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.
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.
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
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.
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.
There was the Vauxhall Nova incident at Golden Cap, the Escort at Thorncombe Beacon and today my Seat Ibiza is bumping across the old stubble of Bishops Court Farm, windscreen-high in vegetation, the wheels bumping along over hidden hazards.
I need to take the tools to the trench-side and Clive and his JCB are cutting into the old ploughsoil, their linear trench now hundreds of metres long.
Two distant people at either end of a white chalky gash in a huge field. Today, just Clive and me with the birdsong, surrounded by the wilding bushy hedges … now off-green and golden.
A herd of deer cross the horizon.
A transformation of four years ago when this 300 hectare arable farm was taken out of the plough. The grain fields productive yet mono-habitat prairies, the hedges close clipped.
The last tenant decided to retire and handed this farm back to the National Trust. Then Covid came and the farmland rested and began to ecologically diversify. All sorts of birds, animals and plants are returning.
Controversial though…. how does nature link arms with commercial farming. This has been a farmed landscape for at least five and a half thousand years. Treading the path to enable productive farming with rich habitats is the golden thread.
There are now plans to create new woodlands with other areas that will become scrub pasture…survey here in the future will not be possible.
Though this land has been ploughed for many generations, archaeology will still survive where features cut into the chalk bedrock. In the right conditions, aerial photography will reveal these hidden features…. and Bishops’ Court certainly has archaeology.
Back in 2014, Wessex Water cut a pipeline across this land and the archaeological recording work revealed all sorts of prehistoric features…including a Bronze Age palisade of close-set tree-sized post-holes backed by a boundary ditch.. elsewhere, by the Dairy, a cemetery of barrow sites.
Over the decades, the roots of the trees to be planted in 2023 will seek out nutrient rich archaeological deposits as they grow. What the ploughing avoided, the roots will disrupt.
That’s the theory so…
Find the archaeology and avoid planting there. Make the woodlands where the archaeology isn’t.
At Bishops Court, the National Trust are funding largescale geophysical survey to map the buried remains… and this year, 150 hectares of land have been traversed by Tigergeo Ltd. They have driven their magnetometer buggies across the fields capturing the archaeology.
The prehistoric environment can now be seen and understood on a landscape scale.
This place, was a medieval manor west of Shapwick village…merged with Kingston Lacy.
I walked the farm with Steve and Rebecca the nature and farming advisors.
Its perimeter is higher ground sloping into a gentle dry valley leading south to the meadows beside the River Stour.
A world in itself… the farm now establishing a new identity.
The geophysics shows a complicated network of connected linears on the western upland with settlement enclosures attached. Nearby, are the attendant scattered ring ditches of earlier Bronze Age burial mounds. To the east, along a localised ridge is a row of round barrow sites. Other settlements, boundaries, trackways and field systems cross the area.
It was good to do the survey before the vegetation became too established. Even now, the development of nature makes it a difficult decision to top the ground to enable the next phase of geophysics.
My sense is to grab the survey opportunity before its gone.
The data is so good …it has the appearance of looking into the night sky. So many stars… but what lies beyond them ? Are there significant sites that glimmer only faintly from the geophysical survey plot… or, perhaps they are hidden.. perhaps they do not respond to magnetometry at all? Are we missing anything?
The answer was to put a long trench across a surveyed area which seemed almost blank of features. One of the candidates for woodland planting.
Luke, Harry, Dave and Nancy watched the digger to see…. and the answer was reassuring. The regular deep ploughing of this land had scraped the soil down to chalk, the modern cultivation disturbance 30-40cm deep.
Our 250m long trench found only the long boundary features seen on the geophysics.
At 15m a small ‘U’ shaped ditch with an oyster shell, at 22m a deeper field ditch, a recut of a shallower earlier boundary with an Iron Age sherd in the backfill. At 70m a shallow boundary scooped into the chalk with a later Bronze Age piece of pot.
And beyond this.. at 80m? .. I’d come back to finish things off… early morning, for a couple of hours …to complete the excavation of a pit … nothing was found beyond it….. just hundreds of metres of plough-scored white chalk.
The pit was irregular, mixed with chalk and flint.
Mattocking…with that sense of solitude.. with the hum of the digger in the distance… backfilling the trench.
The wide overcast sky, the threat of the storm to come, my silver thermos, the drawing board, the tape measures ….and the abused Seat Ibiza backed up to the trench.
No finds at all. The feature probably the root bowl from an ancient windblown tree.
