The world of 7th-century Britain was…different. Looking back to it now, we are faced with barriers of language, culture, religion. Everything was different. If a time machine were to transport us back to the 7th century, we would find ourselves in a strange landscape.
Although not something we could see when we emerge, blinking, from our time machine, perhaps the most unexpected difference is the shape of the country. The map of Britain is something we’re as familiar with as our own neighbourhoods. But even the shape of the country, particularly in its low lying eastern half, was different. Then, the sea took deep bites into the land: what is today Lincolnshire was almost an island, its boundaries as fluid as the tidal marshes that surrounded it. The Humber flowed through a markedly broader estuary and then spread, north and south, creating a vast marshland south of York. The Wash washed inland to take up almost all of present-day Cambridgeshire. The River Thames was not constrained, as it is today, behind concrete embankments but breathed in and out on every tide, sending its turbid water through deep channels into Southwark and up the now hidden rivers and streams that fed it. The Kentish spur that ends at the shingle beach of Dungeness was salt marsh too, with boats able to navigate up stream along the River Rother as far as Bodiam Castle, built in 1385 to guard against French invaders sailing up stream and landing there. At the eastern extremity of Kent, forming the hinge upon which so much of our history has turned, the Isle of Thanet really was an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, a safe anchorage where many a boat moored before attempting the passage along the north coast of Kent and into the treacherous tidal waters of the Thames estuary.
These tidal estuaries, salt marshes and broad rivers made the eastern coast of England markedly different from today. In the west, only the Somerset levels interrupt a generally familiar coast line, taking a big bite out of their eponymous county and providing, two hundred and fifty years later a refuge for a later Anglo-Saxon king.
Archaeologist Paul Gething looking out to the Farne Islands from Bamburgh
“Medieval tile. Medieval pottery. Another piece of pottery. More tile. Animal bone.” Paul Gething, archaeologist, picked through his finds.
I had, literally, been walking on history, oblivious to its presence beneath my boots.
We were standing on a path down from the great crag of rock upon which Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland squats. Paul had just told me that most people are oblivious to what lies beneath their feet and I had challenged him to prove it. Within ten yards he’d found these remains.
Looking up at Bamburgh Castle
Paul Gething is co-director of the Bamburgh Research Project (BRP), a multi-disciplinary archaeological dig investigating the history in and around Bamburgh. We’re brothers-in-law (married to sisters) and have known each other for years, but this was the first time I’d asked him to explain how he sees the world through the eyes of his discipline. I looked at his finds. To my eyes, they still looked like old stones.
“People have been here since Neolithic times, so it’s not hard to find things,” said Paul. “People drop litter now, and they threw away their rubbish then; we’ve not fundamentally changed over the centuries.”
In Northumberland, this continuity is visceral, tangible. The ramparts of Bamburgh Castle loomed above us. The fortress, capital of the lost kingdom of Northumbria, sits on top of a great outcrop of basalt, a part of the Great Whin Sill rock formation that stretches from the North Pennines to Northumberland. Out to sea, the Farne Islands, where St Cuthbert withdrew from the world and befriended the local eider ducks, are made of the same hard rock. The islands glittered darkly against an unexpectedly blue sky, while a few miles to the north, Holy Island (Lindisfarne) had, until the tide turned, rejoined the mainland.
Looking out from Bamburgh Castle towards Lindisfarne
Paul looked out to sea. “Ten thousand years ago, that was land. I think hunters camped here, watching the herds trailing past on their way to their feeding grounds.”
Paul Gething and Graeme Young, directors of the Bamburgh Research Project
We’d started the day by inspecting the trenches the BRP has dug in the grounds of the castle. Teams of archaeologists on hands and knees were carefully scraping away the earth with trowels, noting and tagging every find. For the really delicate work, they employed toothbrushes. The archaeologists here come in all ages, from pensioners to schoolchildren, for one of the key objectives of the Bamburgh Research Project is to make archaeology accessible: anyone, from members of the public to Indiana Jones, can dig after being taught the necessary skills. The site is open in the summer and people can sign up for anywhere between one day and two weeks.
Paul Gething and Graeme Young, directors of the BRP, in a pointing contest in a trench in the castle
Leaving the archaeologists in the trenches, we set off along a section of the St Oswald’s Way long distance path. It seemed to me that Bamburgh Castle, once the capital of the kingdom of Northumbria, was an obvious place to do archaeology, but Paul bet me that archaeology could illuminate any walk.
