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.

Killerton Fort: Results…Pot, Charcoal & C14 dating

It has almost been a year now since the excavations took place on the suspected Roman Fort at Budlake Farm on the Killerton Estate, Devon.

Over the last few months, Nancy has been sending the Budlake finds off to specialists and their reports will enable us to tell the story of the site.

Was it a Roman fort? When was it occupied and abandoned?

If there was a fort.. why was it built here? Was there a settlement here before the soldiers arrived?

What was the date of the far older prehistoric site we found unexpectedly beneath the playing card shaped triple-ditched enclosure?

The red Devon soil is very acidic and therefore corrosive. No bone (apart from cremated bone) or other organic matter like sea shells, leather or fabric could survive in it. Even the pottery has lost much of its finished surface.

We hoped for preserved pollen but none survived.

Fortunately, charcoal was found across the site and this was sent to Cathie. First to identify it and then to assess it for radiocarbon dating suitability.

Some chunks were from mature trees and therefore the date range for C14 would be too large. She selected the fragments of round wood and twig that would provide a closer date.

Our samples were from young oak, ash, gorse, blackthorn and hazel collected from sealed contexts across the site. We sent ten samples off, and eventually, last week, the C14 dates came back.

It turned out they represented a huge date range….from 8537-8297BC to AD 16-124.

The Mesolithic date from the pit filling containing microliths

Quite a spread… but the dates can be looked at in clusters.

You may remember that our earliest feature at Budlake was a small pit which contained tiny fragments of flint.

These are known as microliths and typical of the middle stone age or Mesolithic period. Our earliest date of c.8500 BC would be good for this but this date, from a fragment of hazel nut shell, was the earliest of four dates from the pit filling. The others were all from ash twigs, a sample from the top, the middle and the bottom of the pit … all dated from between 4700-4500 BC at 95% probability.

One of the three other dates within the pit. The beginning of the Neolithic and farming in Britain is usually calculated as about 4500 BC so these dates lie just at the threshold of that innovative agricultural revolution.

I phoned Olaf, our flint specialist. Yes, he felt that the flints from the pit were mixed and though most of the flints seem be typical of the Mesolithic material, there was Neolithic lithic technology evident.

The other three C14 dates from the pit were exciting because they date the soil to a period when the last hunter gatherer communities and the earliest farmers were in contact.

We can now compare the pottery finds and there were 8 small sherds mixed in the Roman deposits which were of fabrics likely to date from the Neolithic and Bronze Age.

Last year’s Trench I cut across the three ditches of the enclosure and found them to ‘V’-shaped in profile and averaging 3m wide and 1.75m deep. They looked typically Roman but contained next to nothing to date them. Fragments of blackthorn charcoal were found in the filling of the middle and inner ditch and both gave dates. From the middle ditch 201BC to 53 BC at 90% probability and from the inner ditch 47BC to AD66 at 95% probability.

Ed, the pot specialist dated the single rim fragment I’d found in the inner ditch as Late Iron Age…so was the triple-ditched enclosure Roman at all?

The other four C14 dates were very similar. Three came from Trench II, at the south entrance into the playing card shaped enclosure, and one more came from Trench III.

In Trench II, the enclosure’s middle and inner ditches had pottery and charcoal found within the debris filling them. From the inner ditch, a fragment of gorse charcoal and one of oak.. together with an fragment of oak charcoal from the middle ditch, all gave dates within a band AD 6 to AD 124 at 90% probability. The last date came from hazel charcoal from the filling of a large ditch found outside the enclosure AD 16-124 at 95% probability.

One of the three almost identical C14 dates from charcoal from the soil filling the ditches in Trench II at the southern gateway into the triple ditched enclosure

The mid range of all four would be AD 64-70. This would fit a Devon conquest period occupation of a Roman fort….though tempting, this way of averaging the dates is considered to be statistically incorrect and too precise for radiocarbon dating.

