August 19, 2024 • 33 mins
Welcome to Tales from the Trowel with Jackie and Sarah! In this episode, we delve into the fascinating world of archaeology at Hamsterley Church, where we sit down with Ady Davis, the mastermind behind the Hamsterley Big Dig. Discover the origins of this ambitious project aimed at uncovering the mysteries surrounding the Grade 1 listed St. James's Church.
Join us as Ady recounts the community's journey from initial curiosity to full-fledged archaeological exploration. Learn about the involvement of Durham University students, and the heartwarming stories of villagers coming together to unearth their shared history.
From medieval pottery to unexpected finds and the community's collaborative spirit, this episode is packed with insights and surprises. Don't miss out on the tales of discovery, connection, and the enduring quest to understand Hamsterleys past.
Make sure to like, follow, and subscribe to Tales from the Trowel for more captivating episodes on archaeology and history from around the UK.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Now from Archaeology News North East, the latest archaeology news and interviews from around the UK.
This is Tales from the Trowel with Jackie and Sarah.
We are here in Hampsteadley Church in St James' Church with Aidy Davis,
organiser of the Hampsteadley Big Dig. So, Eddie, can you tell us in your own
(00:26):
words why you decided to take on this mammoth task?
Being in St. James's is quite relevant because it all started here.
We set up the Friends of St. James's Church a while ago to start trying to look
after the fabric of this Grade 1 listed church.
And in preparation for doing things to try and sort of look after the masonry,
(00:48):
look after our door and all that sort of thing, one of the things we thought
was that we needed to understand the context of the church first.
So how old it was, its origins, its history, that began this whole massive journey.
And how did you come up with the idea of the Big Dig?
So Hamsley Church, for people that don't know, St James's, is about half a mile outside of the village.
(01:13):
And for a long, long time, most of the villagers believed
that the village used to extend to the church and it
reduced in size over time and that does
happen particularly where there's like plague villages where population
numbers have greatly reduced and then suddenly the church
ends up isolated however in local historians writings and i have and they are
(01:35):
literally just written into some old notebooks by one of the previous vickers
he related that the fields between the church and the village are known as the
Shith Fields or Sheath Fields, spelled S-H-I-T-H.
That relates to the idea of banshees, the screaming sort of souls from round barrows.
(01:56):
In Scotland, I think they're believed to be quite negative and drawing people to their death.
In Ireland, they are warning people of death.
So basically, it's sort of indicated that there might be this gap between the
village and the church as always exists.
So I set about looking at evidence for any settlement and couldn't.
(02:18):
So then put together a briefing paper, I suppose, for lack of better terminology,
as I'm not a professional archaeologist, and badgered lots and lots of people,
as Jackie, you know, because I think you're one of the people I badgered.
Yes, I remember coming up one winter's day to have a look around this beautiful church.
I mean, it wasn't a chore to come out and have a look. Hampstead Lee is absolutely beautiful.
(02:42):
I mean, it's well worth looking into. I mean, this building itself is just amazing,
just absolutely lovely.
And it's about the 11th century, was I reading?
So the church was dedicated in 1180. But Peter Ryder, who's a well-known church
archaeological historian, believes that probably the nave of the church is pre-conquest.
(03:08):
So eventually, after knocking on lots of doors, I managed to knock on the door
of David Petz, who at that time was involved with the project of belief in the Northeast.
And I explained what we were trying to do
and David provided some funding
to do some archaeological geophys around
the church to try and see if there was any evidence of settlement
(03:30):
and what was great was that was our first involvement of people from the community
so we have people that came out from Durham Archaeological Services and had
the patience to take us through how to use the the geophysical machines in the
briefings nobody told us that we went to wear metal things oh no.
(03:51):
So although one of the machines we had to go none of the results could be used,
because we didn't quite even a belt buckle isn't allowed that's right yeah and
dermarchological services were very perplexed at telling me that they had found
really nothing but i was delighted that they found nothing and through doing
(04:12):
that we kept reporting Porting back to the local village,
we got lots and lots of interest to the point that the last sort of evening
that we had, we had 50 people here in the church coming to hear about sort of
some of the latest history.
And that then prompted the idea that we need to try and find out the history of the village.
Hampsteadley as a village is absent from loads of the written texts.
(04:36):
I must admit, I've done a little bit of research myself, sort of trying to,
in preparation for coming here.
And you're right, there is very little to be found.
When you start looking, one of the major websites for information is Keys to the Past.
And even then, there's one page that talks about a bit of Neolithic flint found
(04:59):
more down near Hampsteadly Forest.
Something else. Something else. Oh, an arrowhead that I was reading about.
But apart from that, I couldn't really find anything much more about Hampsteadley
other than it has a disconnected church from its congregation.
Yeah, and we don't appear in the Bolden book, but there are quite a lot of places
(05:22):
in the sort of Teesdale, because we are actually in Teesdale,
that don't appear in the Bolden book and also depend on the ownership.
But also we don't appear in the bishop
hatfield survey right whereas our neighbor
witten weir doesn't appear in the bomb
but but they reappear in the hatfield survey so we're
sort of the the community side
(05:45):
of the archaeology would you say that you
had it was kind of 50 50 with the
professionals then that that it was that that you
took your work to them and they helped you or
did they lead you to do
what you're doing so i think when david pets
got involved with the belief in the northeast and helped
(06:07):
us do the geophysical survey he saw the amount of interest from the local village
right and it was him that said have you thought of doing a big community dig
right because it's a great way to get other people involved you could see it
as an opportunity to try and find out information about the village.
You know, this is all very new for us, new for me. I'm not an archaeologist.
(06:30):
And so some of it isn't going to be exact precise techniques.
I'm aware of that. But some of it was about actually beginning to engage people with where they live.
Yeah, I was reading a paper this morning, actually, about community archaeology.