Well.. the trees would return here. Our geophysics safeguard was good and the evaluation trench backup was reassuring.
I said a fond farewell to Clive. I guess we won’t meet again.
The National Trust is now 128 years old and in its archives lie many hidden historical delights.
I bumped into one last week while researching the book which will publish the National Trust’s archaeological excavation, carried out in 2020, which dated the Cerne Abbas Giant.
The Cerne Giant c.1935 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
The early correspondence lies deep in the Wansdyke tunnels somewhere in Wiltshire. To call it back, the ARMS digital database needs to be consulted… Nicky looked up the file references for Cerne Abbas and ordered the boxes.
A few days later they were delivered to our Tisbury Office.
The files contained a great collection of photographs, collected for the management plan of 1974. One dated back to 1890… but it was the correspondence concerning the Giant which was particularly fascinating. The letters take the reader back to another world.
One group of letters was dated September 1925 , between the writer Thomas Hardy at Max Gate Dorchester and Sir Henry Hoare at Stourhead… the Giant was always green ‘and never all over white like King George’s near Weymouth’
But the file that caught my eye contained letters from 1945 to 1948 and concerned conservation work and research overseen by Stuart Piggott.
If you have seen the film ‘The Dig’, Stuart Piggott (played by the actor Ben Chaplin) with his wife Margaret (played by Lily James) were part of the team of archaeologists invited by the British Museum to dig the great Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo in 1939…. on the eve of WWII.
Stuart had had already written an article in 1938 comparing the Cerne Giant to Hercules and he was of the opinion that he dated to the Roman period.
During WWII, Piggott was posted to India and was involved in surveillance and interpretation of aerial photography.
Our first letter is from the Clerk of the Cerne Abbas Parish Council L.H. Shutter and is dated 13th June 1945.
This is barely five weeks after the Victory in Europe celebration on May 8th.
It requests action from the National Trust concerning the neglected condition of the Giant.
‘It is now much overgrown and not very distinguishable…it is such a centre of attention by visitors and Parishioners’
The letter was sent to Edward Eardley Knollys who in his reply to Mr Shutter described himself as the Area Agent for the National Trust’s properties in Dorset (though he was an established artist and curator before being recruited to the NT by James Lees Milne). Knollys promised to contact the Trust’s Archaeological Advisor Sir Cyril Fox.
Sir Cyril immediately recommended Stuart Piggott to carry out the work and Knolly’s letter to Piggott’s family home in Rockbourne, Hants is met with a positive response …..but there is a problem.
The shortages of post-war Britain. Knollys writes to Fox suggesting a personal request to Raby at the Ministry of Works ‘would do the trick’ to obtain the much needed petrol coupons.
His letter of 30th July to F.J.E. Raby Esq.at the Ministry requests scheduled monument consent to repair the Giant and 12 petrol coupons.
The letter of consent is sent on 1st August by a Mr Miller. The Ministry is still at its war time location of the Palace Hotel Rhyll, Flintshire. Miller mentions in a P.S….. how he might obtain the National Trust’s new ‘Jubilee’ publication. A reminder that 1945 marked the Trust’s Golden Jublilee ….50 years after the conservation charity’s foundation in 1895.
3rd August: Sir Cyril Fox had pulled the right stings…. Eardley Knollys writes to Piggott ‘Here are your petrol coupons. All is agreed. Go ahead with Hercules’
Stuart Piggott’s first letter on site is dated 16th August. His mission is to erect a fence around the Giant to stop cattle and horses eroding it and to clean the trenches out and repair turf so that the figure would be visible again.
Lord Digby owned the land around the Giant, the Trust only owns the Giant itself. ‘Victory’ in the letter is a reference to Victory in Japan day 15th August.
the second part of this letter reveals an additional element of Piggott’s work on the Giant. He planned to test by excavation whether the Giant’s outstretched arm once had the representation of a ‘Lion’s Skin’ draped over it.
As I wrote at the start .. Stuart Piggott was sure that he was both Roman and an image of Hercules.
Looking down onto the cleaned stone walling in trench F … I spot an abandoned trowel… used as a scale last night.
The fencing is undone and I jump down to retrieve it.
‘Are you pleased with the last dig Dad?’
‘It was satisfactory Simon. We found what we were looking for….. It definitely had a golden glow to it.’
Janet puts the trowel in her bag and we walk towards the tournament.
Part of the medieval encampment at Stourhead House
……………
Day 12: The last day. Everything needs to be recorded before its end and this is our final chance to uncover the walls in our trenches.
Lots of grey mortar rubble still in trench A.