“Before setting out, look at the map. The names are clues to the past. For instance, -burgh is the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘fort’, and -by is Old Norse for a village, so that tells you who settled there and named the features of the landscape. Then look at aerial photographs, or satellite images – Google makes this easy – since things often show up more clearly from above.”
This was once a burial ground
Heading down into the marram grass covered dunes, Paul told me how an old Ordnance Survey map had given them a vital clue when the BRP first started digging here. There were written references to a burial ground in the vicinity of Bamburgh Castle, but they had no idea where to search for it. But then they looked at the very first Ordnance Survey map of the area and there, to the south, were the neatly printed words ‘Danish burial ground’. We made our way through a small wood (“Just regrowth, only a couple of hundred years old”), the air thick with the buzzing of heat-drugged insects, until we came to the burial ground. Paul said they’d found over 100 skeletons here, dating from the seventh and eighth centuries. The remains indicated the people buried here were from the nobility – “They were all well fed” – and some had come from as far away as Western Scotland and Norway, only to meet their end in the service of the kings of Northumbria.
Heading inland, Paul stopped at a pasture. The cows looked up placidly before returning to cropping the grass.
Ridge and furrow patterns in a field. Photo Matt Neale
“Ridge and furrow,” Paul said, indicating the undulations that ran across the field. “Or rig and frig in archaeological slang. Medieval, judging by the distance between the ridges. Roman fields have narrower gaps.”
Parallel lines, like the ripples that form on beaches as the tide goes out, marked the field in straight lines. In medieval times common land was ploughed or dug in long parallel strips. The soil from the furrow was piled on to the ridge, creating two different microclimates for crops. In a dry season, the seeds down in the water-collecting furrow would be assured enough moisture for growth, but if the year was wet, the crops in the freely-draining ridge would flourish. Thus medieval peasants hedged their bets and their labour to ensure a crop. Where the field has been turned over to pasture rather than cross ploughed, the centuries-old pattern of cultivation can still be clearly visible.
“The rule of thumb is the wider the gap, the nearer it is to our own time. Roman fields have a three-metre gap between the ridges, medieval ones from five to eight metres.”
Paul was winning the argument before we’d gone a mile. I asked him if there were any other archaeological landscape features that an amateur could spot and he pointed to a roughly circular patch of nettles sitting alone in the corner of a nearby field. Nettles love phosphorus, and the excrement of cattle and sheep is rich in the element. These solitary patches usually marked the site of a medieval sheep or cow pen. Although the enclosure had disappeared, the plants lived on on the bounty left by the long-dead animals.
“My family are always moaning that whenever we go anywhere, I’m always saying that that’s rig and frig, or there must have been Roman villa in the vicinity, but I can’t help it. It’s just part of the way I automatically process a landscape. For instance, near where I live in York, a Second World War airfield is reverting to scrub. It’s an archaeological test bed. There’s rig and frig fields, crab apples that aren’t native to Britain – my guess is that pilots flew over from America, ate the apple they’d bought there and then threw away the core – and miles of underground tunnels that I’ll bet future archaeologists will take to be sewers, but are actually communication ducts.”
The Bradford Kaims dig
A couple of miles inland, with the Cheviots looming in the distance, we arrived at another BRP dig. This one cut through the grass, topsoil and subsoil to reveal the limits of a prehistoric lake. One of the archaeologists there told me that in Mesolithic times, that is between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, where we were standing was a large figure-eight-shaped lake, and we were standing at the pinch point of the lake. It was the obvious place for a settlement, but our distant ancestors were proving elusive. The archaeologists had only uncovered the remains of a millennia-old ditch so far.
Walking back to the castle, Paul showed me an arrowhead he’d found at the edge of a field. It was an exquisitely worked, barbed and tanged late Neolithic flint. But what could this solitary find tell us?
Digging at Bradford Kaims
“I’m firmly convinced that the key skill archaeologists have to learn is how not to focus on what is in front of them. Five thousand years ago, skilled artisan could produce half a dozen arrowheads like this every hour. They were as disposable as Bic razors. The shafts, on the other hand, were a different matter. Finding and preparing a truly straight length of wood was difficult. Once that was done, the shaft had to be fletched too. For Neolithic man, the valuable part of an arrow was not the arrowhead but the shaft. What would happen, though, if an animal wasn’t killed outright but fled, taking your valuable arrow with it? So they made their arrows in such a way that the arrowhead would break off easily, leaving the shaft to be retrieved.”