And what it said was that community digs connect people to the archaeology,
but they also connect people to the community. community?
(06:53):
Do you think that's something that's happened during this process?
Yeah, because I put out the call for people and they sort of expressed their
interests and there were some people who couldn't dig their gardens for example
that were very happy for people to come into their gardens and dig.
Now some of those people that went into those people's gardens,
those people didn't know. And some of the people that.
(07:15):
Digging the same pit didn't really know each other even
though we're in a village yeah yeah but they then spent two days
sat alongside each other digging and actually
one of the things that people have come up and said afterwards is
what a great opportunity it was just to spend time
with somebody in a different completely different environment yeah
to learn about that one of the gardens
(07:37):
where it's happened the owner and the
two people who are digging the garden have already remet oh really
and they've got their
own little whatsapp group between the three of them and
they got on like a house and that and they didn't know each other right in advance
of that yeah and what about help from outside the community did did people come
(07:58):
forward yeah and it was really really lovely that that happened so there were
some people who just interested in archaeology wanting
to get involved in some sort of dig but we also
then had people that were associated with hamstley or
from the past so that some of their families were from
hamstley and although they're not living here now they wanted
(08:19):
to come in and do that what was also nice was
that there were some people involved who are relatively newly moved into the
village and there are people that born and bred from families that have existed
here for forever and it was great to also hear them the people who had lived
here for a long time sharing their information to the other people.
(08:40):
Yeah. So on the morning of the first day, were you a bit anxious who was going to turn up?
Completely, utterly. And we had somebody that was children were poorly,
somebody else that had to pull out.
And I was like, oh, no, this is not going to have enough pits to dig.
And this is going to be embarrassing.
(09:00):
And all these students can arrive from Durham University I'm not going to look like an idiot.
Oh, of course, because you had David brought some people with him.
Yeah, we had a fantastic number of students that came to us,
including undergraduates and postgrads. Very enthusiastic.
Great with the people in the village, which was really lovely.
But then I was like getting really embarrassed that, oh, no.
(09:23):
And then I was like, have we got all the right equipment? And then as soon as
I arrived, somebody went, have you got string?
And I went, no. no oh no
there was just so
much to think about oh dear me but
it's about like equipment and everything a lot of people had their own didn't
because they were doing their own gardens so a lot of people had some tape measures
(09:47):
and spades and things and they did yeah and it was helpful and david borrowed
a lot from dermal archaeological services they came with them the special trowel Oh,
yes, of course. The four-inch trowel.
Why it has to be four-inch, I don't know, but the four-inch trowel.
And, you know, I had tarpaulin and David also brought some mattocks as well.
(10:10):
Yes, yeah. Oh, absolute necessity.
But one thing I noticed coming back into the village today was I was looking
at some of the spots where the test pits had been dug and you can't tell.
Well, prior to the event, David had sent me a picture of a previous dig,
which I had to circulate, showing whether somebody had done a test pit to say,
(10:32):
don't do this on immaculate lawn because, you know, you can't return it to what it is. Yeah.
I think we've done really well. I was going to say, I think Hampstead took up
the challenge and said, do you know what? We will put it back how it was.
I mean, Hampstead, if you drive through Hampstead, everyone's garden is beautiful.
They're all covered in flowers and immaculate, beautiful lawns.
(10:52):
And that's exactly what it looks like now. It's like nothing happened. It's bizarre.
Although several people had to dig another hole to put the rest of what they
couldn't fit back in. In the same circle.
Which is quite odd. so you had so did you have was it 21 pits open during the
two days we didn't have 21 pits open but in advance david pet said have a number
(11:18):
of pits that could be used so actually we only dug 16.
Right some of those bottomed out because one of the things that we discovered
was that hamstley's bedrock although i've been told not to call it bedrock right
by some people because it's I don't understand,
(11:38):
it's glacial deposits or something. Oh, right, okay.
Is only 40 to 50 centimetres below the surface.
Right, and you were aiming to dig a little bit further than that.
Well, you dig until there's no evidence of human activity or you hit bedclothes.
Archaeologists like to call the natural. The natural, yes. The natural.
(11:58):
So a number of the pits bottomed out quite quickly with not a lot in them.
Yeah. One of the pits sort of was dug and they were only available for one day,
so they didn't get all the way down and filled it in, which is a real shame.
And there was one pit that was dug that when they saw all the sort of instructions,
(12:19):
they didn't want to do that.
So they just did their own
pit in the garden with the children but didn't have
any involvement of anybody so we've unfortunately
not had any we can't record anything from it
but it just the paperwork put them off
right oh fair enough and the thing is that's the one thing that probably is
(12:39):
the most important thing is to write up the evidence because then you can start
putting it with other context sheets and and then you can start building up
a picture of what's happening and without that written evidence,
documentation, it's kind of lost.
But if that's only one, it's not the end of the world, is it?
No, and also I would say, you know, they did that with their children and it
(13:02):
was a great little exercise for them. And do you know what?
That's fine. It's great. Yeah, and I mean, getting the younger people involved
in some archaeology, it's fun, isn't it?
Well, one of the houses ended up with seven children around their pit.
It i do believe i visited that one there's
a lot of sieving going on which i think there's a lot of
(13:24):
sieving going on and and a lot of people that it
was a real community spirit feel when
we went to that garden um to talk to people because everybody
was mucking in and just everyone was around this meter
square soil everywhere enjoying themselves
and you know had three
or four sieves on the go so i mean they were very finely going
(13:46):
through all of the soil but yeah it was it
was nice it was a nice garden to go and visit the
next one we visited actually had some help
from a sheep oh so that was quite nice there's chickens helping scratching and
there was a sheep that came in and thought it would come and have a little nose
you see what was happening and that was uh yeah that was interesting and it's
(14:07):
like my dog rolled over into mine as well yeah so just Just stretch them. Makes cool lures.
