Return to Max Gate

The front door is open and from where I kneel in the trench, cleaning chalk, I can hear the sound of the piano tune…a Victorian Romance.

The view across the reopened trench looking across to the front door of Max Gate

Sue talks to her group. She tells of Thomas the architect, his trip to Cornwall and how he met Emma and they fell in love (‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’).

Max Gate their home in later life after Hardy had established himself as a writer.

A voice from above.

‘You’re back then’

I stand to reply.

‘In the end I had to. We found no dating evidence in July. I thought that… before the trenches are hidden… by new grass or the new front drive.. there was still a window of opportunity to take some samples.’

I say the three tongue twister words again… optically stimulated luminescence…dating from quartzite crystals.

Taking the OSL sample from the ditch section the tube is right of the red marker.

I find the best point in the prehistoric? ditch section …and hammer a black plastic pipe into it.

Not easy… as several times it judders to a halt ..on hidden flint nodules.

In the end I got two 20cm long samples, wrapped them in labelled parcel tape and marked the locations on my section drawing. Then I walk back through the garden and into the paddock to find Pete in the pit.

Sarah had dug some of this in July …but like the front door ditch, the excavated filling contained nothing really to date it… just a few flint flakes and one fragment of pottery. Nothing organic though to get a C14 date.

On the first morning, we’d measured along the trench edge, marked out a 3m square and re-exposed the pit. This time, extending the old trench line by a metre to get the full outline of the pit cutting.

The pit after re-excavation to point we left it in July apart from our metre extension (top of photo)

In July, I’d thought the pit was circular and I had a feeling it might be an Iron Age grain storage pit…nice but about 2500 years too recent. In our extension we discovered that it was oval in plan…not so Iron Age after all.

Now, on our second day and almost 1m down Pete has found a larger chunk of pottery and two patches of charcoal. The sherd.. could be Neolithic… and the charcoal would give a date but there were 3 hours left to get as deep as possible.

The pit section 1m deep with the collapsed weathered chalk at the edges. The darker middle fill contained a fragment of prehistoric pottery and two small patches of charcoal contained in the plastic finds bags.

The filling was now collapsed chalk from the weathered sides of the pit with less chance of artefacts being found amongst it.

We talked again about the 1980s excavations which uncovered the west half of the circular Middle Neolithic enclosure… now swept away by road construction.

Back then, some of the pit and ditch sections had smooth chalk walls and these had been inscribed with exceptionally rare… maze-like art or graffiti.

I left that thought in the air as I walked back to the garden.

The home the great writer Thomas Hardy designed for himself..Max Gate. The circular parch mark in front of the bench and megalith found during the 1980s excavation and donated to Max Gate. Linear parch mark to right leading to parched area in foreground.

The dry weather had created parch marks which I plotted on the site plan. One 3m diameter circular parch mark was found in the front lawn near a diagonal linear feature and opposite the megalith left at Max Gate from the 1980s excavation.

Back again to the paddock and there was time to sieve the soil from the pit.

This revealed a few more struck flint flakes, a couple of snail shells and another small black piece of thin pottery. The ceramic specialist will analyse the fabric of our three sherds from the pit and pass judgement on their age.

Pete was now 1.4m down and we’d run out of time. He’d found two smooth faces of chalk stepped one above the other and a section of darker soil at the deepest level.

“Anything on the chalk? What do you see?”

“There are marks… but generally it looks quite smooth”

We changed places. I jumped down. Pete passed down a finds bag and I troweled a soil sample into it. There was definitely charcoal and ash in the darker material. Hopefully enough for a radiocarbon date.

Then I looked at the vertical face of the pit wall.

In all directions… angled down and sideways, the rounded pointed ends of marked indentations. In that intimate, deep place.. hidden for 5,000 years…now uncovered for an hour…

On the smooth chalk face of the pit numerous pointed indentations the impact blows of the antler pick. Traces of a darker chalky soil with ash beneath the chalk rubble filling.