Looking at the killing instrument, I was transported back in time to a world of woods and marshes, and a hunter drawing his bow on a deer and loosing his arrow. The beast, startled, leapt away, the arrow protruding from its haunch. The shaft broke off as the deer careered through the trees and the pursuing hunter spotted the bright feathers of its fletch lying in the moss. The deer escaped, only to die a few days later when the wound became infected. Scavengers cleared the remains, but the indigestible flint of the arrowhead fell to the earth, and was covered over, only to be uncovered centuries later when a sweating medieval peasant piled the spoil from the furrow on to the adjacent ridge. There it remained, alternately exposed and hidden, until a passing archaeologist saw it glittering on the ground and grasped its significance.
Paul Gething and I will be talking ‘Warrior’ and all things archaeological and Anglo-Saxon at an online talk for the Felixstowe Book Festival at 1:30pm on Saturday 26 June. This will probably be the last time we talk about the warrior that Paul excavated from the Bowl Hole outside Bamburgh Castle, so if you want to hear about screaming skulls, Thor’s thunder and lots and lots of bones, get your tickets from the Festival box office. Here’s the link.
We’re on YouTube! The talk Paul and I gave about the Warrior and all things Anglo-Saxon is now up on YouTube so if you missed it you can see the whole thing here:
There were many more questions than we had time to answer during our talk for the York Festival of Ideas. But luckily, we have all the questions that were submitted during the webinar and here are the answers!
Warrior: A life of war in Anglo-Saxon Britain – Saturday 7 June 2020, 1.00pm
York Festival of Ideas 2020 Online
Audience Questions, captured from the Zoom Webinar:
Stan Tan 01:25 PM
Hello from Singapore!
What is a “Bowl Hole” / why is the “Bowl Hole” termed as such?
Answer: Because it is a bowl shape: a depression amid the surrounding sand dunes.
Geoff 01:25 PM
Would the bodies buried face down with legs raised maybe infer a disposal rather than a burial?
Answer: we go into this in some detail in the book but in short, there are two explanations advanced for this type of burial: that it’s a sign of the person buried being in some form of disgrace or that, with the bloating that occurs in dead bodies and the corpse being put into the grave simply wrapped in a shroud, that it can be impossible for the burial party to know which way up they were burying the body.
Jack 01:37 PM
Given the classification of “warrior” to the finds and the idea they are elites are there any traces of this in their skeleton? healed broken bones or sign of a violent death etc?
Answer: Yes, there are. We go into this in detail in the book, but some of the skeletons show clear evidence of a very violent death: I am thinking in particular of one body where the skeleton was basically cut diagonally in half, from shoulder to waist.
Beverley Hallam 01:47 PM
What evidence can be gleaned about diet?
Answer: both direct and indirect. Remains of various foods have been excavated at Bamburgh, indicating a protein-rich diet with much meat eaten and various exotic imported foodstuffs, ranging from wild crane to lentils. The bones of the people excavated are uniformly free of the stress marks that indicate periods of starvation, so they were a well-fed and wealthy elite. Among the men, there is more evidence of tooth decay than among the women, which may be the result of drinking lots of sweet, and very alcoholic, mead.
Chris U 01:49 PM
Was there any evidence of cause of death on any of the skeletons?
Answer: there are some skeletons with clear evidence that they died violently, including one unfortunate man who was cut diagonally in half, from shoulder to waist.
Ruth 01:21 PM
Don’t forget the story of Grace Darling too. Women of the North East ….. strong women!
Answer: Indeed! There is an excellent Grace Darling Museum in the village.
Anonymous Attendee 01:25 PM
Why is it called the Bowl Hole?
Answer: because it’s shaped like a bowl!
Raffi Thomas 01:31 PM
Do you know if the broad axe was found in the same context as the sword? I’d be interested if they belonged to the same individual.
Answer from Paul: In the same garage, yes 😉 Until the archives are fully analysed and published I suspect this is uncertain.
henselmd 01:46 PM
Did you find a workshop at Bamburgh or implications of one–or are the artifacts thought to be spoils of war/raids?
Answer: There is some evidence for a smithy over towards St Oswald’s Gate.