But yeah, and I believe there's like four of the children who are involved want
to do, try and get involved in the young archaeology and stuff, which is just fab. Yeah.
Oh, maybe we can have a chat about that later. I've had some ideas on that. Oh, you see.
(14:30):
So all the digs were happening. The day was moving on and come sort of four
o'clock packing up time,
I, like you, headed back to the village hall to find a lot of fines processing
that had been going on throughout the day.
Yeah. So who were all the ladies who were helping out doing the fines processing?
(14:53):
And gents. and always all right i only
saw a couple of ladies so yeah i couldn't yeah so there
were a number of what was really nice was a number of
people who couldn't be on like on
the ground or didn't have the physical ability to dig
but wanted to be involved and i thought
um you know in there is the
(15:13):
possibility of washing your finds next to you where you're
digging your pit and therefore you're processing as you go yeah
but rather than do that so that we could
have other people involved we created like a
hub in our village hall and the
people that were in that situation came together
they got instruction from david pets about how to wash
(15:34):
things how to catalog them make sure they're labeled and they
just sort of kept having load after load
arriving during the day i did forewarn them
as they experienced that that would just keep on increasing and
indeed on the the sunday they were swamped
with quite a lot of stuff but also the
people digging initially you weren't quite sure what to save so i think their
(15:59):
first batch they just got loads of rocks and things that weren't tooled at all
and they were just like actually there was a there was a few more exciting things
came out of the ground wasn't it um some uh Datable pottery.
I think, some nice bits of blue and white and some salt glazed pottery,
so a bit more rougher sort of farm kitchenware kind of thing, which is interesting.
(16:23):
You know, to find out what was on the tables, you know, the houses in Hampsteadley,
maybe 100, 200 years ago.
Yeah and well and some of the
dateable medieval pottery is maybe thought
to be 12th 11th century so very early yeah
there's also some little carved stone and maybe a work stone like a sharpening
(16:46):
stone right oh so this has come out after since i since i had a look so i wasn't
aware of these things i think i saw a couple of little pieces of green glass
medieval pottery but but not a great deal.
This must have come out, like you say, a little bit later on.
Yeah, it's just right at the sort of end, as is always the case, isn't it?
(17:06):
But also, there were things like, you know, little skeletons of.
Chickens oh nice one of the
gardens is an she's an artist and actually about
30 centimeters down they found one of her old paint tubes
so goodness knows how it ended up 30 centimeters down
but it does give you a little snapshot into the the life of people ironically
(17:31):
my pit i think was by somebody who's obsessively clean because there was nothing
in it apart from rubble not a sausage but it's.
It's great.
And one of the people, actually, the house where their pit was being dug,
his parents and his grandparents had all lived in that house.
So there were some of the things coming out that he could relate to because he remembered them.
(17:57):
Yeah. Which is like... Yeah.
That's quite nice, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
So the second day, you moved on to more public spaces in the village.
Yeah and i think probably
if i was doing this again i probably done more
of a mix on the first day because i think it was quite nice having
(18:19):
some public spaces that people could see because a lot of on the first day was
in people's back gardens for example yeah and so when if you came through the
village you wouldn't really have seen a lot yeah and i think we could have perhaps
done a mix and that might have been more useful so like to get so that people
could wander around and have
a look although we did have one in the pub garden on the
(18:41):
first day yeah i mean maybe he's one
of the things that comes out of doing something is you you
sort of you you learn a few things that you think like you
said that you maybe do a little bit differently and maybe to get a little bit
more notice might be to set up like a gazebo maybe he's on the village green
with maybe a bit of finds processing going on outside for like you say because
(19:04):
i know some people did come come through the village to come and have a look, didn't they,
on the Sunday? Yeah, they did. Yeah, it was quite nice.
But we chose some areas on the village green.
We had to get permission to dig the village greens. But we chose some areas
where we believed there may have been previous buildings.
And one of them was next to a stone locally that's known as the Coffin Resting
(19:27):
Stone. Coffin Resting Stones were often used...
When people were transporting the coffins from some distance to the church that served a big area.
And obviously it's heavy and they would rest it on the stone.
And do we think it still is a coffin resting stone now after a bit of archaeology?
Well, what was really lovely was it was a fantastic example of archaeology plus talking to people.
(19:52):
Because when they dug down by the side of the coffin resting stone,
it initially looked like it was on a bed of pebbles.
But then when they re-looked at it, actually, it looks like it was probably
a stone that had been transported here with the Ice Age and it was just lead on moraenic deposits.
It then turns out that actually it was outside what was formerly a carpenter's
(20:17):
shop and the carpenter used to make coffins.
And so he probably just went, this is a really handy stone.
I'll just move it to here. Right. And I'll use it to make me coffins on.
So it was a coffin resting stone in a way, but not the coffin resting stone
that had a, not one that had a body in. It was free body coffin.
(20:39):
So we would have, we wouldn't have found that out actually, if we hadn't been
digging there and then other people who'd grown up in the village.
It was actually two people's information that got put together to get that.
And this is another thing about the community coming together,
doing something and talking where these people probably wouldn't have never had that conversation.
(20:59):
They would have never been together to have that and and that's
come out and it's something really useful and it actually gives
credence to to the name now that's something that everybody
knew but nobody knew why it was called that they just assumed yeah and now now
there is actually there's a factual thing that you can attach to it now and
(21:20):
like at the end of first day where i was digging my pits then my opposite neighbor
came over because i was digging over former cottages that were in front of my house.
And my opposite neighbour came over and went, why are you digging there?
That's the old coal house.
They lived in that end of the house, not that end. I was like, serves me right.
(21:42):
Did you find any coal? We did find coal, yes.
There was a layer. So you've proved something. Yeah, we were digging in the
coal house. But it was really interesting.