The trench locations A-F 1722 map on LiDAR Stable Yard (bottom), Stourhead House (left)
We pass round the mattocks, deploy a couple of wheelbarrows and five of us attack it.
The wall footings begin to emerge within half an hour.
By mid morning, the east end of the trench can be seen as two rooms divided by a wall with traces of a robbed stone floor … but generally, the surfaces that survive are only the olive green sandy mortar that the recycled floor was bedded on.
The walls at the east end of Trench A
The finds tray becomes full of smaller animal bones. Rabbit sized?
There are Tudor records of the Stourton manor warren with its keepers lodge on White Sheet Hill… which overlooks our excavation.
In trench F, beside its east wall face, Pete is finding deer-sized bones. Perhaps fallow deer from Stourton deer park. The specialist report will tell us.
The east wall face of Trench F, the ranging pole 0.5m divisions lies along the wall face with a stone path along its outside edge.
Lydia uncovers the star find.. in the dark soil between the mortar and the olive sand. A broken pewter spoon.
In trench C, I have levelled the line and strung out the tape to draw the layers of the section
Brian walks by ‘I see you’ve found a newel stair’
I look blank.
‘Like the ones going up Alfred’sTower’
I hadn’t spotted that.
But I climb down into Carol’s trench B and take a look.
There it is.
Upside down but the front edge of the step clearly worn by the many feet that ascended it ..before it was cast down.
Bottom right is part of the stone newel step; upside down but the worn surface is clear. Numerous feet must have used the spiral staircase it was once a part of. In the corner of the fireplace was a wine bottle of c.1700 style.
Was there a tower nearby? Perhaps the one shown on the only drawing we have of Stourton Castle, sketched by John Aubrey during his visit in 1674.
The drawing of Stourton Castle dated 1674 showing the tower (centre left) which looks like the Sharrington Tower at Lacock. Another tower is shown on the right.
Our step could be a long way from its origin but it rests beside the carved breast-piece of the fireplace which still lies where it fell.. beside its hearth.
Who knows…our trenches are just small windows into the extensive ranges of rooms that surrounded the Inner Court of the Castle. We know of the large open hall and the passage leading to the kitchen. There would have been a parlour, pantry and buttery and various other offices and chambers. The chapel with its tiled floor is mentioned. Aubrey writes of tiles bearing the initials WS for William Stourton.
Despite my specific requirement for a WS tile, the digging team…. has not supplied one! Though, to be fair… we’ve had some glazed floor tiles and I am consoled by a geometric black and yellow encaustic tile from C… as the next best thing.
Gemma and Ollie have arrived for the BBC and we are miked up. Later, Ben arrives from National Trust central office and we are miked up again. He is filming the filming for a film of the film.
Gemma and Ollie interviewing Pete in Trench F for ‘Treasures of the National Trust’
It was good to see him again. We last met on the closing day of the Cerne Abbas dig… just before lockdown. We were glad of his coverage then.
A wine bottle is found in the corner of B’s fire place. Here are also found bent grey cames and glass from a diamond leaded window. A long iron object..a window catch?
I walk to A to draw it. Elegant Stourhead House stares down on us disapproving. The rolling green serenity of the park is now seemingly industrialised – archaeologically pockmarked with holes and heaps of turf and spoil.
But Edward and Audrey Hoare visit us. They are delighted and congratulate us on our discovery.
It’s OK, Tim will make everything right on Monday. Gradually the turves will knit back together and… in the years to come the sites of our trenches will become mere dimples in the grass.
It is a time of departures. The visitors, then our volunteer excavators, finds team and guides. So many wonderful people gave up their time to help… including staff, conservation and visitor services, rangers, gardeners, curators, collection managers..lots
Ben makes me a coffee and says goodbye. Gemma and Ollie retrieve their microphone and thank us for the story.
Just our Time Team now.
We were of a different era and methods than Colt Hoare, Cunnington, the Parkers and.. my favourite, the surveyor and artist Philip Crocker of Frome.
This National Trust team of archaeologists has randomly…for a while.. washed up together on the same shore.
We’ve done some stuff !…. such memories!.. and long, long after our beginnings at Corfe Castle.
The bodies at Bottle Knap Cottage, the Roman fort at Budlake, our socially distanced trenches on the Giant, the Neolithic antler impacts at Max Gate. That smell of the burnt mound on the cliff edge at Seatown and …of course, the glass, the marble and the 5th century mosaic at the Villa.