I imagined our fellow digger.. armed not with a 4 inch cast steel pointing trowel but swinging his red deer antler pick again and again against the chalk and leaving this evidence behind….

and just above the chalk rubble, still filling the pit, there were traces (perhaps) of vertical inscribed lines… but further excavation was needed…

The pit at the limit of its excavation. The ranging rod divisions 0.2m.

Just the two of us saw it. We’d run out of time. We drew the section and took the photographs and buried it… but … yes….we now had what we needed.

Neolithic and Roman Dyrham

It’s a fabulous piece of landscape between Bristol and Bath.

But you can’t really see Dyrham House at the moment it’s covered in scaffolding.

The west side of Dyrham House.Now covered in scaffolding while the roof is repaired. The medieval parish church beside it shows that there has been a house here at least since medieval times.

You can’t see Neolithic Dyrham either it’s covered in Roman Dyrham… and who’d have thought there was a Roman Dyrham. Paul found it a few years ago but he’s just found something 3000 years older.

The story we tell the visitors is that Dyrham is a great house and garden created by a wealthy man. A key player in William III’s government during the 1690s. That’s the most visible layer in the multiplex of Dyrham but it’s far too obvious and far too simple for the archaeological soul.

I got a text and decided to stop off on the way back from Brean Down. Parked at the top and walked down the bowl of the escarpment to the valley floor passing the scaffolded house to get to the West Garden.

I could see Paul’s trench at the far end and passed below the medieval church tower along the path to see what he had found. The gardeners want to recreate the late 17th century garden beds and the excavation was to find archaeological evidence for their location.

The view west along the access path towards the garden gate and to the left is the site of the excavation. It was dug to find the late 17th century garden beds but found something much older. The proposed sites for new garden beds can be seen as mown rectangles.

There wasn’t any really…but in the process Paul found a polished Neolithic axe made from stone brought all the way from south Wales. He also found some worked flint tools of the same date. He placed them on the table beside the trench. We wondered whether the 17th century gardeners had levelled the ground and cut down through the valley deposits reveal a Neolithic feature.

A polished axe made of stone from south-west Wales. It dates to the Neolithic period and is over 4500 years old.

Things are not necessarily what they first seem. The next find from the feature was a piece of medieval pottery and then other things of various dates turned up..so the gardeners, 320 years ago, had dug up the Neolithic stuff from somewhere up-slope and then it became mixed with later material and dumped down slope to level out the garden terrace.

The gardeners’ redeposited soils were deepest at the south terrace edge. Mainly yellow and orange natural clay but then everything went dark again. There was still archaeology underneath. What could it be?

Then the Roman pottery started popping out of it, oyster shells and chunks of bone with cut and saw marks on, butchered joints of meat.

The pottery and bone from the Roman ditch filling.

It went down and down.

It is good to imagine the generations who have enjoyed the gardens and then all those who lived here before the gardens. Lots to be discovered.. where are their houses now?

The view back towards the house showing the numbered archaeological layers filling the deep ditch filled with Roman pottery.

Dorset jewel adds to the National Trust’s hillfort crown

National Trust Stonehenge Estate

On holiday this week but I’ve been reading up on Stonehenge and Avebury for a talk on Monday. Our understanding of these places have been transformed in recent years. There is a great deal to know.

The National Trust does not own Stonehenge itself, which is cared for by English Heritage but Stonehenge is surrounded by the National Trust Stonehenge Estate which leases the visitor car park to EH. For many years discussions have been taking place to improve the setting of the stones and amazingly, in the last few weeks, the modern road that cuts Stonehenge from the processional way, known as the Avenue, has been closed. This will soon enable people to approach Stonehenge as intended 4500 years ago (without having to climb over two fences and cross a busy road).

The car park will be moved to a new visitor centre which is rising at Airman’s Cross about a mile to the west.