Actually, probably one of the things that will come from this,
and it's already started happening naturally,
People have started writing articles for the parish magazine about their experiences
(22:03):
as children growing up. Right.
So they've just started recounting stuff and submitting stuff.
And what happened with the big dig thing is it started those further conversations.
And somehow there's a really good sort of oral history there that needs to be recorded. Yeah, yeah.
And that can form part of the archaeological process.
(22:25):
Yeah. What a good idea. And I have heard of that happening in mining communities,
you know, people recording their history and their recollections and,
you know, time spent with their grandparents and putting those documents together,
putting that information together.
Yeah, and what's sort of quite unusual about Hampstead in a way is that because
(22:48):
our bedrock's so shallow, although we're surrounded by areas that were involved
with mining, Hampstead was always agricultural.
Right. And quite often the agricultural history gets lost in those mining communities
because that's the predominant sort of employer.
Yeah. Whereas Hampstead has always been farming. Yeah, which is one of the things
(23:09):
that came out in your geophysical survey, isn't it? That the ridge and furrow
came up quite nicely, didn't it?
Yeah. And the old strip farming, the more wonky, should we say,
ridge and furrow as opposed to the very neat.
Yeah. And you could tell, you could kind of date the farming techniques by looking
(23:31):
at making a comparison between the two. Very obviously.
And as you said, a lot of the houses within the village have the old remnants
of the massive strips behind them.
And one of the other things that's come out of the big dig is us being linked
with knowledgeable professionals.
Professionals yeah so one of the professionals have
(23:52):
been linked with was also feeling that we've got like old terrace
sort of unaged probably cultivation terraces as
well so that you know our agricultural history has gone back years and hamstley
did at some point come back into textual histories because hamstley as a village
was known as one of the key growers of potatoes not long after they got introduced
(24:17):
in Elizabethan times. Yeah.
I did hear something about that. Yeah. Yeah, about the potatoes.
Quite why? I don't know. Putting Hans Sully on the map. Yay. Potato growing.
So, looking...
Everything that's been collected, all the finds and everything,
they're going to be looked at by Durham University and what's going to happen with those things.
(24:41):
I mean, the bit I've learned from this is there's actually quite a lot to do
after, before it's even gone to that stage.
Right. Because in two days we didn't manage to get everything dry and you can't
store things wet. So I am still drying stuff out.
Oh, right. Still collecting everybody's
papers, making sure that we've got everything recorded correctly.
What's been quite interesting is how people interpret instructions and
(25:06):
trying to sort of suss out and make
sure that there's a consistency between them right
otherwise again the information ends up yeah pretty
you know you can't really use it so there's
all that to do before it even goes to durham university to
be sort of reviewed and analyzed and then
the idea is that david pets is going to come back
(25:27):
and do an evening for the village taking us through a
more detailed description of what's been found and what
it means in terms of the development of the village
and if we can tell anything from it yeah i think inevitably
one of the things is is you are digging 16 pits
in a village and if you hit something yay
yeah if you don't hit anything so with
(25:48):
that in mind are you going to do another dig i think
one of the things is that one of the things we
were were looking for is to have a group of people
who have now had the experience of doing it who we could
then get involved in doing something else in another
location oh right okay is that a secret at the moment or no not necessarily
(26:11):
i just there are a number of potential other locations to do with the landscape
archaeology in and around hampstead that might warrant further investigation And we, me and you.
Jackie, we've talked about the notion of field walking as well at times,
which can, you know, generate some really good information.
(26:32):
That's quite hard when you don't know what on earth you're looking for. Right.
Now that we've had our heads down a pit for two days. Yeah, yeah.
People are used to looking at old, broken bits of ceramic and can't find them.
Know what they look like when they're dirty in the ground it
sounds daft but yeah you have to i know you know two
days does not make an expert by any means but
(26:54):
it just means i would feel a bit better in terms of
if i was doing that knowing what i was.
Looking for a bit more yeah so that process of
field working walking becomes more useful and.
More people aren't just picking random stones.
That's the other thing so do you think hamster leaves archaeology.
Is is it's set to a stay now do you think
(27:15):
this is something that's gonna continue as a
project maybe not necessarily every
year but there will be aspects of archaeology happening
and information going out to people from
now on yeah so during the
summer we open the church once a
month and we do sort of tours
(27:37):
of the church about the history of the church because there's some unique i
know that word's used a lot but unique features of hampstead
church that aren't found anywhere else as far as we know
in the uk we're going to be applying for funding to
have another load of geophys done on
some particular areas like i said one
of the links we've made from the big dig with one
(27:58):
of the professionals seems to be very like hopeful yeah
and they're very very keen to get involved and we
need to reach out to some of the other local
archaeological groups the belief in the
northeast project linked us up with thought fuels oh
yes yeah i don't know is that how you say it yeah fuel this or thought
food yeah thought fuels and they're very
(28:19):
keen to come over here and we're keen to go over there to try and make links
because they've done a lot of the church survey but like the graffiti that's
right yeah which we haven't done yeah oh you've not done that yes no oh right
oh that's another fun task yeah yeah it's really it's so interesting and it's
amazing and what naughty choir boys get at.
(28:40):
And somebody is researching into, because we had war graves in here that were exhumed and moved.
So somebody's done research into that. And for Remembrance Day,
there's a talk in here about those people and their history.
And Hampstead Forest was used as a house prison wall for a time.
(29:02):
And indeed, during the archaeological, the big dig,
one of the pieces of tree graffiti that was
recorded was from a prisoner of war wasn't it
yeah yeah which i didn't know about and that was fascinating and then we've
got some other sites that we want to sort of ones that have already been geophys
we're thinking of doing that field walking and we've also awaiting carbon date
(29:26):
on our church door right what.
