Binchester landscapes

I went exploring the environs of Binchester last week. Primarily I was interested in getting a feeling for the extent that there might be surviving Romano-British field archaeology in the area that surrounded the fort. Whilst I did find some interesting features, it was also a fascinating exercise in the exploring a post-medieval and modern landscape. Most of the fields appear to be a product of 18th or 19th century parliamentary enclosure, although there are areas of ridge and furrow in many of the fields. I’m intrigued by possible areas of what appear to be ridge and furrow in the low-lying area around the Bell Burn, but these can’t be medieval ploughing can they? More likely they are linked to the management of water meadows. The woods along the Bell Burn are probably ancient woodland and are rich in birch and sycamore, although there are clearly many features within them. There are a series of leats and small stone bridges linked along the course of the stream. These are probably post-medieval and perhaps connected with a lot of investment put into the lands owned by the Bishops of Durham in this area in the late 18th century.



Walking through the woods I also stumbled across a recent ‘shrine’ clearly to someone who had died and been remembered by his family at a place he’d loved. It was rather an eerie experience to discover it tucked away in a thick wood. Strangely enough, I came across another similar example a little further on by a bench on the old railway track (now a footpath). Is this a Bishop Auckland tradition?




The railway track was a reminder that this part of Durham was a heavily industrialised area, with many collieries; Lodge Farm just to the south of the wood was once where all the pit ponies in Durham were bred- according to a visitor to site whose grandfather had worked there, there were sometimes thousands of ponies there; I wonder if some of the features along the burn were connected to the need to water them?

Drowned Lands

Last week we took the nipper down to Hull to visit The Deep (an excellent afternoon out for all those who love combining looking at fish with colossal sensory overload). Afterwards we headed out east into Holderness, the slice of land that lies in between the Humber estuary, the Wolds and the North Sea. This part of Yorkshire feels very like East Anglia, with its low-lying wetlands, shallow coastlines and insistent presence of the North Sea. One of my favourite parts is Spurn Head which juts out into the mouth of the Humber, and has a vaguely post-Apocalyptic feel, and reminds me of places like Dungeness, combining raw nature, ruins and traces of industry. At Spurn you can watch waders feed on the mud flats whilst in the background the lights from the petrochemical factories at Immingham twinkle on the other side of the estuary.

Like much of the east coast, Holderness has been in a constant struggle with the sea. Estimates vary, but its reckoned that between 3 and 4 miles of land have been lost to the North Sea since the Roman period. Villages with evocative names such as Frismersk, Orwith Fleet, Ravenser Odd, Dimlington, Hoton and Turmarr amongst others have all disappeared since the Middle Ages. South of the Humber many other villages have slipped beneath the waves, perhaps the best known being Dunwich in Suffolk, once a thriving coastal trading town, but now largely consigned to the sea (not to be mistaken of course with the Dunwich which appears in the works of HP Lovecraft…). I like the idea of these missing villages and towns lying beneath the waves of the German Sea These are the last traces of the land bridge that once linked Britain the Continent. Along the west coast of Britain, there are myths of other drowned lands, such as Lyonesse (off Cornwall) and Cantre'r Gwaelod (in Cardigan Bay), but, as far as I know, the lost villages of the East coast have never stimulated similar legends. Although there have been fantastic archaeological and geomorphological projects to map these drowned lands, of the North Sea, I like the idea of mapping the lost histories of these drowned villages. It would have to be an entirely speculative and creative exercise, certainly not something rigorous or methodological; perhaps more like a collaborative work of fiction. Something else for the ‘to do’ list.

Road to ruin

One of my first professional archaeology jobs after I completed my undergraduate degree was as a site assistant on an English Heritage fieldwork project along the edge of the A1 (‘The Great North Road’) around Catterick. This involved fieldwalking and excavation on the site of the Roman town of Cataractonium, in advance of a scheme for widening the road to three lanes. My abiding memories of this job are the joys of fieldwalking in light snow cover and digging in shin deep mud.

