September 9, 2024 • 57 mins
Welcome to another exciting episode of Tales from the Trowel! Today, Darren and Jackie are on location in the scenic yet stormy Teesdale, exploring the fascinating archaeological site at Gueswick. Despite the challenging weather, the team is eager to uncover the rich history buried beneath the beautiful surroundings.
Join Darren as he chats with professional lead Rob Young about the meticulous process of archaeological excavation, the importance of sequencing, and the intriguing finds that have emerged from the trenches. Discover how layers of history are peeled back like an onion to reveal the stories of the past.
In this episode, we also hear from Martin Green, the coordinator for fieldwork with Altogether Archaeology, as he shares insights into the challenges and rewards of organizing digs and writing detailed reports. Martin's extensive knowledge and experience shed light on the site's long history, from the Middle Iron Age to the Roman period.
Additionally, Tony Metcalfe, another key member of the team, discusses the significance of the multi-period palisaded settlement at Guesswick. Learn about the site's origins, its impressive array of finds, and the ongoing efforts to uncover its secrets. Tony also touches on the importance of community involvement and the support of various archaeological groups and funding bodies.
Finally, hear from Sue Wilson, a dedicated volunteer with Altogether Archaeology, about the sense of community and the joy of unearthing the past. Whether you're a seasoned archaeologist or a curious listener, this episode is packed with fascinating stories and expert insights.
Don't miss out on this captivating journey through time as we dig deep into the history of Teesdale. Subscribe to Tales from the Trowel and stay tuned for more thrilling episodes!
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Episode Transcript
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(00:02):
Digging up the best in archaeology from around the uk this is the tales from the trowel podcast,
welcome back to another episode of tales
from the trowel today darren and i are out on location in
teesdale we are at guesswick beautiful surroundings absolutely
gorgeous horrific weather on its way and
(00:24):
as usual we come outside to do some outside recording thinking
we're going going to have a nice summer's day it's going to be lovely full of
full of rain high winds and generally off
but in saying that the archaeology is fantastic darren and
i are gonna have a wander around now and have a look at some of the trenches
find out what's been going on talk to some of the volunteer archaeologists here
(00:46):
with altogether archaeology so we have rob young yeah so rob rob you're the
professional lead that's that's apparently the the title they've given me yeah Right.
Does that come with any extra responsibilities? Well, Martin,
who's brilliant at doing these sort of jobs, Martin Green actually writes the reports.
But I just sort of, you know, make sure that we take things out in the right
(01:07):
sequence and hopefully record them right so he can, you know,
he can actually use that data to write the report.
And sequencing, I'm realizing, in archaeology, it's the be-all and end-all. Yeah, it is.
Everything has to be sequential, doesn't it? It's like peeling an onion.
You know, the earliest layers are on the top. Yeah.
And as you peel the skin off, you go down through the onion and you get to the
(01:30):
latest layers in the middle.
So digging the sites just like that is taking the layers and the context out in the right order.
Well, that's quite a simplistic view because I thought that's what it is.
But then you've got cuts.
Oh, yeah. There'll be a cut in a different layer and then you have a cut where
there's been a structure built against the cut and there's a lot.
(01:51):
Well, that's just, a lot of that is observation that comes sort of with experience. Right.
And once you've done two or three excavations, you get your eye in for what's
cut and what and what's overlying.
The most basic relationships in any archaeological excavation are if you've
got a layer, what's above it, what's below it? Is anything cutting through it?
Right. And if you can get those relationships right, you can actually sort of
(02:14):
tell the story of how the site developed.
And once you can do that, then you can put all the finds into the different
contexts and the layers that they've come from.
And you can work out a chronological sequence to go with that relative sequence,
you know, where event A is followed by event B, is followed by event C.
You can put all the artifacts into that relative sequence and that's what gives you the chronology.
And then that's really, really enhanced, really, I mean, really,
(02:36):
really enhanced by radiocarbon there. And they give you...
Well, I was going to say absolute dates, but they're not. Technically,
they're called chronometric dates, dates with real years added.
And that's when it gets really interesting is when you get radiocarbon dates.
But carbon dates are kind of still expensive to get, a couple of hundred quid
to get radiocarbon dates.
So you have to be dead careful, you know, what context you take samples from to date.
(02:58):
And we've got a really good sequence of radiocarbon dates from this site that
shows at least the excavational sequence we're doing is, you know,
is correct because the dates follow the sequence, which is nice. Nice.
Archaeology, is it nature or nurture? Can you learn archaeology? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, definitely. Because, so you've gone through university,
(03:19):
you're not an archaeologist, you know the theories, you know the basics.
Like you say, you have to spend time studying layers and things.
But from my point of view, the digs I've been involved with,
and the archaeologists say, there, can you see where there's a change?
There's a brown or there's a slight green. And I don't always see it.
Again, that's just experience, just getting your eye in. Textures as well.
(03:42):
Soils have textures, and it's being able to sort of feel those textures.
But there's all kinds of different sorts of archaeology. You know,
you don't have to just dig holes to be an archaeologist.
You could do research on finds. Like Tony's really good. Tony Metcalfe's really
good on the find side of things.
When I'm not digging holes, I do reports on flint and pottery from other people's excavations.
(04:04):
To be an archaeologist, there's lots of different branches of the study.
There's people who specialise in studying animal bones, talk about past diets,
they look at plant remains, to talk again about what the environment was like
when people were around, say, in the Iron Age.
There's a tremendous amount of information you can get. And you can be an archaeologist
and just listen to what the professionals, in other words, have to tell you
(04:28):
and be kind of entertained by that and get your knowledge from that.
But much more interesting, I always used to argue this when I worked in university,
is to turn what you could say were passive consumers, the folks who went to
lectures and were really interested and listen to what the professionals have to say.
Turn those folks into active producers of their own archaeology.
(04:49):
That's crucial, I think. If you're doing that, then you're on a roll.
And this organisation now, Altogether Archaeology, has done that successfully
over the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years or more. They're brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
Do you get pigeonholed? Like Tony, you say Tony's good at finds,
where someone might be good at another aspect or someone's good at bones.
(05:09):
Yeah, sometimes you have a specialism, yeah. Yeah, but isn't that surely a complete
archaeologist as we cross all the disciplines?
You've got a finger on the pulse, as it were, yeah. Nobody can hope to,
you know, to know it all, really.
I mean, my specialism is prehistory. I mean, you know, I'm digging on a site
that's Iron Age. All right, that's good.
But Romans, I was really interested in Romans when I was a student,
(05:31):
but I was taught by people who were really, really fired up by prehistory,
you know, the period before the development of writing.
And that just fired me to get involved.
And I've never looked back. Is there periods that you think, oh, no, not for me?
Any period, if there was a site and it was from a certain period,
would you say, I haven't got any interest? No, no, I wouldn't, no.
(05:53):
Because genuinely, you have to be interested. You have to have that inquiry
kind of, it's inbred, really. You don't want to know what happens.
Yeah. I mean, you might not have the knowledge that, say, a medieval specialist
would have to tell you about medieval buildings and medieval settlements and
medieval pottery, but you'd be interested to find out what they had to say.
And that would stimulate you, I think, to think about how, you know,
(06:16):
an interpretation might develop and how you could get involved in a debate with
the experts about what's actually going on on the site.
So that's about another organisation.
A kind of an organisation that probably brought archaeology to the masses was Time Team.
Yeah, yeah. Now you're getting Time Team. The reason I ask the question about
areas where you mightn't have a massive interest in, I think Mick,
Mick Aston, he wasn't that interested in Roman. Am I right in believing it?
(06:41):
Well, I don't know really.
I mean, Mick Astin was a great field archaeologist. His real interest was landscapes.
And he ran a lot of really good projects, you know, from the time when he was
a county archaeologist right through to when he was involved with the time team.
Actually, technically, I think he probably was meant to have been retired,
but he was such a good archaeologist and so enthusiastic.
He had an interest in everything. And that's why the time team was such a good program.
(07:05):
Because the work was done in three days. I know because when I worked for English
Heritage, I had to go and look after, you know, I think three or four sites
they were digging on to see that, you know, the job was done right.
And the work was done within three days. And was it done right?
Yes, always. Yeah, meticulous, yeah. Fast, done fast. Exactly,
because I only watched the Benchester time team the other night.
(07:26):
I'm like, I've watched them all nine days this week. I keep falling asleep.
I put it on and it just relaxes me.
Yeah, they go in and I know they
use mechanical diggers, but in no time at all, they're quite far down.
Yeah. And I think, God, you know, I've been at Auckland Castle last week and
we had a scraper and a pick or a matic and we didn't get down six inches.
(07:47):
So in no time at all, they're quite down.
They used to have a set of, you know, there were research questions they wanted
answers to and they devised techniques to actually realise the answers to those
research questions in a limited period of time.
And that was what made it so exciting was that, you know, here we've got three
days to do X and sometimes they did it in three days.
(08:08):
Sometimes they did it and it wasn't quite what they wanted to, you know, to realize.
But no, the professionalism was amazing. I always thought it was incredible
given the timescales. Mick Aston was a genius.
Stuart Ainsworth, who used to do all the landscape work. I worked with him when
he worked for English Heritage at Historic England.
(08:28):
Phil Harding is another one. He's such a great communicator,
a really, really good field archaeologist, works for Wessex.
And they were all, you know, they were all really talented people who all came
together at a time when there was a burgeoning interest in archaeology.
And there's that old film, you know, I can't remember who's in it,
but it's called Field of Dreams, where the guy wants to be a baseball player.
(08:49):
And he builds a baseball diamond and all the ghosts of all the players he wanted
to play with turn up. If you build it, they will come.
Once there's a mechanism there and a structure there, then folks will get involved
if they're interested. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's getting that interest.
Now, as I say, turning consumers of professional knowledge into producers of
their own archaeology is a crucial thing to be doing through a community project like this one.
(09:11):
And it works. One of the members of the Time Team is, was he,
is he involved with Altogether?
Is it Stuart? Stuart, yeah, Stuart, yeah. And that was the chap who did the
magnetometry and all the... No, that was Vince Gaffney.
Oh, right. Stuart was the landscape... Yes, yes, because he was the one that
reconstructed Winchester and he said it all slipped away.
Yeah, he used to do all the flying around in the helicopter. So how did you get in?
(09:32):
How did you start with archaeology? How did I start with archaeology?
Yeah, because obviously, I'm not being, but Taintain probably wasn't the reason
you got into archaeology. No, I mean, I'm ancient.
I went on my first archaeological excavation in 1965.
Right. 1965. You're ancient, aren't you, really? I am ancient,
yeah. I'm joking. I was 11.
And it was at Winchester and it was with the Bishop Auckland Auckland Archaeological Research Group.
(09:57):
And it was when they were clearing out the bathhouse, before the bathhouse had
the shed put over it, and before they developed it.
And I got into it because my teacher at school, I went to the grammar school,
when it was a grammar school at Bishop Orton, and I did Latin.
I did Latin right through to A-level from the first year I went in.
And Mrs. Wanders, who taught Latin, said, anybody want to come to see an archaeological
(10:20):
excavation, meet up Saturday in the Market Square at Bishop and we'll go to
the Winchester excavations.
And I went and I never looked back. And I was bitten by the bug and I had no plan B.
I always wanted to be an alcoholic just after that. My dad always said to me,
Robert, when you get a real job, you'll know what work's about because he knew
I would have done it for nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(10:41):
I just loved it and I've been all over the world with it.
I've worked in some amazing places, met some incredible people and it's just been a blast.
I can honestly say I've never had a boring day.
Genuinely, I've never had a boring day. I've had days when I've been dead on
my feet and I've had enough, you know, but I've never been bored.
I wonder how many people can say that. It's true. and I've never been born.
(11:04):
So a question I've asked everybody and the listenership is probably going to
go, we know, we know what's going on. Right, time machine, you're going to go
back to a period in time. Yeah.