Will that tell you what's carbon dating? So carbon dating is where,
you know, you're asking really technical things.
It's just for people who don't know what carbon dating is.
So we took a minute sample of the wood from the church door and apparently the
(29:49):
carbon that gets deposited within it at the time it's growing,
they can remove that, test it and analyse it and they can understand from that date.
But I think there's other information and other things happening that have spiralled
on from that that will mean that that will happen sooner than that feedback.
(30:10):
I do definitely think there is a thing about recording this sort of oral information.
I personally have been involved in something like that before.
And it was all done, although we're recording audio at the moment,
I don't think it's a very successful way to record it.
Because people never listen to it right again you
(30:31):
listen and it's really then hard to find information
back once you've listened to them right so i
want to do something where i'm always one for going with what how people are
sort of leading it and because people are now sending stuff into the village
magazine naturally yeah go with it right yeah yeah so i was thinking of like
(30:53):
trying to encourage more and more and even putting out some questions for to sort of
get people to answer to jog their
memories and things like that to try and build up a bank of information and
none of this stuff is useful unless it's
made available yeah so one of the other things i
want to do is pull all the research
(31:14):
that we've got not only from this project but geophys stuff
which is available on the count what's
it called the council wonder oh the keys
east to the back the records archaeological records thing right i
can't think what's she called she's at the belief in
the northeast the historic environment record so our geophys
(31:34):
is available on the historic environment record system but also we've got loads
of documents that we want to make available generally so we've got a record
of all the graves in our three churches can you believe in that one village
yeah and we've already done lots of research.
Into various people and poets
(31:56):
and people who have lived in the village and stuff
like that and just begin to build up this massive bank of information
that people can research oh you're gonna have
to write a book when do you have time to do stuff like that well all this information
i mean it oh yeah definitely gonna have to build a website yeah you know a hamsterly
website where you know where this this can all be made available for future
(32:20):
generations i hope so So that's the idea.
And, you know, I know when I'm researching things, it's really useful to come
across stuff like that. Yeah. It's really helpful.
And what about video? Do you think you might do some video, you know,
for some of these interviews with people, you know, about the village?
If only I knew somebody who's really good at doing like recording and videos
(32:44):
of things and sort of documenting histories.
Maybe with a bit more tech training. But no, I think videos are always a good way to involve people.
Well and you know and i think there's some stuff we can do with the school i'd love to do some,
direct stuff for the school because the big dig was on the weekend so
(33:06):
it was quite hard for school to get involved yeah and i would like to get them
involved in something because i think i it sounds naff doesn't it but i remember
as a kid watching time teen and getting obsessed with it and just loving it
yeah and that's what got me into
this whole thing and you know be fab to inspire more all young people.
Yeah. Well, A.D. Davis, thank you very much for your time and look forward to
(33:30):
talking to you again. Thank you.
We'll be back next time 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 Bitmatic Productions.
(33:50):
Music.
Now from Archaeology News North East, the latest archaeology news and interviews from around the UK.
This is Tales from the Trowel with Jackie and Sarah.
We are here in Hampsteadley Church in St James' Church with Aidy Davis,
organiser of the Hampsteadley Big Dig. So, Eddie, can you tell us in your own
(00:26):
words why you decided to take on this mammoth task?
Being in St. James's is quite relevant because it all started here.
We set up the Friends of St. James's Church a while ago to start trying to look
after the fabric of this Grade 1 listed church.
And in preparation for doing things to try and sort of look after the masonry,
(00:48):
look after our door and all that sort of thing, one of the things we thought
was that we needed to understand the context of the church first.
So how old it was, its origins, its history, that began this whole massive journey.
And how did you come up with the idea of the Big Dig?
So Hamsley Church, for people that don't know, St James's, is about half a mile outside of the village.
(01:13):
And for a long, long time, most of the villagers believed
that the village used to extend to the church and it
reduced in size over time and that does
happen particularly where there's like plague villages where population
numbers have greatly reduced and then suddenly the church
ends up isolated however in local historians writings and i have and they are
(01:35):
literally just written into some old notebooks by one of the previous vickers
he related that the fields between the church and the village are known as the
Shith Fields or Sheath Fields, spelled S-H-I-T-H.
That relates to the idea of banshees, the screaming sort of souls from round barrows.
(01:56):
In Scotland, I think they're believed to be quite negative and drawing people to their death.
In Ireland, they are warning people of death.
So basically, it's sort of indicated that there might be this gap between the
village and the church as always exists.
So I set about looking at evidence for any settlement and couldn't.
(02:18):
So then put together a briefing paper, I suppose, for lack of better terminology,
as I'm not a professional archaeologist, and badgered lots and lots of people,
as Jackie, you know, because I think you're one of the people I badgered.
Yes, I remember coming up one winter's day to have a look around this beautiful church.
I mean, it wasn't a chore to come out and have a look. Hampstead Lee is absolutely beautiful.
(02:42):
I mean, it's well worth looking into. I mean, this building itself is just amazing,
just absolutely lovely.
And it's about the 11th century, was I reading?
So the church was dedicated in 1180. But Peter Ryder, who's a well-known church
archaeological historian, believes that probably the nave of the church is pre-conquest.
(03:08):
So eventually, after knocking on lots of doors, I managed to knock on the door
of David Petz, who at that time was involved with the project of belief in the Northeast.
And I explained what we were trying to do
and David provided some funding
to do some archaeological geophys around
the church to try and see if there was any evidence of settlement
(03:30):
and what was great was that was our first involvement of people from the community
so we have people that came out from Durham Archaeological Services and had
the patience to take us through how to use the the geophysical machines in the
briefings nobody told us that we went to wear metal things oh no.