S 01:46 PM
Did you find any female burials? If not, where would the women have been buried?
Answer: Yes, there were many female burials.
Sue Cumberpatch 01:47 PM
Is the book a fictionlised recreation, or a factual account?
Answer: the book is a factual account of the archaeology and history of Northumbria and the life and times of the Warrior: to bring this to life, I also interweave episodes in the Warrior’s life written with the techniques of historical fiction but always alive to the reality of the history and archaeology.
Lesley Hagon 01:47 PM
Can you talk more about the technology of the sword making – and is this a craft that died out?4
Answer: We’d need a whole book to do that – and we’re hoping to write one next, on how to make the perfect sword.
Anonymous Attendee 01:47 PM
The materials used particularly on the sword furniture are not local so where did these come from and so what does this say about the kind of trading relationships that these people had?
Answer: it tells us that trade links were much wider, and further reaching, than might be supposed for the time. For instance, some of the garnets used in Anglo-Saxon jewellery came from as far away as Sri Lanka. These luxury items were probably traded through a succession of middlemen before fetching up on the coast of the North Sea.
Anonymous Attendee 01:51 PM
Hi Paul, thank you for the interesting sharing. May I ask how do archaeologists tell from skeletons that these people are well-fed?
Answer: bones have a growth pattern that in some way resembles the rings in the trunk of a tree. If the person suffered periods of famine, particularly when growing up, this is shown in the patterns of bone growth.
Paul Bernardi 01:19 PM
Has any evidence of the early Angle fortress ever been found? From the time of Ida and his wife Bebba? (appreciate i may be jumping the gun here!
Answer: Yes, there has. St Oswald’s Gate and the structures around it date from the seventh century, and the well in the castle was probably cut down through the rock at this time.
Alison Offer 01:38 PM
These warriors living in a parallel world – are they exclusively young – do they settle down if they survive – thinking of Cuthbert who seemed to have fought as a youth – would he be one of these warriors – do you see the warriors as a separate community (say like the monks) or is been a warrior a rite of passage for all elite men?
Answer: Not exclusively young, but fighting is a young man’s game, then and now. However, experienced warriors still had to be prepared to fight at need. Having proved themselves among the king’s retinue, the best of his warriors were probably granted land and became, in effect, the king’s local representative.
Simon Thomas 01:39 PM
What date was the layer in which the window glass was found?
Answer: seventh century.
Walter Van Opstal 01:42 PM
beautiful gate!
Anonymous Attendee 01:44 PM
Having visited Bamburgh many times over recent years I have to say the information boards about the project could do with updating and expanding! Can members of the public support the project in some way to facilitate updating the information boards?
Answer: any support is gratefully accepted! If you would like to help, please email graemeyoung@bamburghresearchproject.co.uk.
Ruth 01:45 PM
What is the connection with Bradford Kaims?
Answer: Bradford Kaims is about five miles from Bamburgh. The BRP is excavating an ancient (Mesolithic to the Iron Age) wetland site there. For more information about the finds, please see here: https://bamburghresearchproject.co.uk/index.php/bradford-kaims/
Danny 01:45 PM
Presumably there was a larger Anglo-Saxon settlement at Bamburgh at this time. Can you say something about that?
Answer: Not too much, archaeologically, as we haven’t excavated there. But certainly, historical sources suggest a settlement around the castle, and there was probably a beach market on the strand.
Valerie Coyne 01:46 PM
Any females amongst the burials?
Answer: Yes, and in particular a young Norwegian woman (early 20s) who died and was buried in the cemetery in the sixth century, long before the better known contacts between Britain and the Viking world.
Valerie Coyne 01:51 PM
thanks very informative
Answer: Thank you!
Nic 01:46 PM
Why do you think one of the skeletons was buried face down?
Answer: we go into this in some detail in the book but in short, there are two explanations advanced for this type of burial: that it’s a sign of the person buried being in some form of disgrace or that, with the bloating that occurs in dead bodies and the corpse being put into the grave simply wrapped in a shroud, that it can be impossible for the burial party to know which way up they were burying the body.
Susan Palmer 01:47 PM
Are you still excavating in Bamburgh?
