhead, perhaps case hardened by plunging when hot into a horn and hoof powder mix, then, to infuse the carbon, dousing in cold water… to fix the chemical reaction.

2.A short military arrowhead .. they were fascinated by the welded wings and ridge.. how were the fletchers able to make it quickly? The skill of the arrowsmith was to mass produce to order. This one, not armour piercing …but still an efficient killer.

3.The next was a strange inverted crescent type head. ‘This one’s for hunting’ they said for despatching rabbits and birds. If you miss.. this arrow won’t disappear into the ground but will bounce of the surface.. easy to recover.

What else ? A couple more armour piercing bodkins.. but smaller.. sharp, lean and nasty.

Then an impressive barbed and tanged classic looking arrowhead. Broad and mean. Hector said it was good for hunting red deer. A longbow arrow like this would judder into the beast creating a wide wound…designed to increase fatality.. the barb would stop it from falling out.

I mentioned that Corfe Castle lies at the centre of the Purbeck forest. A hunting ground loved by King John. The 1586 map of the ‘Island’ shows many red deer, prancing around the northern heathlands. None in Purbeck now.

‘This one’s a crossbow bolt’ Will said. ‘It has a heavy triangular head. A cross-bow is more maneuverable.. it can be fired from an arrow loop. The longbows are best used from the wall tops to fire the arrows further, arcing out…up to 300m out from Castle Hill.. down onto any attacker.

They measured and discussed how each would have been made in the smithing workshop, the type of iron… how it was heated and hammered into a die.

The last one seemed less interesting.. a flattened pointed blade. Found in the great ditch beside the bridge leading up to the 13th-century South West Gatehouse.

“We love this one” said Hector “It’s Norman, a type used at the Battle of Hastings, 10th-11th century, a typical warhead of its time”

It was good to meet them, particularly to gain an understanding of these finds through an arrowsmith’s eyes.

‘There’s only two of us that recreate medieval arrows’ said Will.. ‘I’m still learning from Hector.. but now that I’ve seen your Corfe Castle arrows … the ones I made aren’t good enough yet. I’ll go back to forge and make them better for you’.

Next time we’ll meet at Corfe Castle. Stand in the 3rd Tower of the Outer Bailey and consider King Stephen’s siege-work through the narrow western arrow slit.

Try to re-imagine the thoughts of a medieval archer.

D 4 B & the New Chedworth Villa Dating

The Digging for Britain tent this year was erected on a hillside high above the National Trust’s Snowshill Manor.

Snowshill, contains Charles Wade’s fantastic collection of objects …from weaving shuttles to suits of Samurai armour…. but that’s another story. It’s the most northerly property I visit and a long way from Warminster.

On a good day, the Digging for Britain tent would have had fantastic views across the Gloucestershire countryside. I arrive in wind and rain after following the D 4 B signs up the back lanes from Snowshill village.

The landscape today is overcast and bleak.

Waved into a parking place, I get soaked crossing a field carrying the Chedworth finds in a box… and enter the storm buffeted tent.

There had been an accident at Melksham and I was late.

One of the crew said that if I took my shirt off she could dry it. I declined and they brought a huge hot air heater which did the job.

Then the production team show me where to put the Chedworth items and I place them lovingly on three black round plinths on a table at the far end of the tent.

What have I brought?

1: A chunk of Cotswold limestone gravel cemented with mortar

2: A small plastic bag containing small fragments of charcoal

3: A base sherd of black pottery decorated with parallel lines.

‘Is that all’ Alice pulls a face and smiles.

It’s a trick for me to explain myself.

The mortared gravel (item 1) was the hardstanding for the mortar floor that covered the foundation trench and abutted the wall. It sealed the charcoal and the pot sherd in the foundation trench filling for the wall.

This charcoal (item 2) in this labelled finds bag provided the exciting new radiocarbon dates and the pottery sherd (item 3) found beside it, is the ideal fabric to confirm such late dates (Late Roman Shelly Ware).

If the wall was built so late.. then the mosaic that abuts it.. has to have been built then too…. but that’s not right. Everyone knows that mosaics were not being constructed at that time.

I step to the screen. I’d sent some images to be uploaded. Here was the air photograph of the mosaic in Room 28 in the North Range of Chedworth Roman Villa. Here is the west wall which the mosaic abuts and here is Room 27.

In 2017, we found the trench dug as a foundation to build the wall. The mortared limestone hardstanding (item 1) in Room 27 had been built over it.

Eleanor gives me a black marker pen and a piece of paper. I begin to draw a section.

I draw it once as a distant shot and once again with the camera above me.

So the charcoal ( 2) which gave the C14 dates was from the foundation trench which is sealed by the floor (1)….. and therefore it must be earlier.

That’s why…. in 2017… it was a complete surprise to get the radiocarbon date from the charcoal of AD 424-544 at 95% probability. If you follow the stratigraphic argument and examine the drawing … there was no obvious way that the charcoal could get into the filling after the wall was built ……which the floors abutted…..

Therefore…. the mosaic was constructed….at the very earliest… 14 years after Roman rule ended in Britain.