Where are you going? I would go back to a period called the Mesolithic,
the Middle Stone Age, which is what I'm really interested in.
It's the period just before farming starts when people were still hunting and
(11:25):
gathering, still making a living by, you know, gathering fruits from the forest
and by hunting animals in the forested environment.
And the crucial thing I'd want to know about is why give a lifestyle where you
were part of the landscape and you could predict where all your resources were
going to be on stream and on tap at different times of the year and where people
(11:45):
had structured patterns of movement through that landscape and knew it,
they were part of it, they didn't own it, they were part of it.
Why give that balanced way of making a living off to become a farmer where you
cut trees down, you destroy the ecosystem.
Because the ecosystem never goes back to like it was.
You couldn't go back to hunting and gathering once you committed to farming
(12:06):
and become reliant on what in nature are just wild grasses.
That's all crops are. Wild grasses that have been tamed, as it were,
and animals that have been tamed.
When you had a rich supply of tremendous animals like red deer,
roe deer, wild boar, wild cattle, all there in the forest to be hunted and gathered.
(12:26):
Why give all that rich dietary variety up to restrict your diet to agricultural food.
And there must be some really social big issues there and there must be some
really big economic issues there.
And I'd love to go back to that period of the transition from hunting and gathering
to farming and try and find out.
You'd give that some thought. Yeah, that never would have occurred to me, never.
(12:49):
It's one of the most momentous periods, the Mesolithic. Because at one level,
right at the start of the Mesolithic, say about 10,000 BC, something like that,
we'll say for the sake of an argument,
You've got the end of the ice age and people are adapting to change in landscape
conditions as the ice retreats.
And at the other end of the timescale, you've got this big momentous change
with the development of agriculture.
(13:10):
And around about 7,000 BC, Britain gets cut off from the continent and North
Sea breaks through and the Channel gets formed and Britain becomes an island.
So there's all these changes that go on. Just at that point,
there's a cusp that people are sitting on at that Mesolithic-Neolithic transition.
Transition and i'd love to go back to see just how that panned out
yeah that's certainly brilliant wow and i'd
(13:33):
never never occurred to me any of that but one last question
on this site we're on now what's what's the one thing that
surprised you well several things have surprised me that the commitment of the
folks who've been doing the digging is amazing yeah but the fact that it's you
walk over it's totally unprepossessing field right but you do the the geophysical
(13:54):
survey like the time team used to do geophysics.
The geophysics shows that there's a tremendously rich archaeological record under the Turk.
And it's complicated and it's really interesting.
And trying to unravel that is, I think, really, really difficult and challenging
to do. And that's been great, trying to do that.
(14:16):
And people say, well, you didn't find very much. Well, you find the site. The site's the find.
And what that site tells you about the way people were making a living in the
Iron Age and in the Roman period, that's the crucial sort of area of interest, really.
The actual material culture finds, the bits of pot and, you know,
the metalwork and that, you need that to establish the chronology and you need
that to talk about the way people, you know, utilise ceramics for certain jobs
(14:40):
or metal for certain jobs.
And it becomes very interesting once you start to do that because up here,
right, we've got a sequence of settlement activity that goes from the Middle
Iron Age, say around, well, 200, 250 BC, through to the 2nd,
3rd century in the Roman period, right?
And whether it's continued use, you don't know. But at some point,
(15:00):
these what were probably well-to-do farmers in the Iron Age were Romanized,
for want of a better term, in the very commons. They met with the Romans.
They knew about, probably through contact with the Roman army.
And that changed their whole outlook on trade and exchange.
And what for me is really interesting is that you go from a farmstead where
(15:22):
people were living an Iron Age way of life, probably cooking lots of stews,
eating beans and pulses and lentils and that kind of thing.
To a period once they were in
contact with Romans for trade where they bought into a
totally different way of preparing food and you can see that in some of the
pottery we've got there are these things called notaria that are chafing dishes
(15:43):
like if you imagine a box grate of a grate in your food jug it's a chafing dish
for for making your vegetables into sort of mush really sort of to cook them
differently mush is too strong a word but.
You wouldn't have those things if the people who lived on the site didn't know how to use them.
So there's a change in the way people view culinary activity.
(16:03):
And that's kind of an interesting question. What promoted that? Yeah.
And how did that link with the Romans actually manifest itself?
Well, we know it manifests itself here with stone slab floors in the buildings,
with querns that were of a Romanized type, pottery that's Romanized.
So there's a really interesting set of changes that goes on at that period around,
(16:27):
you know, 50 AD when the Romans first really come into the region.
Might I suggest that people's dedication on the site, which is the first thing
you learn, you might be down to your enthusiasm as well.
I think that's got a rough off on people. They're all committed.
They're very, very good. I want to go up there and dig now.
But Rob, honestly, that's been brilliant. Thank you very much.
(16:49):
I've enjoyed it. It's been good. And two things I didn't expect out of that.
Didn't expect to think about the mesolithic in that manner right and i didn't
expect to write kevin cosner downy and i can't remember why he wrote that ah
that is that failed to dream,
that's right brilliant thank you it's great fun this is tales from the trowel,
okay so we've been lucky enough to have a quick chat with with martin green,
(17:11):
who is one of the i'm the coordinator for field work for together archaeology
okay so it's me that kind of arranges the portaloos and make sure the tents
get here and all the equipment and i do the i generally do the main writing up of the digs as well,
after the digs finish so i kind of make sure all the stuff goes off to the right labs for,
(17:33):
processing and then write up the results so we
can get out an interim report on the dig each year before
the next dig starts but you've got quite an extensive knowledge of archaeology
and history yeah i was although i'm not a was never a professional archaeologist
in my youth I did actually work as a digger and supervisor for an archaeology
(17:54):
unit in the 1970s until I went off and did other things.
Many years background in archaeology and also i
think writing the digs up makes you kind of
understand more deeply what's going on because you have to try and
get it right in your own mind before you
start writing it for other people of course so do
(18:14):
you have experience in in writing texts and
and is this something that's come across in your career well i've
got a i've got a doctorate but not in archaeology
so you know i've written theses written papers on other things
so it's something that comes fairly natural
to me the importance of the ridden wood is not lost on you
yeah yeah and record keeping because in archaeology it's
(18:36):
it's never easy to keep a kind of track of the dig basically
when you're up on top of a hill and the rain's coming down like it
is now and the wind's whizzing across as it
is at the moment it's quite difficult to try and
keep decent records and make sure you've got all the photographs and
it all makes sense it's with
with doing that and being as involved as you are does that does that
(18:57):
lead to extra pressures is it you wake up on a morning it's really bluster it's
really rain and you think i really can't not go i have to go today um yeah i
mean it is quite exhausting i think i've had we've had a couple of days off
during three weeks of this dig but that's the only two days i'll have off.
Of course it's not as physically demanding because i although i spend some time
(19:20):
digging quite a lot of the time is kind of supervising and keeping the record
straight so it's less physically demanding than a lot of the volunteers who will be digging all day.
How long have you been involved with Altagala?
Well, right from the very beginning. It started in 2011 when it was a.
Part of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the North Pennines project of that.
(19:41):
And I was just a volunteer at that stage. But then in 2015, when the money ran
out from the Heritage Lottery Fund, we reorganized as a community group.
And I've been one of the main ones on the committee ever since then,
just as Tony has, helping to run the group.
But as I said, my particular part of it is to organize the digs and make sure
(20:01):
they run okay and get written up at the end.
Other people We'll do other things
like organising the meetings and the insurance and all the other bits.
But it's me that does the portal here and so on. So do you live locally?
Yeah, I live about half an hour's drive north of here near Blancheland.
So I do live in the North Pennines. And one of the problems of the organisation
just is that we cover a very large area.
(20:24):
And in winter, it can be virtually impossible to get around the area because
it's split up between the dales with high mountain passes in between them.
It's always it's it means as an organization we
don't run like most community archaeology groups and
have evening meetings where people come to hear speakers because the distances
(20:44):
the people would travel just be not worth it for an hour-long talk by sunday
so we tend to have whole days of a series of talks several times during the
the winter rather than kind of separate evening meetings things.
And the same for digs. We try and organize digs in different parts of the North Benin.
So the people, if they live locally, can at least get to something near to them.
(21:08):
Unfortunately, a lot of our digs have tended to be in the Teesdale area just
because of the opportunities we've had here.
Teesdale is a wonderful area archaeologically and not very well investigated.
So there's a lot to do here.
Your accent suggests that you're not originally from Blanchland.
No, no, I've actually come from Cambridge here, so I come from down south.
(21:31):
I originally came up to the northeast to work in the university in the late 70s, I think.
Yeah, so I've been around here for about 40 years or so.
But I'm married to a local, so she translates when necessary. Yeah.
I'm sure it's never necessary so so
(21:51):
where we are now in in gesmik so and this
is this is an important site is it a site that was
known to be important or have you revealed its importance no it's curious it's
it's a site that really wasn't known at all until about eight years ago the
only thing that was known about it was that on top of the hill is a can a very
(22:11):
much mutilated cairn because it's been robbed for wall building,
presumably other things.
And in the cairn and near to it were a couple of stones with cup marks in.
And on the ground about 10 meters from the cairn is a ground-fast boulder with cup marks on.
And these were noted by Paul Brown, who's expert or was the expert in cup and
(22:34):
ring marks and rock art in this area.
So he noticed it, published it in a book, and it got it onto the county historic
environment record as being the Bronze Age camp because of the rock art,
but it wasn't investigated any further.
It was only about eight or nine years ago that it was noticed that the top of
the plateau here is actually quite lumpy, but not lumpy in a very obvious way
(22:57):
that you can define at all.
It doesn't look like an obvious prehistoric site or medieval site. It's just lumpy.
It was picked up in the community LIDAR survey. Paul Frodsham,
about five years ago, ran a community-based survey of LiDAR images for Teesdale and Weardale.
And this survey included, this site was noted in that, but they wasn't too sure what it was.
(23:24):
So about five years ago, we started off with.
Doing geophysics. Fortunately, the next archaeology group south,
which is the Arkengarth, the Swelldown Arkengarth group, have got a magnetometer
that they got as part of a Heritage Lottery funded project.
So we snubbed up to them and asked if they might like to bring their magnetometer up to Gesswick.
(23:46):
And we started doing surveys across the field.
We've extended it a couple of times in later years.
We've now got a magnetometry survey of the whole top of the plateau,
which completely to our surprise showed this large trench,
a large ditch that runs around the plateau enclosing quite a large area, about a hectare or so.
(24:09):
You can't see it on the ground, you can't even see it on the LiDAR images and
it doesn't appear as a crop mark.
It wasn't known it was there and there
were various other kind of ditches and
other anomalies as well in the scan so it
was obvious that this was some kind of site probably a prehistoric site and
this would fit in with the big terraces because the south side of the hill facing
(24:33):
towards Cotherston has got large terraces cut into it for presumably agricultural
terraces and these are some way from the local villages.
The villages around here were all in the Doomsday Book, so they're active and
probably found in early medieval times.
They've got their own field systems around them. You can see on Google Earth,
(24:54):
Cothaston, Rommelkirk, Connethwaite have all got the typical reverse S hedge
lines of medieval field systems around them.
But the Guesswick Hills here aren't inside those field systems,
so it seems unlikely that the terraces were anything to do with the medieval farming.
So it's more of they're older. So the terraces kind of fit in with the fact
(25:17):
that this is a prehistoric settlement,
Do you think there's a reason why it was sited here? Was it because of the geography?
We know from the LIDAR survey that Paul did with volunteers,
we know from that that there are Iron Age-type farmsteads. There's little enclosed
settlements with a couple of round houses inside a bank.
(25:39):
These are spread at about half-mile intervals up both sides of Teesdale.