(03:51):
So although one of the machines we had to go none of the results could be used,
because we didn't quite even a belt buckle isn't allowed that's right yeah and
dermarchological services were very perplexed at telling me that they had found
really nothing but i was delighted that they found nothing and through doing
(04:12):
that we kept reporting Porting back to the local village,
we got lots and lots of interest to the point that the last sort of evening
that we had, we had 50 people here in the church coming to hear about sort of
some of the latest history.
And that then prompted the idea that we need to try and find out the history of the village.
Hampsteadley as a village is absent from loads of the written texts.
(04:36):
I must admit, I've done a little bit of research myself, sort of trying to,
in preparation for coming here.
And you're right, there is very little to be found.
When you start looking, one of the major websites for information is Keys to the Past.
And even then, there's one page that talks about a bit of Neolithic flint found
(04:59):
more down near Hampsteadly Forest.
Something else. Something else. Oh, an arrowhead that I was reading about.
But apart from that, I couldn't really find anything much more about Hampsteadley
other than it has a disconnected church from its congregation.
Yeah, and we don't appear in the Bolden book, but there are quite a lot of places
(05:22):
in the sort of Teesdale, because we are actually in Teesdale,
that don't appear in the Bolden book and also depend on the ownership.
But also we don't appear in the bishop
hatfield survey right whereas our neighbor
witten weir doesn't appear in the bomb
but but they reappear in the hatfield survey so we're
sort of the the community side
(05:45):
of the archaeology would you say that you
had it was kind of 50 50 with the
professionals then that that it was that that you
took your work to them and they helped you or
did they lead you to do
what you're doing so i think when david pets
got involved with the belief in the northeast and helped
(06:07):
us do the geophysical survey he saw the amount of interest from the local village
right and it was him that said have you thought of doing a big community dig
right because it's a great way to get other people involved you could see it
as an opportunity to try and find out information about the village.
You know, this is all very new for us, new for me. I'm not an archaeologist.
(06:30):
And so some of it isn't going to be exact precise techniques.
I'm aware of that. But some of it was about actually beginning to engage people with where they live.
Yeah, I was reading a paper this morning, actually, about community archaeology.
And what it said was that community digs connect people to the archaeology,
but they also connect people to the community. community?
(06:53):
Do you think that's something that's happened during this process?
Yeah, because I put out the call for people and they sort of expressed their
interests and there were some people who couldn't dig their gardens for example
that were very happy for people to come into their gardens and dig.
Now some of those people that went into those people's gardens,
those people didn't know. And some of the people that.
(07:15):
Digging the same pit didn't really know each other even
though we're in a village yeah yeah but they then spent two days
sat alongside each other digging and actually
one of the things that people have come up and said afterwards is
what a great opportunity it was just to spend time
with somebody in a different completely different environment yeah
to learn about that one of the gardens
(07:37):
where it's happened the owner and the
two people who are digging the garden have already remet oh really
and they've got their
own little whatsapp group between the three of them and
they got on like a house and that and they didn't know each other right in advance
of that yeah and what about help from outside the community did did people come
(07:58):
forward yeah and it was really really lovely that that happened so there were
some people who just interested in archaeology wanting
to get involved in some sort of dig but we also
then had people that were associated with hamstley or
from the past so that some of their families were from
hamstley and although they're not living here now they wanted
(08:19):
to come in and do that what was also nice was
that there were some people involved who are relatively newly moved into the
village and there are people that born and bred from families that have existed
here for forever and it was great to also hear them the people who had lived
here for a long time sharing their information to the other people.
(08:40):
Yeah. So on the morning of the first day, were you a bit anxious who was going to turn up?
Completely, utterly. And we had somebody that was children were poorly,
somebody else that had to pull out.
And I was like, oh, no, this is not going to have enough pits to dig.
And this is going to be embarrassing.
(09:00):
And all these students can arrive from Durham University I'm not going to look like an idiot.
Oh, of course, because you had David brought some people with him.
Yeah, we had a fantastic number of students that came to us,
including undergraduates and postgrads. Very enthusiastic.
Great with the people in the village, which was really lovely.
But then I was like getting really embarrassed that, oh, no.
(09:23):
And then I was like, have we got all the right equipment? And then as soon as
I arrived, somebody went, have you got string?
And I went, no. no oh no
there was just so
much to think about oh dear me but
it's about like equipment and everything a lot of people had their own didn't
because they were doing their own gardens so a lot of people had some tape measures
(09:47):
and spades and things and they did yeah and it was helpful and david borrowed
a lot from dermal archaeological services they came with them the special trowel Oh,
yes, of course. The four-inch trowel.
Why it has to be four-inch, I don't know, but the four-inch trowel.
And, you know, I had tarpaulin and David also brought some mattocks as well.
(10:10):
Yes, yeah. Oh, absolute necessity.
But one thing I noticed coming back into the village today was I was looking
at some of the spots where the test pits had been dug and you can't tell.
Well, prior to the event, David had sent me a picture of a previous dig,
which I had to circulate, showing whether somebody had done a test pit to say,
(10:32):
don't do this on immaculate lawn because, you know, you can't return it to what it is. Yeah.
I think we've done really well. I was going to say, I think Hampstead took up
the challenge and said, do you know what? We will put it back how it was.
I mean, Hampstead, if you drive through Hampstead, everyone's garden is beautiful.
They're all covered in flowers and immaculate, beautiful lawns.
(10:52):
And that's exactly what it looks like now. It's like nothing happened. It's bizarre.
Although several people had to dig another hole to put the rest of what they
couldn't fit back in. In the same circle.
Which is quite odd. so you had so did you have was it 21 pits open during the
two days we didn't have 21 pits open but in advance david pet said have a number
(11:18):
of pits that could be used so actually we only dug 16.
Right some of those bottomed out because one of the things that we discovered
was that hamstley's bedrock although i've been told not to call it bedrock right
by some people because it's I don't understand,
(11:38):
it's glacial deposits or something. Oh, right, okay.