Answer: Yes, and you can join in! The Bamburgh Research Project excavates each summer (although this summer’s dig is still up in the air for obvious reasons) and it’s open to members of the public interested in trying archaeology hands on. See here for more details: https://bamburghresearchproject.co.uk/index.php/archaeology-field-school-2/
Gavin Welch 01:47 PM
How long does it take to acquire a burial licence? And how do you secure such an important site for that time frame whilst you wait?
Answer: It’s all in the book! But the short answer is, a while. And the BRP secured the site by reburying the bodies while they waited for the licence to come through.
Anonymous Attendee 01:47 PM
Why were the swords so extravagantly decorated?
Answer: Wouldn’t you? These warriors lives depended upon their weapons, and the blades were things of beauty in themselves. Further, the wielder’s status would be enhanced by the sword’s accompanying ‘bling’.
Andrew Sefton 01:48 PM
Why were they buried away from the church, were they fully Christian?
Answer: while the earliest graves in the Bowl Hole date from the pre-Christian era, most of the people buried there would have been Christian. In the book, we suggest that the Bowl Hole cemetery was reserved for non-local people who died while in Northumbria, as many of the bodies show evidence of having been born and brought up elsewhere.
Rick Brookes 01:48 PM
Did all of the graves have the same orientation?
Answer: roughly, yes, towards the east and the sea.
Jan Garrill 01:50 PM
Are these people of a similar size in height and physical stature to modern man?
Answer: Yes. And probably much stronger.
Karl&Vicky 01:50 PM
Have any other examples of pattern welded blades been excavated eleswehere in the country? Are they specific to the Anglo-Saxon period?
Answer: Yes. The best known is the sword buried at Sutton Hoo but there have been others. Pattern-welded blades are not specific to this era, but the time and effort that went into making such a sword was best repaid at a time when armies were small (often less than a hundred men), rather than the much larger armies of the late Anglo-Saxon/early Norman era.
James Pennock 01:51 PM
The book is superb – the crossover of 2 different approaches to history works really well. What have you both taken away from the other? Can the other approach influence your own?
Answer: Thank you! That’s really kind of you. I think we were trying to do something different – dare I say, unique – with this book, hammering together different strands of narrative to make a whole that lights up the subject from different angles, rather like the way the garnets of the period were cut and polished.
Walter Van Opstal 01:53 PM
Do you know exactly where the sword was excavated from? r were the records lost in that garage?
Answer: We have a reasonable idea of the context of the swords.
Paola 01:54 PM
In terms of pathologies… was there any evidence of inter-personal trauma in the skeletons? Paul showed one skeleton buried prone which in Saxon times this is interpretated as possible ‘deviant’ and as such they’re likely to present some form of trauma…
Answer: yes, some of the skeletons did show very clear, indeed quite horrific, evidence of injury, in particular one unfortunate man who was sliced diagonally in half, from shoulder to waist.
Anonymous Attendee 01:54 PM
Where were the metal workers buried?
Answer: We don’t know.
Stan Tan 01:55 PM
Hello from Singapore!
How did the Indian or Japanese influences get imported?
Answer: There probably weren’t any Japanese influences, but some garnets did come from Sri Lanka, traded through middle men via the Middle East.
Barry 01:55 PM
Had most of these people died of natural causes or had they been killed?
Answer: You can only tell for certain a violent death if the skeleton was damaged (as happened with one man who was cut diagonally in half). Others may have died through blood loss or injury to internal organs without that leaving any trace on the body.
Raffi Thomas 01:55 PM
Do you think the Dalriadan would’ve been a Christian, and if so is this reflected in his burial?
Answer: Yes, we think the Warrior was a Christian. He has no grave goods, and the portion of the cemetery where he was buried has a number of other graves buried in a typical Dal Riadan fashion.
Helen Butt 01:58 PM
Thank you for such a fascinating talk. Can’t wait till I can visit….
Answer: You’re welcome! You should visit: Bamburgh and Northumberland are wonderful.
Few books manage to be simultaneously so fascinating and so eye glazing. The tale of the movements of the successive waves of people that have made and remade Europe is fascinating, and the new science of DNA analysis that allows for the extraction of ancient DNA and its comparison to the modern inhabitants of a country is a salutary corrective to the strong tendency in archaeology and historical studies in the latter half of the 20th century to deny all movements of people in favour of cultural overlay and small groups of elite warriors while the peasants remain, lumpen and unmoved on the land (although these lumpen peasants do, by this view, display a remarkable ability to change languages and cultures at the arrival of a new bunch of guys waving swords). Since all the contemporary accounts of the age of migration talk about the movements of peoples, it’s good to accord the contemporary witnesses some credit for telling what they saw. However, on the eye glazing front, I defy anyone to get through a few pages of Y-DNA haplogroup R1a1a and the like without their head drooping.
Coffee-table book of Biblical archaeology. Beautifully produced, with a great deal of reasonably useful material about the wider historical and archaeological context, but written with a definite although veiled Biblical minimalist view. That’s the view, adopted by some scholars, that there is essentially no, or very little, historical value in the Bible. They see it as a theological, cultural and political document, reflecting purely the realities of the times when the various books of the Bible were written, with an assumption that they were written much after the events that they supposedly record. Thus the stories of David and Solomon and the United Monarchy are not a history of what actually happened but an invented genealogy and hence rationale for much later kings. While a strong strand in Biblical archaeology, it’s by no means the only one, but there’s very little in this book to suggest that there any other interpretations of the evidence beyond those presented here. Somewhat disappointing.
Paul Gething, director of the Bamburgh Research Project
“Medieval tile. Medieval pottery. Another piece of pottery. More tile. Animal bone.” Paul Gething, archaeologist, picked through his finds.
I had, literally, been walking on history, oblivious to its presence beneath my boots.
We were standing on a path down from the great crag of rock upon which Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland squats. Paul had just told me that most people are oblivious to what lies beneath their feet and I had challenged him to prove it. Within ten yards he’d found these remains.
Paul Gething is co-director of the Bamburgh Research Project (BRP), a multi-disciplinary archaeological dig investigating the history in and around Bamburgh. We’ve known each other for many years, but this was the first time I’d asked him to explain how he sees the world through the eyes of his discipline. I looked at his finds. To my eyes, they still looked like battered old stones.
“People have been here since Neolithic times, so it’s not hard to find things,” said Paul. “People drop litter now, and they threw away their rubbish then; we’ve not fundamentally changed over the centuries.”
In Northumberland, this continuity is visceral, tangible. The ramparts of Bamburgh Castle loomed above us. The fortress, capital of the lost kingdom of Northumbria, sits on top of a great outcrop of basalt, a part of the Great Whin Sill rock formation that stretches from the North Pennines to Northumberland. Out to sea, the Farne Islands, where St Cuthbert withdrew from the world and befriended the local eider ducks, are made of the same hard rock. The islands glittered darkly against an unexpectedly blue sky, while a few miles to the north, Holy Island (Lindisfarne) had, until the tide turned, rejoined the mainland.
Paul looked out to sea. “Ten thousand years ago, that was land. I think hunters camped here, watching the herds trailing past on their way to their feeding grounds.”We’d started the day by inspecting the trenches the BRP has dug in the grounds of the castle. Teams of archaeologists on hands and knees were carefully scraping away the earth with trowels, noting and tagging every find. For the really delicate work, they employed toothbrushes. The archaeologists here come in all ages, from pensioner to schoolchild, for one of the key objectives of the Bamburgh Research Project is to make archaeology accessible: anyone, from members of the public to Indiana Jones, can dig after being taught the necessary skills. The site is open in the summer and people can sign up for anywhere between one day and two weeks.
Paul Gething and Graeme Young, directors of the Bamburgh Research Project, inspecting finds in one of the trenches in Bamburgh Castle
Leaving the archaeologists in the trenches, we set off along a section of the St Oswald’s Way long distance path. It seemed to me that Bamburgh Castle, once the capital of the kingdom of Northumbria, was an obvious place to do archaeology, but Paul bet me that archaeology could illuminate any walk.
“Before setting out, look at the map. The names are clues to the past. For instance, -burgh is the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘fort’, and -by is Old Norse for a village, so that tells you who settled there and named the features of the landscape. Then look at aerial photographs, or satellite images – Google makes this easy – since things often show up more clearly from above.”
Heading down into the marram grass covered dunes, Paul told me how an old Ordnance Survey map had given them a vital clue when the BRP first started digging here. There were written references to a burial ground in the vicinity of Bamburgh Castle, but they had no idea where to search for it. But then they looked at the very first Ordnance Survey map of the area and there, to the south, were the neatly printed words ‘Danish burial ground’. We made our way through a small wood (“Just regrowth, only a couple of hundred years old”), the air thick with the buzzing of heat-drugged insects, until we came to the burial ground. Paul said they’d found over 100 skeletons here, dating from the seventh and eighth centuries. The remains indicated the people buried here were from the nobility – “They were all well fed” – and some had come from as far away as Western Scotland and Norway, only to meet their end in the service of the kings of Northumbria.