Generally, some of them are on the valley floor, but quite a lot of them are
kind of halfway up the sides of the valley. In fact, there's one directly opposite,
the other side of the valley, directly opposite from Gatswick that you can see from here.
So it seems to be that they quite like their settlements to be fairly high.
(26:00):
There is fantastic views from here, further up the dale and across the moors,
across to Shacklesborough and Goldsborough, the big flat-topped mountains.
Were the two, obviously the two reservoirs that we're close to here,
they obviously were there, no, no, no less than 50 years ago.
But you hear when they flood the valleys that they flood villages and things
(26:24):
like that, that wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever because now they
control the water coming down there I think it would reduce the flooding of the rivers,
yes, they're used as flood control as well as water supplies But there's no
suggestion this could have been dammed, this area where it was run a raised island,
if it was dammed it would be quite an effective defensive No, I don't think in.
(26:47):
Prehistoric times i mean as it happens guesswick
hills are were actually a dam across teesdale but
that was just at the end of the ice age guesswick hills
are terminal moraine of the glacier so as
the glacier gradually retreated up teesdale at
the end of the ice age it left this huge
ridge of debris across the dale and according
(27:09):
to the geographers it dammed
a huge lake so the guesswick hills formed the dam
of a huge lake that covered a lot of teesdale so
middleton and ronald kirk would have all been
deep underwater at the end of the ice age but then
the water broke through and formed the where the tease is now yes and we landed
(27:30):
up kind of several hundred foot above the tees now right it's absolutely fascinating
but just when you referred to the ark and garthdale group yeah is there a local
rivalry i know you have there's a bit of a cross there's you've got members in both groups.
There's no rivalry at all.
When we set up the Altogether Archaeology for the North Pennines,
(27:52):
there's no archaeology groups in the area at all.
There's a lot of people who are members of more than one group.
I'm a member of the Tyndale group as well, which is the next group north that
covers the Hadrian's Wall area and the area a bit to the north.
I've got people from the Linsdale group.
(28:13):
Us as well so people who are keen on digging are often
members of more than one local group and it's
useful to have their expertise as well as i said it's quite useful
to be able to borrow their equipment as well some some
some drawn radar super duper equipment you're quite happy to learn it oh yeah
yeah yeah yeah no it's nice it's nice and it's i mean there's plenty there's
(28:35):
just so much archaeology to do around here yeah obviously in areas like these
upland areas like the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines,
there's virtually no commercial archaeology like there would be in most of the country,
simply because there isn't much in the way of development.
There's no new roads, no railways, virtually no new housing being built.
So there's no commercial archaeology being done on development sites.
(28:59):
I'm a member of a metal detecting group and we had a gentleman from the British
Museum came to do a talk, and it was about Saxon settlements and how many Saxon
settlements have been found through metal detecting.
It's just because there is areas in the ground that just don't get investigated.
What's the one thing that surprised you? I think the fact that we started off
(29:23):
believing it was kind of simple and that we'd dig it and we'd find the date of it.
And we found a couple of roundhouses and we know that it was 100 BC.
But in archaeology, everything is always more complicated than you think it's going to be.
So as it happens, it turns out that this is a very long-running settlement,
(29:43):
much longer running than we ever thought it would be.
And we're now into deeper levels, so it may even go earlier than we were suspecting last year.
I mean, at the end of last year, when we got the dates back,
we knew that it would have been an active settlement for over 500 years, because we got the.
The enclosure ditch around the Arnage original enclosed settlement is about
(30:06):
250 BC, according to the radiocarbon dates.
We knew right through to the radiocarbon dates in the settlement that it was
still active past 200 AD.
So a very long-lived settlement. Of course, now we've actually gone below those
levels and we're still, you know, we found this arc of post holes and a lot
of charcoal and posts and things. and these may well take it back hundreds of years before that.
(30:31):
So it's just such a huge span of history, the settlement covered.
If you think about it in modern terms, that takes you back from the present
day back into the medieval period, basically 500 years, back into the days of
Henry VIII. So a huge span of history.
Numerous events must have happened, which the biggest one, I guess,
would have been the coming of the Romans.
(30:53):
But the settlement kind of carried on, probably prospered through the Roman period.
So it's just the great sweep of history that we're kind of exposing.
And this is your last week of 2024.
2024 is our last week. We've got about five days of digging and then we'll have to get re-turfing.
If the dig was to finish next weekend or the week I'm coming and that would
(31:16):
be it, that would be a travesty, would it?
I won't say it's a travesty. The thing is, on a site like this,
we've got, as I said, The ditch around the main, the huge ditch around the top
of the summit covers a hectare.
And if you work out how long it would take to dig a hectare archaeologically,
you're running into probably a century or two of digging.
(31:38):
So you have to stop somewhere. Yeah. And wherever you stop is always going to be a wrench.
But in the end, you've got to stop and write it up and publish it.
But there's definitely further years. Oh, there's potential,
yes, for further years of investigation here.
Can you know why, you know? Because obviously the group has only got a finite
(31:59):
amount of resources and people.
You wouldn't open that and get the Achengarth deal and the North Tyne.
Well, I mean, they're welcome. Anybody's welcome to join. I mean, we.
Anybody who's a member, it doesn't cost that much to join. Anybody can come along and dig with us.
Do you do students? Do you use any students from Durham? We have used our other
(32:19):
summer dig down near Bowes, further south of here,
which has been running in July for the last few years, is in cooperation with Durham University.
The timing is always a problem because students expect to dig in July before
they go off on their luxury holidays to wherever Durham students go.
(32:40):
Yeah, probably Molaire and things like that. I don't know what Durer students
do during term time and so on.
But, yeah, cooperation with students is a possibility.
Enthusiastic folks. Some enthusiastic. Yeah, no,
it's, I mean, the, yeah, no, I mean, students have to get,
the ones that are going to carry on to become archaeologists as a career,
(33:02):
you know, have to get a lot more experience because it's only by doing a lot
of digging that you really get to know how it works and get the feel of sites.
And the only way you can do that is by taking part in digs and different types
of digs. So, yeah, there is a potential there.
And, of course, Newcastle University is nearby as well and have had digs.
I mean, Rob Young, a professional archaeologist on this dig,
(33:25):
he's cooperated with Newcastle University students a lot. Yeah, it's difficult.
And, of course, we're all getting older. It's one of the big problems with all
community groups, not just in archaeology, basically, is that it's something
that people don't have time for when they're working hard.
It's only as their careers are running down, they get retired,
people really have time for archaeology.
(33:47):
It's presumably metal detecting as well. If you're going to do it,
it's going to take days and days of your life to do it properly and get used to it and enjoy it.
And people just don't have that time if they've got young families and careers.
Is so people you know join groups like ours
as they're kind of in their 50s getting into their 60s the
problem is by the time they're hitting 70 and beyond their knees
(34:09):
are knackered and their hips have gone and then no the mind's
willing but yes there's no no no more use
in the heavy work so in archaeology it's quite
heavy work and the phases of it that are a nice delicate trailing
but a lot of it is you know matic and shovel and
you need fit young people or youngish people to do
it and by the time you're mid-70s most people are kind of slowing down so one
(34:31):
question to finish one question i always like to ask archaeologists right and
i'm going to answer myself if you had a time this this tent was a time machine
and we could go back to any period in time for one day.
I'd like to go back to the bronze age i think.
The Iron Age, in a way, we can vaguely understand what goes through their minds.
(34:54):
They're not that different from medieval peasants. In many ways,
the farming was similar.
I know they had different beliefs and so on, but the Iron Age was recognizable.
But I think going back a bit further maybe into the Bronze Age,
Chalcolithic, late Neolithic would be interesting just to see if you can understand,
(35:15):
what they believed and the things in their life what was important I wouldn't
want to go to the Roman times I can't think I'd like to go then,
I'd like to go then but I think I'd like to go back just to see how the land lived,
like Bishop Auckland, how was the land before the Roman and things like that. No, I'm brilliant.
(35:37):
I mean, and we know the landscape at the end of the Iron Age,
probably here, lower Teesdale, is probably not that different to how it is now.
But you'd be interested to just go back to sort of 1500 BC and see what it was like then.
As you said before, you write up all the things. If you went back in time for
one week and you got a good understanding and you wrote a book on this,
(35:57):
do you think it would be accepted by?
I would hope so. I mean, what I think, if you think just one photograph graph
of one iron age village. Yeah.
Or tell you just so much that we just can't, that you can't get from either
archeology or from the writings of the Romans or whatever.
Thank you very much. I really enjoy it. Okay. I've learned quite a lot.
(36:17):
So good morning, Tony. Good morning. So we're with Altogether Archeology,
a community based archeology group.
And we're in half a mile from Cuddleston. Right.
We're near a Cuthersdon in Romelkirk. Yeah, okay, yeah. It's a fair difference.
I know, Middle East daily rings a bell. So, Tony, so the site that we're on,
(36:40):
it's been proven to be a multi-period palisaded settlement.
Yes. So, do you know when the initial period would have been?
Well, from the dating evidence that we've got so far, it goes back to 500 BC
on the terraces. And we know that from carbon dating and oscillating light results
(37:02):
done by the tourist team.
And we've also got carbon dating as well. And then we started work here in 2019,
having done a walkover and magnetometry and looking at the LIDAR.
And we put a ditch in, a trench in, and we discovered a ditch which went two
(37:22):
and a half meters deep, which was the ditch for a palisade. And we did more magnetometry.
We returned in 2021 because our dig was obviously stopped in 2020 when COVID arrived.
But that was the year that the tourist team came because they were professionals
from a European team and they worked here for a week with some of the committee helping them.
(37:47):
And they did test pits on all the terraces and some test pits in some of the
fields on the Regent Furrow as well, at the side of the terraces.
And that terrace, the terrace, would that have been for crops?
That would have been for crops, yes. It's a south-facing terrace,
isn't it? Yes, it is. It wasn't access?
No, no. It was built for crops. Right.
(38:09):
And we have results that there was emmer there, which spelt as a derivative
from emmer, and then wheat as well.
And it would have been used for bread making?
Well, it would have been...
Through preparation, yes. And the palisade, so you come with the tourists and
you've got this palisaded area.
(38:30):
The palisade would have been defensive?
Well, it might have been defensive. It might have just been to keep the cattle
in. It might have just been to keep the stock in.
Okay, so there's no indicator of how high the palisade... We don't know.
It might have been various. But clearly, we think that in the Roman period,
the palisade might have well been taken down and because there were lots and
(38:51):
lots of paved areas and some of the paved areas were over what was the palisade
as we discovered in the first trench that we'd done.
How do you establish a site? Because we're not in the middle of nowhere as such
but we are somewhere you wouldn't notice from the roadside.
So I'm just curious how you identify a site to explore. Well,
(39:16):
this was initially identified with LIDAR.
So we had the LIDAR techniques and then... Who initiated the LIDAR? Was it yourselves?
No, no, no, but the LIDAR was done by the Environment Agency,
commissioned the LIDAR to save our fruit plants initially.
(39:38):
The original LiDAR was done by the MOD. So what piqued your interest on the
site? Why did you think, what's that there?
Well, we were interested with the features around here.
There's a more detailed version as well.
And of course, now people are doing LiDAR with drones as well.
It's amazing what happening is.
(39:58):
So you found your site. You think, right, that needs further investigation.
So what's the first steps? The first step is to do a walkover.
And we got our members in a line at the edge of the field and we walked over
very, very slowly and if they saw
any lumps and bumps that seemed to be interesting, we went to have a look.
(40:19):
We recorded them on the LiDAR map that we had just to confer,
try and work out where things were and then with the magnetometry,
we then decided where we were going to put our trench.
And the magnetometry, it's kind of what you say on time, is it where the increments are? Yes.
(40:40):
We just walk across and the signals go down into the ground and then they get
recorded on the computer.
Is that an expensive process?
Because obviously you don't have the equipment at home, so you have to employ someone to do that.