Is only 40 to 50 centimetres below the surface.
Right, and you were aiming to dig a little bit further than that.
Well, you dig until there's no evidence of human activity or you hit bedclothes.
Archaeologists like to call the natural. The natural, yes. The natural.
(11:58):
So a number of the pits bottomed out quite quickly with not a lot in them.
Yeah. One of the pits sort of was dug and they were only available for one day,
so they didn't get all the way down and filled it in, which is a real shame.
And there was one pit that was dug that when they saw all the sort of instructions,
(12:19):
they didn't want to do that.
So they just did their own
pit in the garden with the children but didn't have
any involvement of anybody so we've unfortunately
not had any we can't record anything from it
but it just the paperwork put them off
right oh fair enough and the thing is that's the one thing that probably is
(12:39):
the most important thing is to write up the evidence because then you can start
putting it with other context sheets and and then you can start building up
a picture of what's happening and without that written evidence,
documentation, it's kind of lost.
But if that's only one, it's not the end of the world, is it?
No, and also I would say, you know, they did that with their children and it
(13:02):
was a great little exercise for them. And do you know what?
That's fine. It's great. Yeah, and I mean, getting the younger people involved
in some archaeology, it's fun, isn't it?
Well, one of the houses ended up with seven children around their pit.
It i do believe i visited that one there's
a lot of sieving going on which i think there's a lot of
(13:24):
sieving going on and and a lot of people that it
was a real community spirit feel when
we went to that garden um to talk to people because everybody
was mucking in and just everyone was around this meter
square soil everywhere enjoying themselves
and you know had three
or four sieves on the go so i mean they were very finely going
(13:46):
through all of the soil but yeah it was it
was nice it was a nice garden to go and visit the
next one we visited actually had some help
from a sheep oh so that was quite nice there's chickens helping scratching and
there was a sheep that came in and thought it would come and have a little nose
you see what was happening and that was uh yeah that was interesting and it's
(14:07):
like my dog rolled over into mine as well yeah so just Just stretch them. Makes cool lures.
But yeah, and I believe there's like four of the children who are involved want
to do, try and get involved in the young archaeology and stuff, which is just fab. Yeah.
Oh, maybe we can have a chat about that later. I've had some ideas on that. Oh, you see.
(14:30):
So all the digs were happening. The day was moving on and come sort of four
o'clock packing up time,
I, like you, headed back to the village hall to find a lot of fines processing
that had been going on throughout the day.
Yeah. So who were all the ladies who were helping out doing the fines processing?
(14:53):
And gents. and always all right i only
saw a couple of ladies so yeah i couldn't yeah so there
were a number of what was really nice was a number of
people who couldn't be on like on
the ground or didn't have the physical ability to dig
but wanted to be involved and i thought
um you know in there is the
(15:13):
possibility of washing your finds next to you where you're
digging your pit and therefore you're processing as you go yeah
but rather than do that so that we could
have other people involved we created like a
hub in our village hall and the
people that were in that situation came together
they got instruction from david pets about how to wash
(15:34):
things how to catalog them make sure they're labeled and they
just sort of kept having load after load
arriving during the day i did forewarn them
as they experienced that that would just keep on increasing and
indeed on the the sunday they were swamped
with quite a lot of stuff but also the
people digging initially you weren't quite sure what to save so i think their
(15:59):
first batch they just got loads of rocks and things that weren't tooled at all
and they were just like actually there was a there was a few more exciting things
came out of the ground wasn't it um some uh Datable pottery.
I think, some nice bits of blue and white and some salt glazed pottery,
so a bit more rougher sort of farm kitchenware kind of thing, which is interesting.
(16:23):
You know, to find out what was on the tables, you know, the houses in Hampsteadley,
maybe 100, 200 years ago.
Yeah and well and some of the
dateable medieval pottery is maybe thought
to be 12th 11th century so very early yeah
there's also some little carved stone and maybe a work stone like a sharpening
(16:46):
stone right oh so this has come out after since i since i had a look so i wasn't
aware of these things i think i saw a couple of little pieces of green glass
medieval pottery but but not a great deal.
This must have come out, like you say, a little bit later on.
Yeah, it's just right at the sort of end, as is always the case, isn't it?
(17:06):
But also, there were things like, you know, little skeletons of.
Chickens oh nice one of the
gardens is an she's an artist and actually about
30 centimeters down they found one of her old paint tubes
so goodness knows how it ended up 30 centimeters down
but it does give you a little snapshot into the the life of people ironically
(17:31):
my pit i think was by somebody who's obsessively clean because there was nothing
in it apart from rubble not a sausage but it's.
It's great.
And one of the people, actually, the house where their pit was being dug,
his parents and his grandparents had all lived in that house.
So there were some of the things coming out that he could relate to because he remembered them.
(17:57):
Yeah. Which is like... Yeah.
That's quite nice, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
So the second day, you moved on to more public spaces in the village.
Yeah and i think probably
if i was doing this again i probably done more
of a mix on the first day because i think it was quite nice having
(18:19):
some public spaces that people could see because a lot of on the first day was
in people's back gardens for example yeah and so when if you came through the
village you wouldn't really have seen a lot yeah and i think we could have perhaps
done a mix and that might have been more useful so like to get so that people
could wander around and have
a look although we did have one in the pub garden on the
(18:41):
first day yeah i mean maybe he's one
of the things that comes out of doing something is you you
sort of you you learn a few things that you think like you
said that you maybe do a little bit differently and maybe to get a little bit
more notice might be to set up like a gazebo maybe he's on the village green
with maybe a bit of finds processing going on outside for like you say because
(19:04):
i know some people did come come through the village to come and have a look, didn't they,
on the Sunday? Yeah, they did. Yeah, it was quite nice.
But we chose some areas on the village green.