Little did I know that I would later come to know this stretch of road extremely well. Having variously worked in Northumberland and Durham for the last eight years, I must have now driven up and down this section of the A1 hundreds of times. As it happens the road widening scheme is only now just beginning (a mere 16 years after I was working on the site). What has surprised me is how attached I’ve become to the landscape along the road, including not just the farmhouse, copses and fields, but also the garages and service stations. They’ve all become embedded in my own personal landscape of the commute to work; as such its rather strange to see these private landmarks and distance markers being bulldozed away Its also a shame to see some important aspects of the modern (post-medieval landscape) disappearing. The Great North Road was the main road north from London to Edinburgh since the medieval period, and became particularly important as the route that the mail coaches ran in the 18th and 19th century. It is only with the advent of the railways and more recently the construction of the M1 in the late 1950s and early 1960s that its key role has been circumvented. Even now, it is still the main road north from York to Edinburgh (and once north of Newcastle, is still single carriage way in places).

Its history has meant that it has created its own distinct landscape. Although it now by-passes the centres of most villages and towns, many of which still contain historic coaching inns, many farms still lie close to the road (and at a microtopgrapic level are clearly aligned on it). It’s still crossed by B roads and farm tracks, and in several places former bridges can be seen just beyond the edge of the road. On top of this more ‘historic’ landscape, there is also the post-war infrastructure of a main road, including petrol stations, cafés and service stations. Much of these features are now being sacrificed to the need for a few additional lanes of road. Whilst I would not argue that the Little Chef at Dishforth is of the same historic value as the Roman town at Catterick, it is sad to see the erosion of these elements of an historic landscape. I suspect that there has been little recording of these structures (though I might be wrong).

These ‘modern’ road landscapes aren’t entirely overlooked; Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital explores the M250- the kind of inbetween landscape so loved of the late JG Ballard; there’s also Edward Platt’s Leadville: A Biography of the A40 (a road I spent a lot of time staring at blankly at the Oxford Tube ferried me into London in the mid-1990s. This kind of writing is not even a particularly modern phenomenon: the artist John Piper wrote a long description of the modern and ancient sites along the old Bath Road (A4) as long ago as 1939 (Architectural Review (May 1939), 229-46).

Postscript: a link to the wonderful website Pathetic Motorways

Call for Papers: Archaeology and Englishness

"Field archaeology is an essentially English form of sport" O.G.S Crawford

Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference Durham 2009

As Gordon Brown wrestles with how to promote a sense of ‘Britishness’, there are increased signs of revival of a sense of English identity, whether expressed through the resurgence in popularity of the English flag or increased call to celebrate St George’s Day as a national holiday. There is also an increasing popular literature exploring the notion of the ‘English’ and ‘Englishness’ often creating essentialised models of the concept (e.g. Ackroyd 2002; Gill 2007; Paxman 1999).

However, whilst other discipline, such as art history, literary studies and geography have long treated the notion of ‘Englishness’ as concept worthy of analysis and deconstruction, this has not been true for archaeology (cf. : Burden and Kohl 2006; Corbett , Holt and Russell 2002; Matless 1998; Pevsner 1956). Whether exploring the development of national traditions of scholarship or considering the way in which material culture is used to develop and maintain a sense of national identity, there has been a tendency for England to be subsumed within a wider British or imperial discourse (though there are some exceptions e.g. Johnson 2007). This session aims to restore this balance and consider the extent to which it is possible to recognise the notion of ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’ within archaeology.

It is hoped to explore a number of facets of the problematic relationship between archaeology and English identity including: 1/ Materiality and Englishness: the way in which material culture, structures and landscapes were used to create and maintain a distinct sense of English identity in past societies; 2/ The development of English traditions of archaeological scholarship and a consideration of the consequences of the development of ‘England’ as a distinct unit of analysis. Is there a distinct English tradition of archaeology or heritage management?; 3/ The use of archaeology to create discourses of ‘Englishness’ in popular culture.