We don't have the equipment, but we do borrow the equipment from the Swilldale
(41:02):
and Archengarthdale group.
They bought the equipment with a lottery grant, and we share that with them.
We give them a donation, and some of their members come and do it.
Well, actually, some of their members are our members as well, but that's what we do.
We use their equipment. It's just on your membership. I mean,
they're all volunteers, aren't they? Yes.
(41:23):
This is the Tales from the Travel Podcast. Hello Sue. Hello.
Oh, so I'm here today at Guesswick with Sue Wilson, a member of the Altogether Archaeology team.
So Sue, can you tell me why did you decide to join Altogether Archaeology?
(41:43):
What was the reason behind that? The main reason was to come digging.
I live a bit too far out for the majority of the stuff that they do,
But I do like digging and there's not so many places where you can get to dig now.
So I'm quite happy to join them and come up here.
(42:04):
So what's some of the benefits then of joining Altogether Archaeology?
Well, they do an awful lot apart from digging. They do walks and they have lots of lectures.
But as I said, they're mainly too far away for me, but you can get them online.
Oh, the Zooms? The Zooms, yeah. Yeah, because they started doing those during
(42:24):
COVID and they still do a few online.
So it's easy to keep in touch. And because some of the people that dig here
I've dug with at other places.
It gets to be like a community, so you get to know more and more people.
And so you get to learn, you know, meet new friends here. And then the next
(42:45):
time you come, you remember them again.
This is the Tales from the Travel Podcast. Well, yeah, we have people who are
qualified archaeologists.
Some of them have master's degrees, PhDs, but we order them again.
Actually, what's the youngest member you have? Well, the membership starts at
(43:06):
18, but we do have family membership where people are coming on at 10 and 12.
But the youngsters have to be accompanied by responsible adults.
And is it quite a healthy membership? We have 124 members. That's pretty good.
It is. I can imagine that's a logistical nightmare if you have a dig and everyone
(43:28):
wants to turn up on the same day, a car park. Well, fortunately,
a lot of them don't want to dig every day, can't dig every day because some of them are working.
But it does, we try and restrict numbers on the site so that we can deal with
the numbers because it's not about having people up coming if there's nothing for them to do.
But we open up sites accordingly, but we don't open them up too big because
(43:52):
we know that we have to finish the work.
We're here for three weeks. Right. Is that a time team do the three day thing,
don't they? That's their gimmick.
You different sometimes it'll be different periods of time depending on
when the fields are available across all we're very
very fortunate that alice and steven lamb let
(44:13):
us come whenever we want to come we tell them where we're going to dig and they
actually come and cut the grass prior to us arriving so it's less to dig and
they keep the removal stock as well and this has always been This has always
been grass, farming records going back.
So just where we're situated here, we're on a very prominent hill. Yeah, we are.
(44:39):
Fantastic views. It is very, very prominent. And on a fine day,
not unlike today, you can see Goldsborough and Shacklesborough further up the valley.
And they have rock art on them. And when you're on the top of Shacklesborough
and Goldsborough, this stands out just as they do from here.
(45:02):
So it's probably been a site that people have used, obviously,
for a long, long time. It initially had been like a signalling station where
they would communicate across. Yeah, could have been, yes.
As well have been. That's fascinating. So the land we're on,
obviously, the River Tees, is just down from us. It is.
But to me, it's a long way down from us. It might only be a quarter of a mile.
(45:24):
What do you say? No, it's less than that. Less than that. It's one field.
So there would need a water up here. There would need a lot of water.
There is a spring up here. There is a spring. Okay. There is a spring. Fantastic.
So the site would have been used mainly, it would have been a family settlement
or would it have been multiple?
Well, there must have been a lot of people here to have had all of the people
digging the palisaded ditches and all the other ditches that are here.
(45:48):
And the life of the site, we're spanning a thousand years? Well,
we're spelling from at the moment that we know of, sort of 500 B.C..
To 500 AD. Why do you think that the site went out of use?
We don't know why it went out of use at all. We have no idea yet.
(46:11):
We just don't know why it went out of use.
Do you think it would have been a money economy in that period or would it have been more trade?
Well, there must have been trade going on because when the Romano-British period,
we have food preparation pots here, which must have been traded and we've got
(46:31):
one spearhead here but that could have belonged to a local who was in the Roman army.
It could have just been one of the lads joining the Roman army.
Have you found, there has been quite, I mean next to us on the table we have
some lovely finds which span the Iron Age right through to 1st,
(46:51):
2nd century and into the 5th century.
And the most modern find that you've got, the metallic find,
is the Pilgrim's Badge. Yes.
I can't get my head around how that comes to being on this site.
Well, we don't know whether there's been a religious settlement here or not
later on in the medieval period. We don't know that yet.
(47:11):
And which deity does it portray?
Is it St. Edmund, was it? The Pilgrim's Badge is from St.
Edmund's. Yeah, St. Edmund's. Right. And the badge portrays him being put to death by two archers.
And it's a copper alloy badge. and it's the furthest north we've called it.
Because you imagine people making pilgrimages to large church centres like Durham
(47:34):
and Canterbury and things.
So someone might have been returning from that. Yeah.
Bury St. Edmunds was a prominent position at the time. There were a lot of royal meetings held there.
And there's no churches in the area to Bury St.
Edmunds. Bronze is a bronze or copper alloy? It's copper alloy.
(47:55):
Bronze. Copper alloy. There were a lot made of lead. They were a cheaper version.
And as for other finds, I noticed you've got the spear, which is really,
really nice. Is that the socketed? And that's 180 AD.
180. And there's one identical design to it founded in South Shales.
So 180, so the Romans were already established in the north of England by this period.
(48:17):
It's, my basic knowledge of the Romans, you've got the A66 from Scotch Corner.
That was classed as the Winter Roads. Was that the Roman Winter Roads?
There was a Roman settlement at Bowes, which is not far from here.
But just on the hillside over there, Eggleston, there's the Roman road that
would have gone to Alston.
(48:37):
So there would have been a Roman carriageway
like Passan so there would have been Roman activity
so there would have been trade oh yes with not necessarily
Romans but with the Romano-British so and as
for other finds with some even predates predate the spear there's some well
we've got quernstones we've got beehive quernstones which were done in the Iron
(49:04):
Age right and then we've got quernstones stones right up to the 1st, 2nd century.
Plus a medieval quern stone, which is on the promontory where we did the dig
last autumn, where we found the pilgrim lab.
So this is something that you'd expect to find on a site like this.
Would you expect the volume of cairnstones? Or does this seem more than you would have thought?
(49:26):
Well, we've never worked on a site where we've found as many cairnstones as this.
Does that lead you to any... Well, it just means that the site's been in use.
Grinding grain for such and such a purpose. Do you think it's any indication
of population from this?
Well, yes. I mean, they have a lot of people to feed.
(49:49):
You know, all these cairnstones that were found, they must have been feeding
a lot of people Is there any indication in the name of the site that would,
like you know, that leads to its activity, because Gesswick,
Gesswick, yeah, we haven't we don't know The W-I-C-K ending,
does that does that indicate more Saxon or Viking?
(50:12):
Well, it does, but the names project that we're doing, they still haven't come
up with firm results I did read
some of the Altogether PDF files on your website, which are brilliant.
And it does have, there has been different spellings. Yes. Is that just down
to just literacy or local?
It can be literacy or just doing it how people pronounce it.
(50:34):
So you don't know the name? We don't know.
The guest bits, we don't know. Yeah, we don't know. And we've been through all
of the records for this, for the estate, going back hundreds and hundreds of
years. So they've given us all the information.
So would this have been, because I know we're part of the Doe Park estate here.
Yes. Would this have been herds of deer?
(50:55):
Well, there are still deer here. Yeah.
Because one of the lads that's camping on the site sees deer.
And when people come up early on in the morning, there's often deer up here. So it's still here.
But on the site, as we came on, you showed us that there is a circle of what
have been portholes. so that's that's right at the beginning of its uses would that be?
(51:20):
As far as we know for the information we've got so far every day brings up something
new yeah and that's obviously that's why you're here that's why you go out to
bed and you get here so if we knew all the answers we'd just go to pubs,
Treat it as a holiday. This is your fourth year on the site?
It's the fourth year on the site. And notwithstanding the COVID period.
(51:40):
Do they tend to be the same people? Do they come back year after year?
Well, so the hard call, the membership, yes.
But we get new members every week. And your funding, obviously this is not a cheap thing to fund.
I mean, a port-a-loo, just to hire for three days, can be hundreds of pounds.
We're lucky that we've built up quite a good resources with our membership fees and donations.
(52:05):
But we do get funding to do our research from the, this year,
from the Royal Archaeological Institute.
They've given us money to pay for all our carbon dating last year.
We've had funding from the Council of British Archaeology of Yorkshire to do
some of the postural research.
And that was, their funding was backed by the Architectural and Archaeological
(52:27):
Society of Northumberland and Durham.
They gave us some funds as well. Now, does political events,
I don't want to say the B word, but to political events, do they affect you?
Have things changed from, say, 2015, without using the B word, through to now?
Has that affected you or is it pretty much?
It's pretty much the same. I mean, all the groups are chasing the same pots of money.
(52:51):
We had money for two or three years from the Durham County Community Fund,
But they said that they were going to then concentrate on food banks.
Yeah. Things like that, heating people's homes. So you have to compete.
So do you have to put forward a case for doing it?
Putting in the paperwork to
(53:13):
apply for grants is quite a difficult thing to do. It takes a long time.
And if you don't do it right, you don't stand a chance. Just people in the street,
can you do that? Do you have to employ solicitors?
No, we do it. Do it yourselves?
We do it. We're very, very lucky that we've got a lot of people.
It's a team effort to put it together. Fantastic.
(53:36):
I draw it all together. It's my name that goes on the bottom of my section.
So if it goes wrong, you're equally to blame. But we do get help.
And we're lucky because this is now, since the Boundary Check,
this is in County Durham, which historically and all the local people still
think of themselves as Yorkshire people so that was why the Council of British
(53:59):
Archaeology in Yorkshire sponsors and we also,
there's no such thing as a free lunch so all the people that give us grants,
we have to write them a report for their publications we have to go and give talk as part of the day,
so this year I've been in Durham and York giving talks.
(54:24):
And Martin writes the reports to go into that. So, surely now the money is all
the people who distribute the funds.
They'll say, oh, he's Tony McCaffrey. Just take it. He's fine.
Everything will be good. No. Doesn't happen like that. No.
Unfortunately, no. Can I just skip
back to what you were saying about the dissemination of the information?
Do you go into schools? Do you have any connections with any schools in the area?
(54:48):
We have been into Cleverston School. and
we have had young archaeologists groups
coming up and we have had several people
on work experience this year It's one of the things with
work experience that archaeology is not taught in college anymore now so that's
a nice stepping stone from nothing to going to university and if a lot of younger
(55:15):
people thinking about doing archaeology at At university,
some of the professors at Durham
advise them to join all together in archaeology to get some experience.
And this applies to some mature students as well who are thinking of switching careers.
And we've got new members, some who are actually working here today, are doing that.
(55:35):
But they were advised to come and try it out with us.
Yeah. Well, I think we're going to try and make time to get round some of the
trenches and talk to some of the people digging today.
So they'll be pleased to talk to you. I just hope it doesn't rain too much Tony,
I don't want to leave this without drawing attention to these models,
the models that have been made by one of your members, and these models are fantastic.
(56:01):
We're very, very lucky that Stephen Brown makes our models for us,
and they are really, really admired very, very useful for when we're talking
to school groups or village halls,
and we do go around the community trying to spread the word.
Local societies ask us to go and give talks and they come and visit here as well.
(56:24):
You can say to me, oh, there's a round out of the ditch, there's a palisade, there's pits.
And I don't always get the image in my mind. And then you see that and you get it. You understand it.