Pete fixes the fencing round the trenches, Fay and Carol load the car with tools, Nancy gathers the finds. Rob has already returned to Devon to help with Jim’s work at A La Ronde.
One last photo then. Betsy does the honours. We hug each other and say goodbye.
I have hours of drawing ahead. Natasha brings me water as the medieval tents go up.
I finish at B as the light is fading. The diggers here have done wonders today. The fireplace hearth with its stone floor and surviving jamb decorated with pyramid chamfer and bar stop
The final excavated surfaces of the fireplace and south-east corner of a room in Trench B. The mortar debris (upper left below the ranging poles) is 0.3m lower than the fireplace floor. Perhaps the floor of the room has collapsed into a cellar.
The walls of the south-east corner of a Castle room are clear, though the differing wall fabrics suggest several phases. The fireplace is a later insertion and …where is the floor of this room? At the deepest limit of today’s digging, the mortar rubble is at least 30cm lower than the level of the fireplace hearth.
Perhaps the floor has collapsed into one of the cellars of Stourton Castle.
I climb out of the trench at last with my bucket of measuring and drawing implements.
Perhaps it was in this cellar that Charles Stourton got his cronies to hide the body of his ex-steward William Hartgill in 1556.
The sun is beginning to set as I walk to the car.
Who knows?
We found the answer to the main question but, as always, there are many many more.
The gateway into Stourhead Park. Sir Richard Colt Hoare moved and rebuilt it here in the early 19th century. The 1722 map shows that it was originally located on the south side of the Stable Yard, approximately where the two dormer windows can be seen in the distance to the left of the left gateway tower.
The phone rings as I drive through that gothic gateway at the entrance to Stourhead Park- the one Sir Richard had shifted from the Stable Yard.
Spanish Chestnuts indeed! Definitely a red herring.
On Friday, Phil sent out the results from the preserved woodland found under two metres of peat. A digger bucket had ripped up the branches and twigs just before Christmas and Wessex Archaeology was commissioned to re-excavate the trench on Alderman’s Barrow on Exmoor in West Somerset.
They took samples for pollen, wood, leaves and insects… any evidence they could extract from the archaeological stratigraphy to understand this potentially ancient preserved environment.
How old was it?
Surely…. significantly old… if so much peat had formed above it. Well, the Radiocarbon dates are back and they do not disappoint.
The peat filled valley, Alderman’s Barrow Allotment where the ancient preserved woodland debris deposit was found 2m down.
One sample taken from preserved wood at the west end of the valley, below the peat, was Early Neolithic 3940-3650 BC, an indicator of how long this area had been part of a forest. Hard to imagine now in this bleak, exposed and largely treeless domain.
Further down the valley, below the peat, an 0.7m deep deposit of vegetation was recorded. The C14 date from the bottom sample was Early Bronze Age (2490-2290 BC) and from the upper surface of the wood debris, where the last branches fell… the date range was 1620-1410 BC.
As Phil, the South West Peatland Project Archaeologist said ‘So far it looks like the woodland may have disappeared by the late Bronze Age, which fits quite well with the onset of colder and wetter conditions’.
The excavation in High Wood has just been published.
It reminds me of the day I swung into Badbury Rings car park to ‘Whiskey in the Jar’.
Love the sound of that Thin Lyzzy electric guitar.
As it was a special day, I’d decided to walk across the hillfort to High Wood.
Badbury is the highest and central hill on the Kingston Lacy Estate.. but it is a double hill.
Beyond the hillfort, the land drops away and then rises again through ancient woodland.
Badbury is ringed by its three concentric pairs of ramparts and ditches.. but what lies on the crest of High Wood Hill?
I opened the boot and took out drawing boards, a bucket full of tapes, a toolbox and notebooks. I pulled the camera bag over my shoulder and locked the car.
My route took me across the agger of the Dorchester Roman road, past the Romano Celtic temple, through the western gateway of Badbury.
Mywalk from Badbury car park to the trench in High Wood as a red dotted line using the 1742 rights of way map
I’d had to go into the office before driving down to Dorset and Nancy told me not to hurry. She would look after the site until I arrived.
The bank and ditch had been found hidden by trees in 1987, just before I’d bumped into the body under the windblown tree.
By searching and pacing, the hill top earthworks had turned out to belong to a ‘D’-shaped enclosure about 90m across. The woodland vegetation had stopped it being spotted previously. It had not been easy to see because quarries had been cut through it…hiding its outline.
I walked past the deep ditches and high ramparts of Badbury…High Wood was very different to this. Its bank and ditch were much slighter features.. and.. unlike Badbury, the ditch lay along the inner edge of the bank.