Ackroyd, P. 2002. Albion – The origins of the English imagination London
Burden R and S. Kohl 2006. Landscape and Englishness, Amsterdam
Corbett, D., Holt, Y. and Russell, F. 2002. The geographies of Englishness : landscape and the national past 1880-1940 London
Gill, A.A. 2007. The Angry Island: Hunting the English London
Johnson, M. 2007. Ideas of landscape Blackwell
Matless, D. 1998. Landscape and Englishness London
Paxman, J. 1999. The English: A portrait of a people London
Pevsner, N. 1956. The Englishness of English Art London

Scouring the horse

Nice little article about the 'scouring' of the White Horse at Uffington. It's a wonderful site. Although the Wiltshire Downs are better known, I have a soft spot for the Berkshire Downs, particularly the area from the White Horse along the Ridgeway to Wayland's Smithy and down to Ashdown House (which has also recently appeared in the news). I spent several weeks working for Oxford Archaeology on a very exposed hillside nearby excavating the area where a Bronze Age hoard had been found. I can still remember the way in which the curtains of rain would sweep across the landscape. I would watch the front of the shower of rain move over the field towards me allowing me to time my retreat to the site hut to perfection.

View over Atlantis

Sad to see that John Michell, New Age mystic, counter-culture guru and author of the View over Atlantis has died; particularly as only last night I was reading the large retrospective of his life and thought in the latest issue of the Fortean Times- you can see the FT obituary here. Although as a hard-nosed academic archaeologist I obviously have no truck with ley lines and earth magic, it's hard not to be seduced by the love of landscape which stimulated and pushed Michell’s work.

My own research is on the early medieval period and I have very little interest in prehistoric archaeology from an academic standpoint. However, I do have a profound Romantic attachment to prehistoric landscapes, particularly the Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments of the Wessex chalk downland. I think this stems partly from having grown up in Berkshire and in the course of my childhood been regularly taken to look at hillforts, barrows and megalithic monuments. My experience of this landscape was also stimulated by a number of books and television programmes. I remember particularly a BBC children’s drama called The Moon Stallion, which was full of typical 1970s children’s telly, cod mysticism and general New-Age jiggery pokery, and was, I seem to remember centered around the White Horse at Uffington, the Ridgeway and Wayland’s Smithy. I was also intrigued by the images in Kit William’s book Masquerade, which also had a Wessex- New Age vibe going on in it; I never had my own copy, but coveted those of my friends. As a consequence of this, I still have a close personal and emotional connection to these prehistoric ritual landscapes; always seen at their best I think in the depths of a winter. I don’t want to know about the archaeology, I just want to enjoy them.

ps: When I was writing this just now, I was absolutely convinced that the BBC series was called Sun Horse Moon Horse; which it turns out is actually the name of a Rosemary Sutcliffe book, about the White Horse, which I am absolutely convinced I've never read or even knew about before.

Common Wealth

Those who scour the obituary columns may have noticed that Wing Commander Ernest Millington DSC, the last MP who sat in the Commons during WWII has just died. It’s not only this that makes him important; he was one of the few members of the short-lived Common Wealth party to become an MP. The Common Wealth party was founded by members of the Labour party and other radicals who disapproved of the Conservative-Labour electoral truce put in place during the War. The parties three key platforms were Common Ownership, Vital Democracy and Morality in Politics (which have rather a fine contemporary resonance).

Common Wealth was founded by Richard Acland, JB Priestly and Tom Winteringham. Tom Winteringham (the balding figure in the photograph)has long been a bit of a hero of mine; he commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War before being wounded at Jarama. He broke with the Communist Party in 1938 and went on to take a leading role in running and training the Home Guard in Britain during World War II using techniques he’d acquired in Spain. Coincidentally, I’ve just started reading Hugh Purcell’s The Last English Revolutionary: A Biography of Tom Wintringham 1898-1949. All I need to do now is find an archaeological connection... (though Priestly was married to the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes).