Badbury and the Devil’s Footprint

This is about the 6th century… Dark Times.

You will need to go to Badbury Rings in Dorset and head to the west side of the outer rampart. Stand where the great Roman road, known as the Ackling Dyke, touches the hillfort and then look north.

From the Badbury Roman cross-roads take the road to Old Sarum (nr Salsibury) where there is another hillfort at another cross-roads. After the Roman conquest, just like at Badbury, a small Roman town grew up nearby. At Badbury it’s Shapwick (Vindocladia) at Old Sarum its Stratford sub Castle (Sorviodunum).

The Roman administration lasted about 400 years then the troops left for the continent and Britain sorted out its own politics. It broke up into factions, petty political infighting and one by one these new Romanised British states caved in to alien cultures from outside the old empire. Our modern counties tell the story of conflict and the place names of our villages and towns in the east are almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon. Bit by bit the Roman centres were abandoned or taken over. In recent years it has been suggested that British and Germanic incomers integrated more amicably than has traditionally been believed…but ancient DNA compared with DNA from modern populations argues for the old fashioned view …that the Brits were ethnically cleansed from the east.

The Saxons took Old Sarum in AD 552, their history book, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, states this. A worrying time for the Romanised peoples of Dorset and Somerset. Time to block the Ackling Dyke. It was too easy an access route for the invaders. The old earthwork marking the Dorset border, Bockerley Dyke, was strengthened and the road was blocked here (General Pitt Rivers discovered this during his excavations in 1890). It was re-opened again soon afterwards…

Early aerial photograph of Badbury Rings (Wessex from the Air 1928). The Ackling Dyke runs top centre to centre left. Notice the way the outer rampart touches the road and covers its south eastern bank and ditch. The Devil’s Footprint is top centre cutting the road at right angles. The line has subsequently been rebuilt but over the years has slumped into the old cutting.

Badbury at the cross-roads needed re-fortification. Imagine standing here in the 6th century.. can you feel the vulnerability. What happened?

There are three ramparts around the hillfort. The two inner ones lie close together and look similar…they are Iron Age. What about the outer one? It is further out, slighter, bit humpy…unfinished?. Some say it was built about AD 44 ..on the eve of the Roman Conquest, but stand on the west edge where it runs beside the Ackling Dyke and look at the earthworks.

Which came first? The great Ackling Dyke is 25m across. Late Roman banks and ditches flank the road on either side. Recent LiDAR laser scans, along with aerial photographs, show something new. The east road bank is cut by Badbury’s outer ditch. Excavation at Shapwick has shown that the road is late 4th century…so Badbury’s rampart is later still. Last week I visited and saw it on the ground.

Then there is the chalk quarry just a little to the north.. known as the Devil’s Footprint. It runs from the rampart across the line of the road to the steeper slope to the west. Once it was covered in gorse but NT rangers have now made the earthwork clearly visible and it is not a random digging. It cuts the Ackling Dyke at a right angle. A wide formidable defence acting as a cross-ridge dyke.

Back in 2004, we radiocarbon dated the re-occupation of the hillfort to the 5th century, so good evidence that Badbury’s people re-made this place as a fortress. The British Dorset militia quickly threw up Badbury’s outer rampart and dug the wide trench, the ‘Devil’s Footprint’,to hold back the Saxon tide…. well..now..as the archaeology of the earthworks has demonstrated, there’s a strong argument to be made for this.

Brean Down: Reindeer to Battery

Brean Down is a ridge of rock that sticks out into the sea on the south side of Weston Super Mare. Nearly all of it is a scheduled monument and rightly so, this is definitely an A* site for archaeology.

Brean Down looking NW a carboniferous limestone ridge on the south side of the Bristol Channel entrance.

Approaching it from the south across the Somerset Levels..through the caravan parks. The carboniferous limestone cliff looms up. A giant wind-break..the silts and sands are stopped by Brean and thousands of years worth of evidence of people’s lives has been buried by its slow accumulation.

At the bottom are reindeer bones.., some were remains of meals left by communities of hunters about 12,000 years ago.