And it's like time team. Time team do the reconstructions.
The chap out does the drawings. Yes. So, I mean, they're absolutely amazing.
And we will take some pictures if you don't mind. Do anything you wish.
(56:47):
So, Tony, anyway, thanks for your time this morning. Yes, thank you very much, Tony.
It's very, very nice having you on the site. It is. It's actually quite a nice
little tent we've got here, a little gazebo-y type tent.
Well, it is one of our tents of standing. Yeah.
It's lovely. Thanks for your time, Tony. Thank you. We'll be back next time
(57:07):
with more Tales from the Trowel.
Make sure you like, follow and subscribe from wherever you get your podcasts
so you never miss an episode. Tales from the Trowel, an Archaeology News North
East production in association with Pigmatic Productions.
Digging up the best in archaeology from around the uk this is the tales from the trowel podcast,
welcome back to another episode of tales
from the trowel today darren and i are out on location in
teesdale we are at guesswick beautiful surroundings absolutely
gorgeous horrific weather on its way and
(00:24):
as usual we come outside to do some outside recording thinking
we're going going to have a nice summer's day it's going to be lovely full of
full of rain high winds and generally off
but in saying that the archaeology is fantastic darren and
i are gonna have a wander around now and have a look at some of the trenches
find out what's been going on talk to some of the volunteer archaeologists here
(00:46):
with altogether archaeology so we have rob young yeah so rob rob you're the
professional lead that's that's apparently the the title they've given me yeah Right.
Does that come with any extra responsibilities? Well, Martin,
who's brilliant at doing these sort of jobs, Martin Green actually writes the reports.
But I just sort of, you know, make sure that we take things out in the right
(01:07):
sequence and hopefully record them right so he can, you know,
he can actually use that data to write the report.
And sequencing, I'm realizing, in archaeology, it's the be-all and end-all. Yeah, it is.
Everything has to be sequential, doesn't it? It's like peeling an onion.
You know, the earliest layers are on the top. Yeah.
And as you peel the skin off, you go down through the onion and you get to the
(01:30):
latest layers in the middle.
So digging the sites just like that is taking the layers and the context out in the right order.
Well, that's quite a simplistic view because I thought that's what it is.
But then you've got cuts.
Oh, yeah. There'll be a cut in a different layer and then you have a cut where
there's been a structure built against the cut and there's a lot.
(01:51):
Well, that's just, a lot of that is observation that comes sort of with experience. Right.
And once you've done two or three excavations, you get your eye in for what's
cut and what and what's overlying.
The most basic relationships in any archaeological excavation are if you've
got a layer, what's above it, what's below it? Is anything cutting through it?
Right. And if you can get those relationships right, you can actually sort of
(02:14):
tell the story of how the site developed.
And once you can do that, then you can put all the finds into the different
contexts and the layers that they've come from.
And you can work out a chronological sequence to go with that relative sequence,
you know, where event A is followed by event B, is followed by event C.
You can put all the artifacts into that relative sequence and that's what gives you the chronology.
And then that's really, really enhanced, really, I mean, really,
(02:36):
really enhanced by radiocarbon there. And they give you...
Well, I was going to say absolute dates, but they're not. Technically,
they're called chronometric dates, dates with real years added.
And that's when it gets really interesting is when you get radiocarbon dates.
But carbon dates are kind of still expensive to get, a couple of hundred quid
to get radiocarbon dates.
So you have to be dead careful, you know, what context you take samples from to date.
(02:58):
And we've got a really good sequence of radiocarbon dates from this site that
shows at least the excavational sequence we're doing is, you know,
is correct because the dates follow the sequence, which is nice. Nice.
Archaeology, is it nature or nurture? Can you learn archaeology? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, definitely. Because, so you've gone through university,
(03:19):
you're not an archaeologist, you know the theories, you know the basics.
Like you say, you have to spend time studying layers and things.
But from my point of view, the digs I've been involved with,
and the archaeologists say, there, can you see where there's a change?
There's a brown or there's a slight green. And I don't always see it.
Again, that's just experience, just getting your eye in. Textures as well.
(03:42):
Soils have textures, and it's being able to sort of feel those textures.
But there's all kinds of different sorts of archaeology. You know,
you don't have to just dig holes to be an archaeologist.
You could do research on finds. Like Tony's really good. Tony Metcalfe's really
good on the find side of things.
When I'm not digging holes, I do reports on flint and pottery from other people's excavations.
(04:04):
To be an archaeologist, there's lots of different branches of the study.
There's people who specialise in studying animal bones, talk about past diets,
they look at plant remains, to talk again about what the environment was like
when people were around, say, in the Iron Age.
There's a tremendous amount of information you can get. And you can be an archaeologist
and just listen to what the professionals, in other words, have to tell you
(04:28):
and be kind of entertained by that and get your knowledge from that.
But much more interesting, I always used to argue this when I worked in university,
is to turn what you could say were passive consumers, the folks who went to
lectures and were really interested and listen to what the professionals have to say.
Turn those folks into active producers of their own archaeology.
(04:49):
That's crucial, I think. If you're doing that, then you're on a roll.
And this organisation now, Altogether Archaeology, has done that successfully
over the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years or more. They're brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
Do you get pigeonholed? Like Tony, you say Tony's good at finds,
where someone might be good at another aspect or someone's good at bones.
(05:09):
Yeah, sometimes you have a specialism, yeah. Yeah, but isn't that surely a complete
archaeologist as we cross all the disciplines?
You've got a finger on the pulse, as it were, yeah. Nobody can hope to,
you know, to know it all, really.
I mean, my specialism is prehistory. I mean, you know, I'm digging on a site
that's Iron Age. All right, that's good.
But Romans, I was really interested in Romans when I was a student,
(05:31):
but I was taught by people who were really, really fired up by prehistory,
you know, the period before the development of writing.
And that just fired me to get involved.
And I've never looked back. Is there periods that you think, oh, no, not for me?
Any period, if there was a site and it was from a certain period,
would you say, I haven't got any interest? No, no, I wouldn't, no.
(05:53):
Because genuinely, you have to be interested. You have to have that inquiry
kind of, it's inbred, really. You don't want to know what happens.
Yeah. I mean, you might not have the knowledge that, say, a medieval specialist
would have to tell you about medieval buildings and medieval settlements and
medieval pottery, but you'd be interested to find out what they had to say.
And that would stimulate you, I think, to think about how, you know,
(06:16):
an interpretation might develop and how you could get involved in a debate with
the experts about what's actually going on on the site.
So that's about another organisation.
A kind of an organisation that probably brought archaeology to the masses was Time Team.
Yeah, yeah. Now you're getting Time Team. The reason I ask the question about
areas where you mightn't have a massive interest in, I think Mick,
Mick Aston, he wasn't that interested in Roman. Am I right in believing it?
(06:41):
Well, I don't know really.
I mean, Mick Astin was a great field archaeologist. His real interest was landscapes.
And he ran a lot of really good projects, you know, from the time when he was
a county archaeologist right through to when he was involved with the time team.
Actually, technically, I think he probably was meant to have been retired,
but he was such a good archaeologist and so enthusiastic.
He had an interest in everything. And that's why the time team was such a good program.
(07:05):
Because the work was done in three days. I know because when I worked for English
Heritage, I had to go and look after, you know, I think three or four sites
they were digging on to see that, you know, the job was done right.
And the work was done within three days. And was it done right?
Yes, always. Yeah, meticulous, yeah. Fast, done fast. Exactly,
because I only watched the Benchester time team the other night.
(07:26):
I'm like, I've watched them all nine days this week. I keep falling asleep.
I put it on and it just relaxes me.
Yeah, they go in and I know they
use mechanical diggers, but in no time at all, they're quite far down.
Yeah. And I think, God, you know, I've been at Auckland Castle last week and
we had a scraper and a pick or a matic and we didn't get down six inches.
(07:47):
So in no time at all, they're quite down.
They used to have a set of, you know, there were research questions they wanted
answers to and they devised techniques to actually realise the answers to those
research questions in a limited period of time.
And that was what made it so exciting was that, you know, here we've got three
days to do X and sometimes they did it in three days.
(08:08):
Sometimes they did it and it wasn't quite what they wanted to, you know, to realize.
But no, the professionalism was amazing. I always thought it was incredible
given the timescales. Mick Aston was a genius.
Stuart Ainsworth, who used to do all the landscape work. I worked with him when
he worked for English Heritage at Historic England.
(08:28):
Phil Harding is another one. He's such a great communicator,
a really, really good field archaeologist, works for Wessex.
And they were all, you know, they were all really talented people who all came
together at a time when there was a burgeoning interest in archaeology.
And there's that old film, you know, I can't remember who's in it,
but it's called Field of Dreams, where the guy wants to be a baseball player.
(08:49):
And he builds a baseball diamond and all the ghosts of all the players he wanted
to play with turn up. If you build it, they will come.
Once there's a mechanism there and a structure there, then folks will get involved
if they're interested. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's getting that interest.
Now, as I say, turning consumers of professional knowledge into producers of
their own archaeology is a crucial thing to be doing through a community project like this one.
(09:11):
And it works. One of the members of the Time Team is, was he,
is he involved with Altogether?
Is it Stuart? Stuart, yeah, Stuart, yeah. And that was the chap who did the
magnetometry and all the... No, that was Vince Gaffney.
Oh, right. Stuart was the landscape... Yes, yes, because he was the one that
reconstructed Winchester and he said it all slipped away.
Yeah, he used to do all the flying around in the helicopter. So how did you get in?
(09:32):
How did you start with archaeology? How did I start with archaeology?
Yeah, because obviously, I'm not being, but Taintain probably wasn't the reason
you got into archaeology. No, I mean, I'm ancient.
I went on my first archaeological excavation in 1965.
Right. 1965. You're ancient, aren't you, really? I am ancient,
yeah. I'm joking. I was 11.
And it was at Winchester and it was with the Bishop Auckland Auckland Archaeological Research Group.
(09:57):
And it was when they were clearing out the bathhouse, before the bathhouse had
the shed put over it, and before they developed it.
And I got into it because my teacher at school, I went to the grammar school,
when it was a grammar school at Bishop Orton, and I did Latin.
I did Latin right through to A-level from the first year I went in.
And Mrs. Wanders, who taught Latin, said, anybody want to come to see an archaeological
(10:20):
excavation, meet up Saturday in the Market Square at Bishop and we'll go to
the Winchester excavations.
And I went and I never looked back. And I was bitten by the bug and I had no plan B.
I always wanted to be an alcoholic just after that. My dad always said to me,
Robert, when you get a real job, you'll know what work's about because he knew
I would have done it for nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(10:41):
I just loved it and I've been all over the world with it.
I've worked in some amazing places, met some incredible people and it's just been a blast.
I can honestly say I've never had a boring day.
Genuinely, I've never had a boring day. I've had days when I've been dead on
my feet and I've had enough, you know, but I've never been bored.
I wonder how many people can say that. It's true. and I've never been born.
(11:04):
So a question I've asked everybody and the listenership is probably going to
go, we know, we know what's going on. Right, time machine, you're going to go
back to a period in time. Yeah.
Where are you going? I would go back to a period called the Mesolithic,
the Middle Stone Age, which is what I'm really interested in.
It's the period just before farming starts when people were still hunting and
(11:25):
gathering, still making a living by, you know, gathering fruits from the forest
and by hunting animals in the forested environment.
And the crucial thing I'd want to know about is why give a lifestyle where you
were part of the landscape and you could predict where all your resources were
going to be on stream and on tap at different times of the year and where people
(11:45):
had structured patterns of movement through that landscape and knew it,
they were part of it, they didn't own it, they were part of it.
Why give that balanced way of making a living off to become a farmer where you
cut trees down, you destroy the ecosystem.
Because the ecosystem never goes back to like it was.