Still, the consistency of these four broad date ranges provides reasonable grounds to conclude that this is indeed a mid-late first century Roman fort and Ed’s pottery report provides back-up from the Trench II gateway ditch terminals.

From the middle ditch, a fragment of decorated South Gaulish samian bowl and part of a North Gaulish gritted mixing bowl together with a white ware butt beaker were all distinctively mid-late 1st century. The sherds of amphorae found in the gate-way post-pit had been imported from Spain and were also of a typically early Roman type.

Archaeology can be annoying because it rarely gives definitive answers. The best it can do is to use all available evidence to nudge us closer to the truth.

The case is scientifically well evidenced now to argue for a mid to late 1st century Roman fort at Budlake… but other finds give us the scent of an earlier presence there and perhaps the displaced mid-late Iron Age C14 dates and fragments of pottery suggest that the Romans occupied an existing settlement… fragments of which were scooped up and thrown into its ditches just as the Mesolithic was thrown into an earliest Neolithic pit.

The photo taken in 1984 shows the whole field full of archaeology and. it is hoped that further geophysical survey and excavation by Exeter University and Killerton’s HART volunteers will start to further unravel the palimpsest of time of this fascinating place.

Finding Killerton’s 1776 House 2

To make sense of this you will need to read the first post which describes how a grand 18th century house designed by a famous architect was never completed. This is on the Killerton Estate near Exeter, Devon where the mansion house is…well.. it’s a little disappointing.

The many thousands of acres both at Killerton and on the Holnicote Estate in west Somerset were given to the National Trust in the 1940s by the Acland family.

It’s been 18 months since the first discoveries and things have moved on.

Killerton House with its roof covered in scaffolding. There is limited access for visitors while the repairs are taking place. The roof archaeology is being recorded and fragments of 19th-century wall paper and early 20th century photos of the Acland family have been found amongst the rafters. 

The present Killerton House is having its roof repaired and the 1776 house has been cleared of undergrowth.

We wondered whether the LiDAR survey had see the cellars of the abandoned house under the trees of Columbjohn wood. Now that we can see ground beneath the vegetation there are heaps of bricks everywhere.

The workers charged with salvaging the building materials had left the broken bricks behind.

The scrub has been cleared in what we think was the main cellar of the 1776 house and the remains of its demolition and salvage have been found:  lots of broken bricks scattered in piles in the hollow.

Project manager Fi has co-ordinated a series of events which will enable visitors to explore Killerton’s historic landscape. This will happen during the CBA Archaeology Festival later this month. A team of National Trust Heritage Archaeology Rangers have been trained and Bryn from South West Archaeology is supervising the investigation of the lost house of Killerton .

A couple of weeks ago they mapped the earthworks and these fit with the architect’s plans for great house. At the end of July, they will dig some evaluation trenches to ‘ground-truth’ the remains.

Visitors will be very welcome and the mock-up of an 18th century doorway has been erected amongst trees as an entrance to the excavations.

The newly erected doorway based on the original architect’s drawings of the house that never was. Visit and pass through the doorway to see the excavations in a couple of weeks….

I will spend a couple of days at the folly on the hill-top working out what remains of the ‘white tower’. This folly is shown on an 18th century painting . At this stage we don’t understand quite what the building looked like. It had been demolished long before any photos had been taken.

The new National Trust HART ranger team for Killerton. Practicing making condition monitoring records of the 18th-century folly site on the conical hill top across the valley from Wyatt’s lost house. We will take off the turf on July 27th and see what lies beneath.

Finding Killerton’s 1776 House

Killerton near Exeter Devon is a large farming estate. The Acland family gave it to the National Trust in the 1940s along with their Exmoor Holnicote Estate.

Killerton was where the main house was and generations of the family lived there. If you go there today you’ll see the house nestled beneath Dolbury hillfort and surrounded by mature wooded parkland.