A rare opportunity to walk amongst the stones last year as part of a EH presentation of recent geophysical, laser scan and earthwork survey research into the prehistoric landscape.

The NT has been acquiring land around the stones since the 1920s and now owns much of the Avenue that links Stonehenge to the River Avon, the Greater and Lesser Cursus (3600-3300 BC) and many of the Bronze Age burial mounds (2200-1500 BC).

The 2.8km long feature along the left side of picture is the Great Cursus an Early-Mid Neolithic ‘processional way’ (no one really knows what this long thin, banked enclosure was for. The blobs to the right of the Cursus, left of centre in the picture are part of the Early Bronze Age Cursus Barrow Group. Centre bottom to top right runs the A344 which was recently closed. Stonehenge lies to the right of this road above the car park and the Avenue lies opposite on the left side of the road turning almost through 90 degrees after a few hundred metres to run up the hill to the King Barrow Ridge at the top of the picture.

The Estate was extended in 1999 when Countess Farm was purchased on the east side of King Barrow Ridge. This meant that all the land from Stonehenge east as far as Durrington could be conserved. The Trust owns over 60% of Durrington Walls which is the largest henge… I was going to say in Britain but they only exist here so I guess it’s the largest henge in the world. Henges are ceremonial earthworks which have a ditch inside the bank hacked out of the ground using red deer antler picks c.2500-2400 BC which were often left in the bottoms of ditches (very useful for radiocarbon dates). Durrington was a massive piece of work.

Countess Farm and Durrington Walls looking south taken during a ‘Country File’ helicopter ride. Durrington Walls north boundary can be seen as a line of scrub running left from the wood right of centre of the picture. Durrington was cut by the road on the left of the picture in 1967 when linear band across the Neolithic settlement was excavated.

It was one of those epic conservation days, to go out with Simon the Head Warden with a Land Rover and trailer full of fence posts. We located the ploughed down prehistoric earthworks and marked out areas to exclude them from further ploughing, including Amesbury 42, the Neolithic long barrow (3600-3300 BC) at the east end of the cursus.

Every time a gate post hole is dug on the Stonehenge Estate, it needs to be monitored. This land is holy archaeological ground. Most of the post-holes are ploughsoil above chalk bedrock. However, in 2003, I examined two replacement gate post-holes for the entrance to the main Durrington Walls field. No bedrock in sight, they went down a metre and revealed only an accumulation of silt. The archaeology was snugly buried under a deep accumulation of soil. This had built up in the central hollow of the enclosure which gently slopes down towards the River Avon.

Hmmm. One of the 2003 Durrington Walls field gate post-holes. Exciting for its depth of soil. A special kind of excitement I admit.

A couple of months later I met Mike Parker-Pearson who had also seen the post-holes. He had put together an A Team of archaeologists to test a theory that Durrington had been a place of the living and Stonehenge was a place of the dead linked by the River Avon. It all seemed a bit fanciful at the time but the evidence they found was extraordinary. The deep silts at Durrington had created a Late Neolithic Pompeii of preservation, particularly where the henge lies close to the river. A couple of years into Mike’s Stonehenge Riverside research project, he was showing us amazingly preserved Neolithic house floors complete with a central hearth and fixings for a cupboard and bed (the layout is just like Skara Brae 500 miles away in Orkney where the houses survive in stone but are almost the same size and layout (ancient connectivity over such a distance).

One of the Late Neolithic houses at Durrington Walls (c.2500BC) contemporary with the trilithon building phase of Stonehenge. The central hearth had two indentations beside it worn by the knees of people tending the fire.

The Stonehenge landscape is an inspirational but massive subject. A vastly skilled, unique people remote in time doing incomparable things with stone and wood with very basic tools.

There is too much to write about for a blog but you must read Mike’s book ‘Stonehenge Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery’ (2012) it sets out the evidence and tells the story exceedingly well.