Heading inland, Paul stopped at a pasture. The cows looked up placidly before returning to cropping the grass.
“Ridge and furrow,” Paul said, indicating the undulations that ran across the field. “Or rig and frig in archaeological slang. Medieval, judging by the distance between the ridges. Roman fields have narrower gaps.” Parallel lines, like the ripples that form on beaches as the tide goes out, marked the field in straight lines. In medieval times common land was ploughed or dug in long parallel strips. The soil from the furrow was piled on to the ridge, creating two different microclimates for crops. In a dry season, the seeds down in the water-collecting furrow would be assured enough moisture for growth, but if the year was wet, the crops in the freely-draining ridge would flourish. Thus medieval peasants hedged their bets and their labour to ensure a crop. Where the field has been turned over to pasture rather than cross ploughed, the centuries-old pattern of cultivation can still be clearly visible.
“The rule of thumb is the wider the gap, the nearer it is to our own time. Roman fields have a three-metre gap between the ridges, medieval ones from five to eight metres.”
Paul was winning the argument before we’d gone a mile. I asked him if there were any other archaeological landscape features that an amateur could spot and he pointed to a roughly circular patch of nettles sitting alone in the corner of a nearby field. Nettles love phosphorus, and the excrement of cattle and sheep is rich in the element. Those solitary patches I’d often seen in the past usually marked the site of a medieval sheep or cow pen. Although the enclosure had disappeared, the plants lived on on the bounty left by the long-dead animals.
“My family are always moaning that whenever we go anywhere, I’m always saying that’s rig and frig, or there must have been Roman villa in the vicinity, but I can’t help it. It’s just part of the way I automatically process a landscape. For instance, near where I live in York, a Second World War airfield is reverting to scrub. It’s an archaeological test bed. There’s rig and frig fields, crab apples that aren’t native to Britain – my guess is that pilots flew over from America, ate the apple they’d bought there and then threw away the core – and miles of underground tunnels that I’ll bet future archaeologists will take to be sewers, but are actually communication ducts.”
BRP archaeologists hard at work
A couple of miles inland, with the Cheviots looming in the distance, we arrived at another BRP dig. This one cut through the grass, topsoil and subsoil to reveal the limits of a prehistoric lake. One of the archaeologists there told me that in Mesolithic times, that is between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, where we were standing was a large figure-eight-shaped lake, and we were standing at the pinch point of the lake. It was the obvious place for a settlement, but our distant ancestors were proving elusive. The archaeologists had only uncovered the remains of a millennia-old ditch so far.
Walking back to the castle, Paul showed me an arrowhead he’d found at the edge of a field. It was an exquisitely worked, barbed and tanged late Neolithic flint. But what could this solitary find tell us?
“I’m firmly convinced that the key skill archaeologists have to learn is how not to focus on what is in front of them. Five thousand years ago, skilled artisan could produce half a dozen arrowheads like this every hour. They were as disposable as Bic razors. The shafts, on the other hand, were a different matter. Finding and preparing a truly straight length of wood was difficult. Once that was done, the shaft had to be fletched too. For Neolithic man, the valuable part of an arrow was not the arrowhead but the shaft. What would happen, though, if an animal wasn’t killed outright but fled, taking your valuable arrow with it? So they made their arrows in such a way that the arrowhead would break off easily, leaving the shaft to be retrieved.”
Looking at the killing instrument, I was transported back in time to a world of woods and marshes, and a hunter drawing his bow on a deer and loosing his arrow, but the beast, startled, leapt away, the arrow protruding from its haunch. The shaft broke off as the deer careered through the trees and the pursuing hunter spotted the bright feathers of its fletch lying in the moss. The deer escaped, only to die a few days later when the wound became infected. Scavengers cleared the remains, but the indigestible flint of the arrowhead fell to the earth, and was covered over, only to be uncovered centuries later when a sweating medieval peasant piled the spoil from the furrow on to the adjacent ridge. There it remained, alternately exposed and hidden, until a passing archaeologist saw it glittering on the ground and grasped its significance.