Badbury a defence.. for security, to keep things out .. but High Wood…to keep something in perhaps?
We’d picked up long flint blades scuffed from the leaf litter in High Wood’s ditch…….
Neolithic?
I’d reached the summit of Badbury now, we’d excavated flakes of flint over 5000 years old here in 2004. High Wood was also occupied then… but was the enclosure a henge… like Avebury?
If High Wood was a Neolithic earthwork it would be the only one on the Kingston Lacy Estate. The best way to understand it better was to make a surgical incision.
Mark, from English Heritage, had carried out a survey of the High Wood earthworks and from this we could see where the enclosure survived and where it had been cut by the old quarries.
Our trench was placed across the bank of the enclosure, the ditch and part of the quarry.
My walk now took me down towards the east entrance through the trees and grassland. Here, there are many pebbles, the same geology which ovelies the chalk on the summit of High Wood. The quarries were presumably dug to harvest these slingshot sized stones. I’d seen them capping the Dorchester Roman road where the grass had been eroded by cattle.
The Palaeolithic axe found cast aside in a Roman quarry
On the first day of the excavation, we’d found an extraordinary thing. A multi-faceted but worn chunk of grey flint. The oldest object we’d ever discovered at KL. Phil the flint specialist said it was Palaeolithic, over 40,000 years old. It was out of context as we also picked up sherds of Roman pottery in the quarry backfill. Perhaps the Roman quarrymen had found this curious thing as they dug out the pebbles to surface their new road to Dorchester on the other side of Badbury.
I had walked through Badbury’s Iron Age east gate now and was crossing the turning of the Hamworthy to Bath Roman road before entering High Wood.
When we excavated into the bank, we found burnt flint and struck flakes but also prehistoric pottery.
This site was a strange, hidden sort of place to work.
We’d cut out a narrow world in the undergrowth and our conversations seemed hushed and interrupted by bird song. Visitors rarely found us here unless we guided them in… and there were midges.
The hidden trench in High Wood
As we dug deeper, it was clear that the bank had been built up from earlier occupation deposits, long, long before the medieval wood had been established here. A time when there were clear views out to Badbury and far out across the surrounding landscape.
Once… the Isle of Wight, the Purbeck ridge and the chalkland of Cranborne Chase would have been clearly seen by the people living here.
Phil said that there was so much later Bronze Age flint that the enclosure may well date before Badbury..about 1000 BC but we found that it was mingled with Iron Age pottery.
I had reached the old, upended beech tree roots where I’d discovered the Early Bronze Age woman …21 years earlier (see Arch NT SW ‘Meeting in High Wood’). From here, my path took me upwards, towards the excavation. I followed the markers we’d tied to the saplings to guide us in.
Our trench had revealed that the earthwork enclosure was built in the later Iron Age about 100BC. It was contemporary with Badbury, occupying its hilltop twin, a few hundred metres to the south west.
Perhaps this was a sacred place. A place to keep something valuable?
At the bottom of the bank, we found large chunks of earlier Iron Age pottery.
Excavating a chunk of Middle Iron Age pottery c. 300 BC below the enclosure bank in High Wood
Our small trench and short stay in the wood had uncovered many layers of time.
There were noises ahead. Laughter, the bright colours of balloons.
A champagne cork burst.
A birthday banner stretched between the trees. Half a century!
Papworth, M., 2022, ‘Evaluation Excavation of an Iron Age Enclosure within High Wood, Kingston Lacy Estate, Pamphill ‘, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural HIstory and Archaeological Society 143, 125-148.
On the first day I arrived early and marked out the 12m by 10m trench.
Lee the digger driver arrived, put on a flat edged bucket and we watched as the garden and ploughsoil was scraped off and placed to one side with just few centimetres above the chalk.
We found clay tobacco pipe stems and willow pattern ware right down to the natural chalk surface.
Today we formed a line and worked backwards from the NW (compost heap) end of the trench and revealed the chalk bedrock cleaning and revealing the white blocky surface.
Chalk is nice but for the first 5m of our trench was that’s all there was… no archaeology at all. My imagining of an intricate intercutting, multi-period feast of the past was not working out.
Then the chalk disappeared along a curving edge and by the end of the day a 2m diameter pit and a couple of post-holes had been revealed. We hope for more by Digging for Britain turn up tomorrow.
The trowel lies on the pit filling. The post hole is a little to the right of the point of the trowel.
Archaeology National Trust SW 