You couldn't go back to hunting and gathering once you committed to farming
(12:06):
and become reliant on what in nature are just wild grasses.
That's all crops are. Wild grasses that have been tamed, as it were,
and animals that have been tamed.
When you had a rich supply of tremendous animals like red deer,
roe deer, wild boar, wild cattle, all there in the forest to be hunted and gathered.
(12:26):
Why give all that rich dietary variety up to restrict your diet to agricultural food.
And there must be some really social big issues there and there must be some
really big economic issues there.
And I'd love to go back to that period of the transition from hunting and gathering
to farming and try and find out.
You'd give that some thought. Yeah, that never would have occurred to me, never.
(12:49):
It's one of the most momentous periods, the Mesolithic. Because at one level,
right at the start of the Mesolithic, say about 10,000 BC, something like that,
we'll say for the sake of an argument,
You've got the end of the ice age and people are adapting to change in landscape
conditions as the ice retreats.
And at the other end of the timescale, you've got this big momentous change
with the development of agriculture.
(13:10):
And around about 7,000 BC, Britain gets cut off from the continent and North
Sea breaks through and the Channel gets formed and Britain becomes an island.
So there's all these changes that go on. Just at that point,
there's a cusp that people are sitting on at that Mesolithic-Neolithic transition.
Transition and i'd love to go back to see just how that panned out
yeah that's certainly brilliant wow and i'd
(13:33):
never never occurred to me any of that but one last question
on this site we're on now what's what's the one thing that
surprised you well several things have surprised me that the commitment of the
folks who've been doing the digging is amazing yeah but the fact that it's you
walk over it's totally unprepossessing field right but you do the the geophysical
(13:54):
survey like the time team used to do geophysics.
The geophysics shows that there's a tremendously rich archaeological record under the Turk.
And it's complicated and it's really interesting.
And trying to unravel that is, I think, really, really difficult and challenging
to do. And that's been great, trying to do that.
(14:16):
And people say, well, you didn't find very much. Well, you find the site. The site's the find.
And what that site tells you about the way people were making a living in the
Iron Age and in the Roman period, that's the crucial sort of area of interest, really.
The actual material culture finds, the bits of pot and, you know,
the metalwork and that, you need that to establish the chronology and you need
that to talk about the way people, you know, utilise ceramics for certain jobs
(14:40):
or metal for certain jobs.
And it becomes very interesting once you start to do that because up here,
right, we've got a sequence of settlement activity that goes from the Middle
Iron Age, say around, well, 200, 250 BC, through to the 2nd,
3rd century in the Roman period, right?
And whether it's continued use, you don't know. But at some point,
(15:00):
these what were probably well-to-do farmers in the Iron Age were Romanized,
for want of a better term, in the very commons. They met with the Romans.
They knew about, probably through contact with the Roman army.
And that changed their whole outlook on trade and exchange.
And what for me is really interesting is that you go from a farmstead where
(15:22):
people were living an Iron Age way of life, probably cooking lots of stews,
eating beans and pulses and lentils and that kind of thing.
To a period once they were in
contact with Romans for trade where they bought into a
totally different way of preparing food and you can see that in some of the
pottery we've got there are these things called notaria that are chafing dishes
(15:43):
like if you imagine a box grate of a grate in your food jug it's a chafing dish
for for making your vegetables into sort of mush really sort of to cook them
differently mush is too strong a word but.
You wouldn't have those things if the people who lived on the site didn't know how to use them.
So there's a change in the way people view culinary activity.
(16:03):
And that's kind of an interesting question. What promoted that? Yeah.
And how did that link with the Romans actually manifest itself?
Well, we know it manifests itself here with stone slab floors in the buildings,
with querns that were of a Romanized type, pottery that's Romanized.
So there's a really interesting set of changes that goes on at that period around,
(16:27):
you know, 50 AD when the Romans first really come into the region.
Might I suggest that people's dedication on the site, which is the first thing
you learn, you might be down to your enthusiasm as well.
I think that's got a rough off on people. They're all committed.
They're very, very good. I want to go up there and dig now.
But Rob, honestly, that's been brilliant. Thank you very much.
(16:49):
I've enjoyed it. It's been good. And two things I didn't expect out of that.
Didn't expect to think about the mesolithic in that manner right and i didn't
expect to write kevin cosner downy and i can't remember why he wrote that ah
that is that failed to dream,
that's right brilliant thank you it's great fun this is tales from the trowel,
okay so we've been lucky enough to have a quick chat with with martin green,
(17:11):
who is one of the i'm the coordinator for field work for together archaeology
okay so it's me that kind of arranges the portaloos and make sure the tents
get here and all the equipment and i do the i generally do the main writing up of the digs as well,
after the digs finish so i kind of make sure all the stuff goes off to the right labs for,
(17:33):
processing and then write up the results so we
can get out an interim report on the dig each year before
the next dig starts but you've got quite an extensive knowledge of archaeology
and history yeah i was although i'm not a was never a professional archaeologist
in my youth I did actually work as a digger and supervisor for an archaeology
(17:54):
unit in the 1970s until I went off and did other things.
Many years background in archaeology and also i
think writing the digs up makes you kind of
understand more deeply what's going on because you have to try and
get it right in your own mind before you
start writing it for other people of course so do
(18:14):
you have experience in in writing texts and
and is this something that's come across in your career well i've
got a i've got a doctorate but not in archaeology
so you know i've written theses written papers on other things
so it's something that comes fairly natural
to me the importance of the ridden wood is not lost on you
yeah yeah and record keeping because in archaeology it's
(18:36):
it's never easy to keep a kind of track of the dig basically
when you're up on top of a hill and the rain's coming down like it
is now and the wind's whizzing across as it
is at the moment it's quite difficult to try and
keep decent records and make sure you've got all the photographs and
it all makes sense it's with
with doing that and being as involved as you are does that does that
(18:57):
lead to extra pressures is it you wake up on a morning it's really bluster it's
really rain and you think i really can't not go i have to go today um yeah i
mean it is quite exhausting i think i've had we've had a couple of days off
during three weeks of this dig but that's the only two days i'll have off.
Of course it's not as physically demanding because i although i spend some time
(19:20):
digging quite a lot of the time is kind of supervising and keeping the record
straight so it's less physically demanding than a lot of the volunteers who will be digging all day.
How long have you been involved with Altagala?
Well, right from the very beginning. It started in 2011 when it was a.
Part of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the North Pennines project of that.
(19:41):
And I was just a volunteer at that stage. But then in 2015, when the money ran
out from the Heritage Lottery Fund, we reorganized as a community group.
And I've been one of the main ones on the committee ever since then,
just as Tony has, helping to run the group.
But as I said, my particular part of it is to organize the digs and make sure
(20:01):
they run okay and get written up at the end.
Other people We'll do other things
like organising the meetings and the insurance and all the other bits.
But it's me that does the portal here and so on. So do you live locally?
Yeah, I live about half an hour's drive north of here near Blancheland.
So I do live in the North Pennines. And one of the problems of the organisation
just is that we cover a very large area.
(20:24):
And in winter, it can be virtually impossible to get around the area because
it's split up between the dales with high mountain passes in between them.
It's always it's it means as an organization we
don't run like most community archaeology groups and
have evening meetings where people come to hear speakers because the distances
(20:44):
the people would travel just be not worth it for an hour-long talk by sunday
so we tend to have whole days of a series of talks several times during the
the winter rather than kind of separate evening meetings things.
And the same for digs. We try and organize digs in different parts of the North Benin.
So the people, if they live locally, can at least get to something near to them.
(21:08):
Unfortunately, a lot of our digs have tended to be in the Teesdale area just
because of the opportunities we've had here.
Teesdale is a wonderful area archaeologically and not very well investigated.
So there's a lot to do here.
Your accent suggests that you're not originally from Blanchland.
No, no, I've actually come from Cambridge here, so I come from down south.
(21:31):
I originally came up to the northeast to work in the university in the late 70s, I think.
Yeah, so I've been around here for about 40 years or so.
But I'm married to a local, so she translates when necessary. Yeah.
I'm sure it's never necessary so so
(21:51):
where we are now in in gesmik so and this
is this is an important site is it a site that was
known to be important or have you revealed its importance no it's curious it's
it's a site that really wasn't known at all until about eight years ago the
only thing that was known about it was that on top of the hill is a can a very
(22:11):
much mutilated cairn because it's been robbed for wall building,
presumably other things.
And in the cairn and near to it were a couple of stones with cup marks in.
And on the ground about 10 meters from the cairn is a ground-fast boulder with cup marks on.
And these were noted by Paul Brown, who's expert or was the expert in cup and
(22:34):
ring marks and rock art in this area.
So he noticed it, published it in a book, and it got it onto the county historic
environment record as being the Bronze Age camp because of the rock art,
but it wasn't investigated any further.
It was only about eight or nine years ago that it was noticed that the top of
the plateau here is actually quite lumpy, but not lumpy in a very obvious way
(22:57):
that you can define at all.
It doesn't look like an obvious prehistoric site or medieval site. It's just lumpy.
It was picked up in the community LIDAR survey. Paul Frodsham,
about five years ago, ran a community-based survey of LiDAR images for Teesdale and Weardale.
And this survey included, this site was noted in that, but they wasn't too sure what it was.
(23:24):
So about five years ago, we started off with.
Doing geophysics. Fortunately, the next archaeology group south,
which is the Arkengarth, the Swelldown Arkengarth group, have got a magnetometer
that they got as part of a Heritage Lottery funded project.
So we snubbed up to them and asked if they might like to bring their magnetometer up to Gesswick.
(23:46):
And we started doing surveys across the field.
We've extended it a couple of times in later years.
We've now got a magnetometry survey of the whole top of the plateau,
which completely to our surprise showed this large trench,
a large ditch that runs around the plateau enclosing quite a large area, about a hectare or so.
(24:09):
You can't see it on the ground, you can't even see it on the LiDAR images and
it doesn't appear as a crop mark.
It wasn't known it was there and there
were various other kind of ditches and
other anomalies as well in the scan so it
was obvious that this was some kind of site probably a prehistoric site and
this would fit in with the big terraces because the south side of the hill facing
(24:33):
towards Cotherston has got large terraces cut into it for presumably agricultural
terraces and these are some way from the local villages.
The villages around here were all in the Doomsday Book, so they're active and
probably found in early medieval times.
They've got their own field systems around them. You can see on Google Earth,
(24:54):
Cothaston, Rommelkirk, Connethwaite have all got the typical reverse S hedge
lines of medieval field systems around them.
But the Guesswick Hills here aren't inside those field systems,
so it seems unlikely that the terraces were anything to do with the medieval farming.
So it's more of they're older. So the terraces kind of fit in with the fact
(25:17):
that this is a prehistoric settlement,
Do you think there's a reason why it was sited here? Was it because of the geography?
We know from the LIDAR survey that Paul did with volunteers,
we know from that that there are Iron Age-type farmsteads. There's little enclosed
settlements with a couple of round houses inside a bank.
(25:39):
These are spread at about half-mile intervals up both sides of Teesdale.
Generally, some of them are on the valley floor, but quite a lot of them are
kind of halfway up the sides of the valley. In fact, there's one directly opposite,
the other side of the valley, directly opposite from Gatswick that you can see from here.
So it seems to be that they quite like their settlements to be fairly high.
(26:00):
There is fantastic views from here, further up the dale and across the moors,
across to Shacklesborough and Goldsborough, the big flat-topped mountains.
Were the two, obviously the two reservoirs that we're close to here,
they obviously were there, no, no, no less than 50 years ago.
But you hear when they flood the valleys that they flood villages and things
(26:24):
like that, that wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever because now they
control the water coming down there I think it would reduce the flooding of the rivers,
yes, they're used as flood control as well as water supplies But there's no
suggestion this could have been dammed, this area where it was run a raised island,
if it was dammed it would be quite an effective defensive No, I don't think in.
