Folk Against Facism

A rather depressing but perhaps inevitable story about attempts by the BNP to co-opt folk music to the fascist cause. Traditionally, the sound track of the far right has been heavy rock/punk e.g. Skrewdriver). However, as the article points out this is not compatible with the new smooth image the BNP are trying to put across now. This has been reported a number of time previously- see here and here. However, there is now the formation of a new body Folk Against Fascism to try and counter the attempt by the BNP to 'claim' folk music as its own (interestingly on its on-line shop the BNP labels it 'British' rather than 'English' folk music). Now of course, I doubt this is exactly going to leave Nick Griffin quaking in his hush-puppies; but its an extremely useful development, if only to remind the Neanderthals in the BNP that the English (and indeed Irish and Scottish) folk tradition is primarily an anti-establishment one, pitted against landed and industrial wealth and imperialism. Its not surprising that ideologically bankrupt and historically and culturally ignorant parties such as BNP should in its typically half-arsed and lazy way try and annexe folk music, and its pleasing to see that those involved in the current folk scene are busy telling them precisely where to stick it.

From dots to downloads

By pure chance I caught a fantastic programme on the Radio this morning called From Dots to Downloads about the rediscovery of tunebooks of 17th to 19th century date. These were private notebooks containing a range of music including traditional folk music compiled by local musicians for their own private use. It was presented by Tim van Eyken. The programme particularly talked about the wonderful Village Music Project. Its worth adding that this is not the only excellent resource on-line which brings folk music resources to the wider public. Its definitely worth checking out the excellent FARNE (Folk Archive Resource in the North-East). I was also pleased that it mentioned the importance of folk music to the work of the poet John Clare, a favourite poet of mine (not to mention potentially an ancestor...)

Mining heritage

Last week Durham saw the annual Durham Miner's Gala: this year it attracted over 100 000 people to the city to remember the grant tradition of mining in Durham. This year numbers were doubtlessly swelled by the fact that it was 25 years since the miner's strike of 1984. The narrow streets were crowded with brass bands from the surrounding mining villages marching along the banners from the local National Union of Miner's lodges. Its an awe-inspiring and moving occasion. However, the elephant in the room (or at least in the streets) is the sad fact that there are now no working coal mines in Durham or indeed the entire north-eastern coal field.

When I was doing A levels, it was common knowledge that the north-east (County Durham and Northumberland) was dominated by coal mining. Even then (in the late 1980s) it was notable that we covered this more in History than in Geography. The process of de-industrialisation may have reached a bloody climax in 1984, but mines had been shutting long before this. So when I started working in Durham and Northumberand a little under a decade ago it was no surprise to me that there was little active mining in the area. What was a shock though was the way the entire industry had been wiped from the landscape. Today, the only pitheads still standing are heritage attractions (at Beamish, Washington F Pit and Woodhorn). I was used to the former industrialised areas of Yorkshire such as Leeds, Bradford and Sheffield, where although many factories and mills were no longer working, the buildings themselves still stood. However, in the north-east the entire infrastructure of a globally significant industry that more or less underpinned entire sections of the regional culture has been entirely erased. It was not only the removal of all the mine buildings that is staggering, but the shifting of the spoil heaps. The spoil pit for the pit at Ashington was once the biggest manmade mound in Europe; its now entirely disappeared. Once in the course of work I came across some photographs of the Durham landscape in the 1950s. There many pictures of many mining villages I knew quite well, but they looked almost entirely unfamiliar because in the background were the spoilheaps standing high above the buildings. The end of the mining industry did not just mean the destruction of the mines themselves but an entire reworking of the landscape itself. I was told recently about the notion of the Anthropocene used to describe the period of earth's geological history when for the first time human's rather than natural processes began to influence the earth's geology and geomorphology. The mining history of Durham is surely a case study in this. Now, though, there is clearly a growing interest in reminding people of the role mining played in County Durham. I think people are realising that babies born during the strike are now in their mid-20s, but have never known the county has a centre for coal production. The Gala, which nearly died in the late 1980s, is now bigger than ever (it's still the biggest regular political rally in the world). Almost all former pit villages have now erected memorials to their collieries. There is a burgeoning interest in oral history and local history; new banner's for the Gala are even being created. Despite all this enthusiasm, there is still a strange and silent gap where the mine's themselves used to be.

There is also a political element to this. I've been told that following the '84 strike, English Heritage wanted to record the historic buildings and installations linked to the mines that were to close. Apparently, however, Michael Heseltine (President of the Board of Trade at the time) actively forbade this; it is hard not to see this as a vindictive act against the miners. The feeling that the mining industry should not be turned into a heritage resource was not, hoewever, simply promoted by the government. Many miners at the time felt strongly that what they saw as a living industry should not be turned into a heritage or tourist attraction. For them the wounds were fresh and the bitterness too raw. Consequently, it is not surprising at the time there was little appetite for protecting or preserving the pit heads.

Return to Doggerland

After my blog earlier about drowned lands, I though the following was quite nicely timed.

BBC Radio 4 Open Country programme explores Doggerland.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lmpkb

On the first day of this year's Festival of British Archaeology, BBC
Radio 4 will be airing a special programme exploring Europe's lost world
- Doggerland - a land lost beneath the waves of the North Sea, which is
the focus of a recent book published by the CBA.

Besides speaking to archaeologists who are investigating Doggerland,
Helen Mark will be joined by the storyteller Hugh Lupton who imagines
the myths of those long-lost hunter-gatherers.

The programme will be aired as follows:

* BBC Radio 4 on Saturday 18th July at 6.00am
* repeated on Thursday 23rd at 3.00pm
* will be on the BBC iPlayer for quite some time after that date.

For more information about Doggerland or to purchase a copy, see the CBA
news release about Europe's Lost World; the rediscovery of Doggerland:
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/news/090327-doggerland

I'm particularly pleased as I'm a fan of Hugh Lupton, not least because of the wonderful work he's done with Chris Wood.

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