‘That can’t be right’ said Alice

Yes…that’s what everyone said…. I’d only bumped into this date by mistake… I had to go back to get some more evidence … so six years later I have.

Chedworth 27/28 Day 1

Chedworth 27/28 Day 2

I reopened parts of the 2017 trenches. This was forensic surgery.. I knew where to go to get the samples I needed.

There were lots of charcoal fragments in the new short section of foundation trench I uncovered.

This was precious soil. I kept every bag-full so that it could be sieved and examined carefully… It contained tiny bones, painted plaster fragments and tesserae among other things.

In Room 28, I got a black plastic tube and took a soil sample for optically stimulated luminescence from beneath the mosaic itself.

I sent off three new samples of charcoal for radiocarbon dating.

‘So you’ve brought the results for us today. This is very exciting’

Yes

I drag across the screen with my finger and the next image is revealed.

But it is very disappointing.. the first of the new dates has a range of AD 130-339.

Well……there was always a risk that the new fieldwork would not support the 2017 sample. Jeopardy… There was a sense in the tent… that I had wasted everyone’s time..

but this is just showmanship of course.

I drag the next image onto the screen.

Our next new date AD 414-549 and our third date AD 420-560.

That first date? well, there is always a risk of some older charcoal mixing in with the newer material. That’s why I usually take at least three samples these days

‘And the OSL dating? Did you get a result from that ?’

That result was less clear-cut unfortunately… but Prof. Phil Toms at Gloucestershire University found a few quartzite grains within the sample that gave emissions of c. AD 400 and he concluded that the OSL result backed up the C14…. so, the mosaic had to have been constructed from the 5th century.

‘This changes our perception of the early medieval period! If the people at Chedworth could commission a new mosaic after Roman rule in Britain ceased… then we are looking at a market economy, functioning towns, craft workshops and industry, wealthy people doing up their stylish homes in the countryside’

Putting these 5th-6th century C14 dates together, the mid range date for the mosaic’s construction would be AD 475-495 ….so two to three generations beyond the time when we thought people occupied villas in style.

‘This has changed our perception of history !’ says Alice

‘Electricity’ I say …. and the camera pans out from an elderly bedraggled figure probably in need of a jolt to keep him upright.

Well…. it’s been a long day.

Digging for Britain Series 11 episode 6 will be shown on BBC 2 8pm Thursday 11th January and is currently available on BBC iplayer

…though much of what is written here did not make the cut..

The Mysterious Killerton Causeway

In Devon, on the Killerton Estate, there are landscape scale plans to plant many hectares of new woodland to enhance nature and improve biodiversity.

The ideal is to plant the trees where there is no archaeology.

In a long ploughed landscape, the surface traces of archaeology are difficult to determine. Most earthwork evidence has been spread by cultivation.

Some earthworks can still be seen using the Light Distance and Ranging technique (LiDAR for short)

One narrow straight ridge shows up very clearly on LiDAR. Its about 500m long about 15m wide. It fades into the landscape, builds to a strong earthwork and then fades out again.

It looks like a Roman Road but does not seem to be going anywhere.

If you do some homework you can see it for yourselves. Google Houseprice LiDAR click on LiDAR map of England and Wales https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SX95919978 and then click on the magnifying glass and type in Columbjohn Farm.

You can see it now in plan as a clear ridge across the field. Click on it and then click on the 3D button. This will give a you a 3D view of the kilometre of land the ridge crosses. Spin it round and you can see the ridge crosses lower land between two hills.

We noticed the causeway first in 2017 when excavating the 17th-18th century Killerton Folly north-east of Columbjohn Farm. That’s the steeper of the two hills on the LiDAR plot. You can see the pimple of the folly ruin as a blob on the summit.

Killerton Folly Day 2

This is our 2017 blog on the Folly excavation type in Killerton Folly into the Blog search window.

This winter, new woodland was proposed at Columbjohn Farm and the National Trust funded a geophysical survey to see whether there were any archaeological features in the fields.

This area included the straight ridge we had seen on the LiDAR and we were excited to see whether the geophysics confirmed this as an archaeological feature. Surely it must be man made but what was the point of it.

The survey also included the low hill at the south end of the causeway-like feature and when the geophysics came back it was clear that settlement was focused on this raised piece of ground.

A large rectilinear ditched enclosure occupied the hill’s western flank and it looked as though there were pits and structural remains inside it. The survey also showed other occupation features on the east side of the hill.

The causeway emerges from the north side of the hill and the geophysics shows parallel linear lines like side ditches marking both edges of the causeway. This feature bridges the lower land and then runs into the east side of the steeper Folly Hill to the north.

The enclosure on the south hill conforms to an Iron Age/Romano British farmstead, The causeway is also likely to be this sort of age as it ignores the post-medieval field boundary alignments.

I wonder what lies below and around the Folly Hill… perhaps future geophysics might show the evidence for the causeway’s destination..some kind of watchtower perhaps ?

Archaeology builds over time. Creates new information and from this new questions need to be answered.