Killerton House with Dolbury Hill behind

In the medieval period, the old centre of the Estate lay to the west, beside the river at Columbjohn. There is still a chapel there where some of the Aclands are buried… but 250 years ago Sir Thomas Acland wanted a new grand house and shifted his home to a new location.

The chapel near the old manor house site at Columbjohn

I had a meeting a couple of weeks ago. It was to discuss the recent archaeological recording work and repair along Killerton’s scheduled park boundary wall.

When I got there I was shown a LiDAR image of the park. The amazing thing about LiDAR is that it can strip away the trees and show the archaeological earthworks hidden beneath. As the plane flies over, it fires numerous laser impulses at the ground. The first return hits the tree canopy but the second return is from the laser impulses that filter though and bounce off the ground beneath. The thing to do is to filter out the first returns and there is your picture of the archaeology on the forest floor.

The LiDAR showed something very strange in Columbjohn Wood. A big rectangular feature on the ridge top with an L-shaped feature to the west.

There was time. Friday afternoon, a bright clear winter day, leafless and no undergrowth. I set off on a ground-truthing exercise. Up past the mansion house, through the garden and the parkland edge, crossing the boundary into Columbjohn Wood. Then through the trees and along the ridge top looking at the ground beneath my feet (archaeologists tend to look at the ground).

The ditch and stone revetted boundary bank of the 18th-century deer park

Great views out to the south.. and there was the conical Mount Pleasant, which, I had been told, had the foundations of a hexagonal garden folly tower on it. Worth having a look….

…a great location and the stone footings were still clear jutting from the top of a barrow-like mound. The folly tower would once have been clearly visible in the surrounding landscape but not really from the present Killerton House.

Mount Pleasant from Columbjohn Wood with the folly mound on the top

Back down the hill and then up to Columbjohn Wood ridge again and ..there were some clay roof tiles churned up in an animal burrow and ..there was the L-shaped rampart and a large rectangular pit. A track cut close to its north side and here I bumped into a spread of brick rubble eroding out of the wheel ruts… Amongst the trees were scattered chunks of stone.

Interesting…

The site? of  Sir Thomas Acland’s never completed mansion in Columbjohn Wood.

I spoke to Denise at Killerton House. She told me that it might be the house that Sir Thomas Acland changed his mind about.

1775-76: in America, the British colonists had chosen to disconnect themselves from the mother country and at Killerton, Sir Thomas had chosen the location for his new house. He appointed a fashionable architect  James Wyatt and work began.

The Acland family archive contains the accounts for £1000s spent on building work.. creating the cellars and beginning to construct the walls, but something went wrong. There’s a terse exchange of letters in early 1777. Mr Wyatt was to cease all work and the builders were to leave the new site.

Everything stopped. Then the work began again in 1778-9 but at a different site and with Mr Johnson not Mr Wyatt. The accounts tell of payments to the salvage team, 33 men taking down bricks from the site on the hill and unpicking the mortar. Loading the materials onto carts to bring to the new site where Killerton House is today.

Nobody had worked out where this almost mansion was but it seems that the LiDAR has found it for us. Our big rectangular pit may be the cellars mentioned in the documents and the pile of stuff to one site may be unwanted building material left behind during the salvage work.

Old oak at the foot of Mount Pleasant

Perhaps this 1775-6 site was a windier location… but with great views across the Devon landscape and with the hill top tower folly clearly visible in the foreground. I wonder why Sir Thomas changed his mind.

Bodies in Trenches 2013

A good time to review some of the discoveries of the past year. Much of what we have written here is to do with work that National Trust archaeologists have carried out themselves. However, resources dictate that I usually need to a ask archaeological contractors to carry out recording work.

A typical watching brief situation. This time for a new water pipe at Ebworth, Gloucestershire dug in September this year.

Here are some of the discoveries from repairs, developments and service trenches that needed excavating this year. At some places, a trench can be dug where there is a near certainty that archaeology will be affected…even when the location has been chosen to avoid it. At others, we do not have enough information to know what will be discovered. Geophysics can help… but often it is difficult to know what lies beneath the ground.