(26:47):
Prehistoric times i mean as it happens guesswick
hills are were actually a dam across teesdale but
that was just at the end of the ice age guesswick hills
are terminal moraine of the glacier so as
the glacier gradually retreated up teesdale at
the end of the ice age it left this huge
ridge of debris across the dale and according
(27:09):
to the geographers it dammed
a huge lake so the guesswick hills formed the dam
of a huge lake that covered a lot of teesdale so
middleton and ronald kirk would have all been
deep underwater at the end of the ice age but then
the water broke through and formed the where the tease is now yes and we landed
(27:30):
up kind of several hundred foot above the tees now right it's absolutely fascinating
but just when you referred to the ark and garthdale group yeah is there a local
rivalry i know you have there's a bit of a cross there's you've got members in both groups.
There's no rivalry at all.
When we set up the Altogether Archaeology for the North Pennines,
(27:52):
there's no archaeology groups in the area at all.
There's a lot of people who are members of more than one group.
I'm a member of the Tyndale group as well, which is the next group north that
covers the Hadrian's Wall area and the area a bit to the north.
I've got people from the Linsdale group.
(28:13):
Us as well so people who are keen on digging are often
members of more than one local group and it's
useful to have their expertise as well as i said it's quite useful
to be able to borrow their equipment as well some some
some drawn radar super duper equipment you're quite happy to learn it oh yeah
yeah yeah yeah no it's nice it's nice and it's i mean there's plenty there's
(28:35):
just so much archaeology to do around here yeah obviously in areas like these
upland areas like the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines,
there's virtually no commercial archaeology like there would be in most of the country,
simply because there isn't much in the way of development.
There's no new roads, no railways, virtually no new housing being built.
So there's no commercial archaeology being done on development sites.
(28:59):
I'm a member of a metal detecting group and we had a gentleman from the British
Museum came to do a talk, and it was about Saxon settlements and how many Saxon
settlements have been found through metal detecting.
It's just because there is areas in the ground that just don't get investigated.
What's the one thing that surprised you? I think the fact that we started off
(29:23):
believing it was kind of simple and that we'd dig it and we'd find the date of it.
And we found a couple of roundhouses and we know that it was 100 BC.
But in archaeology, everything is always more complicated than you think it's going to be.
So as it happens, it turns out that this is a very long-running settlement,
(29:43):
much longer running than we ever thought it would be.
And we're now into deeper levels, so it may even go earlier than we were suspecting last year.
I mean, at the end of last year, when we got the dates back,
we knew that it would have been an active settlement for over 500 years, because we got the.
The enclosure ditch around the Arnage original enclosed settlement is about
(30:06):
250 BC, according to the radiocarbon dates.
We knew right through to the radiocarbon dates in the settlement that it was
still active past 200 AD.
So a very long-lived settlement. Of course, now we've actually gone below those
levels and we're still, you know, we found this arc of post holes and a lot
of charcoal and posts and things. and these may well take it back hundreds of years before that.
(30:31):
So it's just such a huge span of history, the settlement covered.
If you think about it in modern terms, that takes you back from the present
day back into the medieval period, basically 500 years, back into the days of
Henry VIII. So a huge span of history.
Numerous events must have happened, which the biggest one, I guess,
would have been the coming of the Romans.
(30:53):
But the settlement kind of carried on, probably prospered through the Roman period.
So it's just the great sweep of history that we're kind of exposing.
And this is your last week of 2024.
2024 is our last week. We've got about five days of digging and then we'll have to get re-turfing.
If the dig was to finish next weekend or the week I'm coming and that would
(31:16):
be it, that would be a travesty, would it?
I won't say it's a travesty. The thing is, on a site like this,
we've got, as I said, The ditch around the main, the huge ditch around the top
of the summit covers a hectare.
And if you work out how long it would take to dig a hectare archaeologically,
you're running into probably a century or two of digging.
(31:38):
So you have to stop somewhere. Yeah. And wherever you stop is always going to be a wrench.
But in the end, you've got to stop and write it up and publish it.
But there's definitely further years. Oh, there's potential,
yes, for further years of investigation here.
Can you know why, you know? Because obviously the group has only got a finite
(31:59):
amount of resources and people.
You wouldn't open that and get the Achengarth deal and the North Tyne.
Well, I mean, they're welcome. Anybody's welcome to join. I mean, we.
Anybody who's a member, it doesn't cost that much to join. Anybody can come along and dig with us.
Do you do students? Do you use any students from Durham? We have used our other
(32:19):
summer dig down near Bowes, further south of here,
which has been running in July for the last few years, is in cooperation with Durham University.
The timing is always a problem because students expect to dig in July before
they go off on their luxury holidays to wherever Durham students go.
(32:40):
Yeah, probably Molaire and things like that. I don't know what Durer students
do during term time and so on.
But, yeah, cooperation with students is a possibility.
Enthusiastic folks. Some enthusiastic. Yeah, no,
it's, I mean, the, yeah, no, I mean, students have to get,
the ones that are going to carry on to become archaeologists as a career,
(33:02):
you know, have to get a lot more experience because it's only by doing a lot
of digging that you really get to know how it works and get the feel of sites.
And the only way you can do that is by taking part in digs and different types
of digs. So, yeah, there is a potential there.
And, of course, Newcastle University is nearby as well and have had digs.
I mean, Rob Young, a professional archaeologist on this dig,
(33:25):
he's cooperated with Newcastle University students a lot. Yeah, it's difficult.
And, of course, we're all getting older. It's one of the big problems with all
community groups, not just in archaeology, basically, is that it's something
that people don't have time for when they're working hard.
It's only as their careers are running down, they get retired,
people really have time for archaeology.
(33:47):
It's presumably metal detecting as well. If you're going to do it,
it's going to take days and days of your life to do it properly and get used to it and enjoy it.
And people just don't have that time if they've got young families and careers.
Is so people you know join groups like ours
as they're kind of in their 50s getting into their 60s the
problem is by the time they're hitting 70 and beyond their knees
(34:09):
are knackered and their hips have gone and then no the mind's
willing but yes there's no no no more use
in the heavy work so in archaeology it's quite
heavy work and the phases of it that are a nice delicate trailing
but a lot of it is you know matic and shovel and
you need fit young people or youngish people to do
it and by the time you're mid-70s most people are kind of slowing down so one
(34:31):
question to finish one question i always like to ask archaeologists right and
i'm going to answer myself if you had a time this this tent was a time machine
and we could go back to any period in time for one day.
I'd like to go back to the bronze age i think.
The Iron Age, in a way, we can vaguely understand what goes through their minds.
(34:54):
They're not that different from medieval peasants. In many ways,
the farming was similar.
I know they had different beliefs and so on, but the Iron Age was recognizable.
But I think going back a bit further maybe into the Bronze Age,
Chalcolithic, late Neolithic would be interesting just to see if you can understand,
(35:15):
what they believed and the things in their life what was important I wouldn't
want to go to the Roman times I can't think I'd like to go then,
I'd like to go then but I think I'd like to go back just to see how the land lived,
like Bishop Auckland, how was the land before the Roman and things like that. No, I'm brilliant.
(35:37):
I mean, and we know the landscape at the end of the Iron Age,
probably here, lower Teesdale, is probably not that different to how it is now.
But you'd be interested to just go back to sort of 1500 BC and see what it was like then.
As you said before, you write up all the things. If you went back in time for
one week and you got a good understanding and you wrote a book on this,
(35:57):
do you think it would be accepted by?
I would hope so. I mean, what I think, if you think just one photograph graph
of one iron age village. Yeah.
Or tell you just so much that we just can't, that you can't get from either
archeology or from the writings of the Romans or whatever.
Thank you very much. I really enjoy it. Okay. I've learned quite a lot.
(36:17):
So good morning, Tony. Good morning. So we're with Altogether Archeology,
a community based archeology group.
And we're in half a mile from Cuddleston. Right.
We're near a Cuthersdon in Romelkirk. Yeah, okay, yeah. It's a fair difference.
I know, Middle East daily rings a bell. So, Tony, so the site that we're on,
(36:40):
it's been proven to be a multi-period palisaded settlement.
Yes. So, do you know when the initial period would have been?
Well, from the dating evidence that we've got so far, it goes back to 500 BC
on the terraces. And we know that from carbon dating and oscillating light results
(37:02):
done by the tourist team.
And we've also got carbon dating as well. And then we started work here in 2019,
having done a walkover and magnetometry and looking at the LIDAR.
And we put a ditch in, a trench in, and we discovered a ditch which went two
(37:22):
and a half meters deep, which was the ditch for a palisade. And we did more magnetometry.
We returned in 2021 because our dig was obviously stopped in 2020 when COVID arrived.
But that was the year that the tourist team came because they were professionals
from a European team and they worked here for a week with some of the committee helping them.
(37:47):
And they did test pits on all the terraces and some test pits in some of the
fields on the Regent Furrow as well, at the side of the terraces.
And that terrace, the terrace, would that have been for crops?
That would have been for crops, yes. It's a south-facing terrace,
isn't it? Yes, it is. It wasn't access?
No, no. It was built for crops. Right.
(38:09):
And we have results that there was emmer there, which spelt as a derivative
from emmer, and then wheat as well.
And it would have been used for bread making?
Well, it would have been...
Through preparation, yes. And the palisade, so you come with the tourists and
you've got this palisaded area.
(38:30):
The palisade would have been defensive?
Well, it might have been defensive. It might have just been to keep the cattle
in. It might have just been to keep the stock in.
Okay, so there's no indicator of how high the palisade... We don't know.
It might have been various. But clearly, we think that in the Roman period,
the palisade might have well been taken down and because there were lots and
(38:51):
lots of paved areas and some of the paved areas were over what was the palisade
as we discovered in the first trench that we'd done.
How do you establish a site? Because we're not in the middle of nowhere as such
but we are somewhere you wouldn't notice from the roadside.
So I'm just curious how you identify a site to explore. Well,
(39:16):
this was initially identified with LIDAR.
So we had the LIDAR techniques and then... Who initiated the LIDAR? Was it yourselves?
No, no, no, but the LIDAR was done by the Environment Agency,
commissioned the LIDAR to save our fruit plants initially.
(39:38):
The original LiDAR was done by the MOD. So what piqued your interest on the
site? Why did you think, what's that there?
Well, we were interested with the features around here.
There's a more detailed version as well.
And of course, now people are doing LiDAR with drones as well.
It's amazing what happening is.
(39:58):
So you found your site. You think, right, that needs further investigation.
So what's the first steps? The first step is to do a walkover.
And we got our members in a line at the edge of the field and we walked over
very, very slowly and if they saw
any lumps and bumps that seemed to be interesting, we went to have a look.
(40:19):
We recorded them on the LiDAR map that we had just to confer,
try and work out where things were and then with the magnetometry,
we then decided where we were going to put our trench.
And the magnetometry, it's kind of what you say on time, is it where the increments are? Yes.
(40:40):
We just walk across and the signals go down into the ground and then they get
recorded on the computer.
Is that an expensive process?
Because obviously you don't have the equipment at home, so you have to employ someone to do that.
We don't have the equipment, but we do borrow the equipment from the Swilldale
(41:02):
and Archengarthdale group.
They bought the equipment with a lottery grant, and we share that with them.
We give them a donation, and some of their members come and do it.
Well, actually, some of their members are our members as well, but that's what we do.
We use their equipment. It's just on your membership. I mean,
they're all volunteers, aren't they? Yes.
(41:23):
This is the Tales from the Travel Podcast. Hello Sue. Hello.
Oh, so I'm here today at Guesswick with Sue Wilson, a member of the Altogether Archaeology team.
So Sue, can you tell me why did you decide to join Altogether Archaeology?
(41:43):
What was the reason behind that? The main reason was to come digging.
I live a bit too far out for the majority of the stuff that they do,
But I do like digging and there's not so many places where you can get to dig now.