The sand cliff from the beach looking east. The deposits have built up against the limestone cliff over thousands of years. The wind sweeps off the levels from the south and has buried archaeology from the remains of hunted reindeer 14,000 years old at the bottom to a Dark Age cemetery of AD 5th-6th century near the top.

Higher up have been found Neolithic flint tools covered by Bronze Age salt-working remains and near the top a Dark Age Christian cemetery below a Tudor rabbit farmer’s cottage. It’s virtually a… you name it we’ve got it ..sort of place and there is much more to be discovered.

Along the crest of the Down are visible earthworks,’celtic’ fields (remains of the Bronze Age to Romano-British farming), these small enclosures are intermingled with Bronze Age burial mounds, an Iron Age fort and a 4th century Roman temple.

The top of the Down looking east towards the Somerset coast. There are the remains of prehistoric fields and Bronze Age burial mounds here as well as an Iron Age hillfort and Romano-Celtic temple.

Other mounds have possibilities. Nick, who carried out the National Trust survey for Brean a few years ago wonders whether one mound facing the Bristol Channel might be a Roman light house or signal post which once guided trading vessels towards the mouth of the River Axe. He and Mark will test this theory in May with a couple of small trenches. Their geophysics has provided some encouraging results.

The Down is well worth a visit. Park in Brean Cafe’ car park beside the beach and take the long climb up the steps over the Brean sand deposits until the summit is reached. There are great views across the levels to the south or across Weston Bay and the Bristol Channel to the north. Follow the undulating spine of the ridge until you start to descend at the west end and there in front of you are the remains of a military base.

The first concrete bunker you come to was the command centre. It is a shell now but there is a WWII photo that shows the soldiers here with range finders, radios and charts on the walls. From here looking down to the left perched on the cliff is one concrete searchlight building, the other lies at the western tip of Brean.

Plan of the Palmerstonian fort gun emplacements before they were covered by new gun positions in WWII.

The main thing to look at here is the fort built to guard against potential attack by Napoleon III’s French troops. By the time it was ready in 1872 and the gunners were stationed there, the French had largely been defeated by Germany and the string of forts ordered by the Prime Minister along the south coast became known as ‘Palmerston’s Follies’

The barrack block built for 20 men only had about 4 or 5 men living there according to the census returns of 1881 and 1891. The officer’s house was lived in by the Master Gunner along with his wife and 6 children aged 1-11 years old. His army career had taken him to various parts of the Empire as his children had each been born in exotic foreign places.

In 1900, Gunner Haynes decided to fire a shot into the Gun Battery’s magazine and blew himself and part of the military base into bits. By 1913, the old Brean Battery had been turned into a Cafe’ and day-trippers came to use the old military base as a recreation area which had a swing and a see-saw. People went down into the munitions stores and signed their names on the walls. Brean NT volunteers have photographed and transcribed them and written a report. The cafe’ was in use throughout WWI but it closed down in 1936.

Brean Down Fort was a cafe’ from 1913-1936 and graffiti in the underground Victorian ammunition stores shows many visitors there during WWI.

WWII and the base was re-occupied. A series of bases for Nissan huts can be seen on the north side of the Battery and two new gun emplacements were built over the old Victorian gun sites. The Bristol Channel was a strategic position and needed to be guarded.

Towards the end of the war, as the invasion threat receded, the boffins moved in. Known locally as the ‘wheezers and dodgers’ they were based in Weston in the old Victorian Birkbeck pier and used the Down and beach beside it to test rockets and other devices, particularly in advance of the D-Day landings of 1944.

Beyond the gun battery is the rocky headland with the view towards the islands of Flat Holm and Steep Holm in the Channel. A WWII searchlight building can be seen. Part of its roof has been flipped back by a violent storm. To the right are the rails for an experimental rocket launcher created by the ‘wheezer and dodger’ boffins based in a requisitioned pier in Weston-Super-Mare.

At the end of Brean, beyond the Battery survives a pair of rails used as a rocket launching device.

Take a trip and go and look. Brean is stunning for nature conservation too but this is an archaeology blog after all so I won’t mention the Peregrines and the rock roses…oh I just did.