Montacute, Somerset built c.1600. There are lost garden features and earlier settlement evidence here. Particularly an ornate gatehouse which is supposed to lie between the pavilion buildings shown on this picture.

In January, trenching for a new drainage system and fibre-optic cable line around the house at Montacute, Somerset was watched by Mike and Peter of Terrain Archaeology but nothing much came up there despite the the archaeological potential of the place. Beyond history there is only archaeology to help us understand. A similar trench at Tyntesfield recorded by Jim of Talits (The Answer Lies In The Soil) found the footings of the original entrance lodge for the mansion complete with its fireplace and flagstone floor. Sam of Absolute Archaeology watched a cable trench for the new IT system in Kingston Lacy Park and this revealed a concentration of flint tools evidence for a Neolithic and Bronze Age occupation site here over 4000 years ago.

Bottle Knap cottage, Long Bredy, Dorset. A new service trench came across 2 burials recorded by Peter and Mike of Terrain Archaeology.

In May, bodies were found. Bottleknap Cottage in Long Bredy, west Dorset is the only piece of National Trust land in the Bride Valley. Peter and Mike were asked to watch while a new drain and soakaway were dug there. At about a metre deep, the digger bucket brought up bones beneath a pile of rubble. Remains of two human skeletons had been discovered in a completely unexpected place… several hundred metres from the parish church. Probably pre-Christian but there was no previous evidence for an ancient settlement site here.. so we will have to wait for the radiocarbon date to find out how old they are.

The parish church at Long Bredy. The Bottleknap burials were found a few hundred metres from the church yard. The hollow-way to the right leads up to the chalk downland where the South Dorset Ridgeway Bronze Age round barrow cemetery can be found. Perhaps the Bottleknap bodies are pre-Christian like those beneath the burial mounds.

In the summer… and now into their stride, Mike and Peter watched a drainage trench at Thomas Hardy’s house at Max Gate. Although late Victorian, Max Gate sits on a large Middle Neolithic enclosure.. it dates to about 3000 BC (like the earthwork around Stonehenge). Hardy found Iron Age and Roman burials here when his house and garden were created, so a new excavation was bound to hit something ..wherever it was located. The trench was dug carefully.. by hand but sure enough it uncovered the top of a Roman burial. The skeleton was covered and the pipe placed above it and whoever it was.. was left it in peace.

Thomas Hardy’s House at Max Gate, Dorchester is built on a Middle Neolithic enclosure like the one surrounding Stonehenge, the stone in the foreground comes from the site. Thomas Hardy found Iron Age and Roman burials here and Peter and Mike found another this year.

Bob of Forum Heritage has been recording historic buildings for us.. the paper mill at Silverton, Killerton Estate in Devon and the Almshouses in Sherborne village, Gloucestershire. He is currently making a record of Hyde Farm in Dorset while it is being refurbished. The walls have subsided over the last 200 years. The reason being that they are sinking into the pits and foundation trenches of an Iron Age settlement.

Jon of AC Archaeology did some archaeological recording while the Knightshayes cricket pavilion, Devon was being built. We thought that settlement remains from the nearby Roman fort might be found but the evidence was limited to the footings for a guardhouse used by the Americans during WWII.

These are all small important fragments, pieces from jigsaws of the past. Trenches are windows. Archaeological layers can only be broken up once. An experienced eye is needed, someone to write the story of what they see.

I wonder what 2014 will bring. On Monday I go to Lacock to discuss the route of a new sewage pipe for the Abbey.The new trench will have to negotiate a lot of buried archaeology.. as we found out when the old one was repaired in 96.

A new sewage treatment plant was needed at Lacock, Wiltshire. The site of the medieval monastic infirmary lies in this area and so AC Archaeology excavated it in 1996. Further work is needed this year.