So I'm quite happy to join them and come up here.
(42:04):
So what's some of the benefits then of joining Altogether Archaeology?
Well, they do an awful lot apart from digging. They do walks and they have lots of lectures.
But as I said, they're mainly too far away for me, but you can get them online.
Oh, the Zooms? The Zooms, yeah. Yeah, because they started doing those during
(42:24):
COVID and they still do a few online.
So it's easy to keep in touch. And because some of the people that dig here
I've dug with at other places.
It gets to be like a community, so you get to know more and more people.
And so you get to learn, you know, meet new friends here. And then the next
(42:45):
time you come, you remember them again.
This is the Tales from the Travel Podcast. Well, yeah, we have people who are
qualified archaeologists.
Some of them have master's degrees, PhDs, but we order them again.
Actually, what's the youngest member you have? Well, the membership starts at
(43:06):
18, but we do have family membership where people are coming on at 10 and 12.
But the youngsters have to be accompanied by responsible adults.
And is it quite a healthy membership? We have 124 members. That's pretty good.
It is. I can imagine that's a logistical nightmare if you have a dig and everyone
(43:28):
wants to turn up on the same day, a car park. Well, fortunately,
a lot of them don't want to dig every day, can't dig every day because some of them are working.
But it does, we try and restrict numbers on the site so that we can deal with
the numbers because it's not about having people up coming if there's nothing for them to do.
But we open up sites accordingly, but we don't open them up too big because
(43:52):
we know that we have to finish the work.
We're here for three weeks. Right. Is that a time team do the three day thing,
don't they? That's their gimmick.
You different sometimes it'll be different periods of time depending on
when the fields are available across all we're very
very fortunate that alice and steven lamb let
(44:13):
us come whenever we want to come we tell them where we're going to dig and they
actually come and cut the grass prior to us arriving so it's less to dig and
they keep the removal stock as well and this has always been This has always
been grass, farming records going back.
So just where we're situated here, we're on a very prominent hill. Yeah, we are.
(44:39):
Fantastic views. It is very, very prominent. And on a fine day,
not unlike today, you can see Goldsborough and Shacklesborough further up the valley.
And they have rock art on them. And when you're on the top of Shacklesborough
and Goldsborough, this stands out just as they do from here.
(45:02):
So it's probably been a site that people have used, obviously,
for a long, long time. It initially had been like a signalling station where
they would communicate across. Yeah, could have been, yes.
As well have been. That's fascinating. So the land we're on,
obviously, the River Tees, is just down from us. It is.
But to me, it's a long way down from us. It might only be a quarter of a mile.
(45:24):
What do you say? No, it's less than that. Less than that. It's one field.
So there would need a water up here. There would need a lot of water.
There is a spring up here. There is a spring. Okay. There is a spring. Fantastic.
So the site would have been used mainly, it would have been a family settlement
or would it have been multiple?
Well, there must have been a lot of people here to have had all of the people
digging the palisaded ditches and all the other ditches that are here.
(45:48):
And the life of the site, we're spanning a thousand years? Well,
we're spelling from at the moment that we know of, sort of 500 B.C..
To 500 AD. Why do you think that the site went out of use?
We don't know why it went out of use at all. We have no idea yet.
(46:11):
We just don't know why it went out of use.
Do you think it would have been a money economy in that period or would it have been more trade?
Well, there must have been trade going on because when the Romano-British period,
we have food preparation pots here, which must have been traded and we've got
(46:31):
one spearhead here but that could have belonged to a local who was in the Roman army.
It could have just been one of the lads joining the Roman army.
Have you found, there has been quite, I mean next to us on the table we have
some lovely finds which span the Iron Age right through to 1st,
(46:51):
2nd century and into the 5th century.
And the most modern find that you've got, the metallic find,
is the Pilgrim's Badge. Yes.
I can't get my head around how that comes to being on this site.
Well, we don't know whether there's been a religious settlement here or not
later on in the medieval period. We don't know that yet.
(47:11):
And which deity does it portray?
Is it St. Edmund, was it? The Pilgrim's Badge is from St.
Edmund's. Yeah, St. Edmund's. Right. And the badge portrays him being put to death by two archers.
And it's a copper alloy badge. and it's the furthest north we've called it.
Because you imagine people making pilgrimages to large church centres like Durham
(47:34):
and Canterbury and things.
So someone might have been returning from that. Yeah.
Bury St. Edmunds was a prominent position at the time. There were a lot of royal meetings held there.
And there's no churches in the area to Bury St.
Edmunds. Bronze is a bronze or copper alloy? It's copper alloy.
(47:55):
Bronze. Copper alloy. There were a lot made of lead. They were a cheaper version.
And as for other finds, I noticed you've got the spear, which is really,
really nice. Is that the socketed? And that's 180 AD.
180. And there's one identical design to it founded in South Shales.
So 180, so the Romans were already established in the north of England by this period.
(48:17):
It's, my basic knowledge of the Romans, you've got the A66 from Scotch Corner.
That was classed as the Winter Roads. Was that the Roman Winter Roads?
There was a Roman settlement at Bowes, which is not far from here.
But just on the hillside over there, Eggleston, there's the Roman road that
would have gone to Alston.
(48:37):
So there would have been a Roman carriageway
like Passan so there would have been Roman activity
so there would have been trade oh yes with not necessarily
Romans but with the Romano-British so and as
for other finds with some even predates predate the spear there's some well
we've got quernstones we've got beehive quernstones which were done in the Iron
(49:04):
Age right and then we've got quernstones stones right up to the 1st, 2nd century.
Plus a medieval quern stone, which is on the promontory where we did the dig
last autumn, where we found the pilgrim lab.
So this is something that you'd expect to find on a site like this.
Would you expect the volume of cairnstones? Or does this seem more than you would have thought?
(49:26):
Well, we've never worked on a site where we've found as many cairnstones as this.
Does that lead you to any... Well, it just means that the site's been in use.
Grinding grain for such and such a purpose. Do you think it's any indication
of population from this?
Well, yes. I mean, they have a lot of people to feed.
(49:49):
You know, all these cairnstones that were found, they must have been feeding
a lot of people Is there any indication in the name of the site that would,
like you know, that leads to its activity, because Gesswick,
Gesswick, yeah, we haven't we don't know The W-I-C-K ending,
does that does that indicate more Saxon or Viking?
(50:12):
Well, it does, but the names project that we're doing, they still haven't come
up with firm results I did read
some of the Altogether PDF files on your website, which are brilliant.
And it does have, there has been different spellings. Yes. Is that just down
to just literacy or local?
It can be literacy or just doing it how people pronounce it.
(50:34):
So you don't know the name? We don't know.
The guest bits, we don't know. Yeah, we don't know. And we've been through all
of the records for this, for the estate, going back hundreds and hundreds of
years. So they've given us all the information.
So would this have been, because I know we're part of the Doe Park estate here.
Yes. Would this have been herds of deer?
(50:55):
Well, there are still deer here. Yeah.
Because one of the lads that's camping on the site sees deer.
And when people come up early on in the morning, there's often deer up here. So it's still here.
But on the site, as we came on, you showed us that there is a circle of what
have been portholes. so that's that's right at the beginning of its uses would that be?
(51:20):
As far as we know for the information we've got so far every day brings up something
new yeah and that's obviously that's why you're here that's why you go out to
bed and you get here so if we knew all the answers we'd just go to pubs,
Treat it as a holiday. This is your fourth year on the site?
It's the fourth year on the site. And notwithstanding the COVID period.
(51:40):
Do they tend to be the same people? Do they come back year after year?
Well, so the hard call, the membership, yes.
But we get new members every week. And your funding, obviously this is not a cheap thing to fund.
I mean, a port-a-loo, just to hire for three days, can be hundreds of pounds.
We're lucky that we've built up quite a good resources with our membership fees and donations.
(52:05):
But we do get funding to do our research from the, this year,
from the Royal Archaeological Institute.
They've given us money to pay for all our carbon dating last year.
We've had funding from the Council of British Archaeology of Yorkshire to do
some of the postural research.
And that was, their funding was backed by the Architectural and Archaeological
(52:27):
Society of Northumberland and Durham.
They gave us some funds as well. Now, does political events,
I don't want to say the B word, but to political events, do they affect you?
Have things changed from, say, 2015, without using the B word, through to now?
Has that affected you or is it pretty much?
It's pretty much the same. I mean, all the groups are chasing the same pots of money.
(52:51):
We had money for two or three years from the Durham County Community Fund,
But they said that they were going to then concentrate on food banks.
Yeah. Things like that, heating people's homes. So you have to compete.
So do you have to put forward a case for doing it?
Putting in the paperwork to
(53:13):
apply for grants is quite a difficult thing to do. It takes a long time.
And if you don't do it right, you don't stand a chance. Just people in the street,
can you do that? Do you have to employ solicitors?
No, we do it. Do it yourselves?
We do it. We're very, very lucky that we've got a lot of people.
It's a team effort to put it together. Fantastic.
(53:36):
I draw it all together. It's my name that goes on the bottom of my section.
So if it goes wrong, you're equally to blame. But we do get help.
And we're lucky because this is now, since the Boundary Check,
this is in County Durham, which historically and all the local people still
think of themselves as Yorkshire people so that was why the Council of British
(53:59):
Archaeology in Yorkshire sponsors and we also,
there's no such thing as a free lunch so all the people that give us grants,
we have to write them a report for their publications we have to go and give talk as part of the day,
so this year I've been in Durham and York giving talks.
(54:24):
And Martin writes the reports to go into that. So, surely now the money is all
the people who distribute the funds.
They'll say, oh, he's Tony McCaffrey. Just take it. He's fine.
Everything will be good. No. Doesn't happen like that. No.
Unfortunately, no. Can I just skip
back to what you were saying about the dissemination of the information?
Do you go into schools? Do you have any connections with any schools in the area?
(54:48):
We have been into Cleverston School. and
we have had young archaeologists groups
coming up and we have had several people
on work experience this year It's one of the things with
work experience that archaeology is not taught in college anymore now so that's
a nice stepping stone from nothing to going to university and if a lot of younger
(55:15):
people thinking about doing archaeology at At university,
some of the professors at Durham
advise them to join all together in archaeology to get some experience.
And this applies to some mature students as well who are thinking of switching careers.
And we've got new members, some who are actually working here today, are doing that.
(55:35):
But they were advised to come and try it out with us.
Yeah. Well, I think we're going to try and make time to get round some of the
trenches and talk to some of the people digging today.
So they'll be pleased to talk to you. I just hope it doesn't rain too much Tony,
I don't want to leave this without drawing attention to these models,
the models that have been made by one of your members, and these models are fantastic.
(56:01):
We're very, very lucky that Stephen Brown makes our models for us,
and they are really, really admired very, very useful for when we're talking
to school groups or village halls,
and we do go around the community trying to spread the word.
Local societies ask us to go and give talks and they come and visit here as well.
(56:24):
You can say to me, oh, there's a round out of the ditch, there's a palisade, there's pits.
And I don't always get the image in my mind. And then you see that and you get it. You understand it.
And it's like time team. Time team do the reconstructions.
The chap out does the drawings. Yes. So, I mean, they're absolutely amazing.
And we will take some pictures if you don't mind. Do anything you wish.
(56:47):
So, Tony, anyway, thanks for your time this morning. Yes, thank you very much, Tony.
It's very, very nice having you on the site. It is. It's actually quite a nice
little tent we've got here, a little gazebo-y type tent.
Well, it is one of our tents of standing. Yeah.
It's lovely. Thanks for your time, Tony. Thank you. We'll be back next time
(57:07):
with more Tales from the Trowel.
Make sure you like, follow and subscribe from wherever you get your podcasts
so you never miss an episode. Tales from the Trowel, an Archaeology News North
East production in association with Pigmatic Productions.
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