Arthur, Badon and Badbury

The end of our October walk standing on the inner rampart looking south beside the west entrance.

Each October I lead a walk at Badbury Rings as part of Dorset Archaeology Days. The weather is generally fine, I meet some great people and it’s an opportunity to share the stories of the place.

At the end, we walk up to the top of the rampart, we look out across the hillfort and surrounding landscape and I say.

“Some people believe that the battle of Mount Badon took place here”

blank faces

“But perhaps you know of Arthur. Not the romantic medieval mythical king but the person he’s based on”

Someone smiles “Yes but was he a real person?”.

Badbury Rings looking south with the west entrance and barbican on the right. The 6m square excavation trench was just above the entrance through the inner rampart.

“Well, there are different views. He’s the hero from a time when the Roman legions had withdrawn from Britain and left her citizens to fend for themselves ( many of them thought of themselves as Roman. Britain had been part of the Empire for nearly 400 years)”.

Badbury lies on a hill top at a route centre. It seems to have defended a crossroads on a border. To the east at Christchurch and north near Salisbury have been found Anglo-Saxon pagan warrior burials of 5th-6th century date. To the west at Tolpuddle, around Dorchester and on the Isle of Purbeck, contemporary burials are of Christian type, east-west without grave goods.

Batts Bed field north of Badbury where the Dorchester to London roman road crosses the Bath to Poole Harbour road. The parish boundary hedge that crosses the picture top to bottom may preserve the line of the road to Hod Hill and Ilchester.

The invading Anglo-Saxons were taking the land. Bit by bit the British were being pushed west. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle documents their triumphs but at the end of the 5th century the tide of conquest is halted.

A leader in the west united the British forces and defeated the Anglo-Saxons at Mount Badon. This battle stopped the Saxon advance for about 50 years. Rare scraps of historical evidence survive. Gildas, a British 6th century monk, comments that the battle took place in the year of his birth although he does not mention when that was or name Arthur.

The Welsh Annals do though

“The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights upon his shoulders and the Britons were the victors”

I particularly like this time (it’s a bit like an end of the world science fiction story). The fading of the old civilisation and the emergence of a new order. The lantern bearers holding back the dark. Traces of history merged with rare archaeological remnants.

…but was the battle in Dorset? Most people don’t think so. Some say it took place in Somerset near Bath on Bathampton Down. Others think it was in Wiltshire near Swindon at a place on the Ridgeway called Liddington Castle close to another Badbury.

The view from Badbury’s west gate across the Roman temple along the Dorchester road to the group of three barrows by the entrance track.

So.. back to last week when we stood on the windswept rampart looking out across the Dorset countryside…

“Nobody had ever recorded an excavation inside Badbury.. so in 2004 we asked for permission to dig a trench. We expected Iron Age occupation and we found it …but above it there was an unexpected floor of rammed chalk and scattered on its surface were scraps of occupation evidence. Fragments of worn late Roman pottery, a spiral bronze ring, a few nails, a worn 4th century coin and patches of charcoal perhaps remains of cooking fires.

Our 6m square excavation against the inner rampart of Badbury Rings. The chalk floor we found covering the Iron Age deposits

Badbury’s population had left when the Roman army arrived in the 1st century. Most of them had probably shifted their homes down to Vindocladia, the small town beside the Stour a mile to the south…then about AD 410 the Empire ended in Britain, the legions left and the world became uncertain. A storm was brewing in the east. The old fortification was re-occupied.

A Late Roman bronze spral ring left on the chalk floor dated to AD 480-520.

We took the charcoal and sent away samples for Radiocarbon dating. All three dates came back as AD 480-520.

We cannot prove that the Battle of Mount Badon took place at Badbury in Dorset and that Arthur was there ..(although all patriotic Dorset people would like it to be true) but we now know that the place was certainly occupied then.

We can stand on the ramparts and imagine… a society on the edge..drawn back to the old secure place guarding the crossroads, people looking towards the threat from the north and the east as though a storm was approaching.

…as it is this evening.