We had to get permission to dig the village greens. But we chose some areas
where we believed there may have been previous buildings.
And one of them was next to a stone locally that's known as the Coffin Resting
(19:27):
Stone. Coffin Resting Stones were often used...
When people were transporting the coffins from some distance to the church that served a big area.
And obviously it's heavy and they would rest it on the stone.
And do we think it still is a coffin resting stone now after a bit of archaeology?
Well, what was really lovely was it was a fantastic example of archaeology plus talking to people.
(19:52):
Because when they dug down by the side of the coffin resting stone,
it initially looked like it was on a bed of pebbles.
But then when they re-looked at it, actually, it looks like it was probably
a stone that had been transported here with the Ice Age and it was just lead on moraenic deposits.
It then turns out that actually it was outside what was formerly a carpenter's
(20:17):
shop and the carpenter used to make coffins.
And so he probably just went, this is a really handy stone.
I'll just move it to here. Right. And I'll use it to make me coffins on.
So it was a coffin resting stone in a way, but not the coffin resting stone
that had a, not one that had a body in. It was free body coffin.
(20:39):
So we would have, we wouldn't have found that out actually, if we hadn't been
digging there and then other people who'd grown up in the village.
It was actually two people's information that got put together to get that.
And this is another thing about the community coming together,
doing something and talking where these people probably wouldn't have never had that conversation.
(20:59):
They would have never been together to have that and and that's
come out and it's something really useful and it actually gives
credence to to the name now that's something that everybody
knew but nobody knew why it was called that they just assumed yeah and now now
there is actually there's a factual thing that you can attach to it now and
(21:20):
like at the end of first day where i was digging my pits then my opposite neighbor
came over because i was digging over former cottages that were in front of my house.
And my opposite neighbour came over and went, why are you digging there?
That's the old coal house.
They lived in that end of the house, not that end. I was like, serves me right.
(21:42):
Did you find any coal? We did find coal, yes.
There was a layer. So you've proved something. Yeah, we were digging in the
coal house. But it was really interesting.
Actually, probably one of the things that will come from this,
and it's already started happening naturally,
People have started writing articles for the parish magazine about their experiences
(22:03):
as children growing up. Right.
So they've just started recounting stuff and submitting stuff.
And what happened with the big dig thing is it started those further conversations.
And somehow there's a really good sort of oral history there that needs to be recorded. Yeah, yeah.
And that can form part of the archaeological process.
(22:25):
Yeah. What a good idea. And I have heard of that happening in mining communities,
you know, people recording their history and their recollections and,
you know, time spent with their grandparents and putting those documents together,
putting that information together.
Yeah, and what's sort of quite unusual about Hampstead in a way is that because
(22:48):
our bedrock's so shallow, although we're surrounded by areas that were involved
with mining, Hampstead was always agricultural.
Right. And quite often the agricultural history gets lost in those mining communities
because that's the predominant sort of employer.
Yeah. Whereas Hampstead has always been farming. Yeah, which is one of the things
(23:09):
that came out in your geophysical survey, isn't it? That the ridge and furrow
came up quite nicely, didn't it?
Yeah. And the old strip farming, the more wonky, should we say,
ridge and furrow as opposed to the very neat.
Yeah. And you could tell, you could kind of date the farming techniques by looking
(23:31):
at making a comparison between the two. Very obviously.
And as you said, a lot of the houses within the village have the old remnants
of the massive strips behind them.
And one of the other things that's come out of the big dig is us being linked
with knowledgeable professionals.
Professionals yeah so one of the professionals have
(23:52):
been linked with was also feeling that we've got like old terrace
sort of unaged probably cultivation terraces as
well so that you know our agricultural history has gone back years and hamstley
did at some point come back into textual histories because hamstley as a village
was known as one of the key growers of potatoes not long after they got introduced
(24:17):
in Elizabethan times. Yeah.
I did hear something about that. Yeah. Yeah, about the potatoes.
Quite why? I don't know. Putting Hans Sully on the map. Yay. Potato growing.
So, looking...
Everything that's been collected, all the finds and everything,
they're going to be looked at by Durham University and what's going to happen with those things.
(24:41):
I mean, the bit I've learned from this is there's actually quite a lot to do
after, before it's even gone to that stage.
Right. Because in two days we didn't manage to get everything dry and you can't
store things wet. So I am still drying stuff out.
Oh, right. Still collecting everybody's
papers, making sure that we've got everything recorded correctly.
What's been quite interesting is how people interpret instructions and
(25:06):
trying to sort of suss out and make
sure that there's a consistency between them right
otherwise again the information ends up yeah pretty
you know you can't really use it so there's
all that to do before it even goes to durham university to
be sort of reviewed and analyzed and then
the idea is that david pets is going to come back
(25:27):
and do an evening for the village taking us through a
more detailed description of what's been found and what
it means in terms of the development of the village
and if we can tell anything from it yeah i think inevitably
one of the things is is you are digging 16 pits
in a village and if you hit something yay
yeah if you don't hit anything so with
(25:48):
that in mind are you going to do another dig i think
one of the things is that one of the things we
were were looking for is to have a group of people
who have now had the experience of doing it who we could
then get involved in doing something else in another
location oh right okay is that a secret at the moment or no not necessarily
(26:11):
i just there are a number of potential other locations to do with the landscape
archaeology in and around hampstead that might warrant further investigation And we, me and you.
Jackie, we've talked about the notion of field walking as well at times,
which can, you know, generate some really good information.
(26:32):
That's quite hard when you don't know what on earth you're looking for. Right.
Now that we've had our heads down a pit for two days. Yeah, yeah.
People are used to looking at old, broken bits of ceramic and can't find them.
Know what they look like when they're dirty in the ground it
sounds daft but yeah you have to i know you know two
days does not make an expert by any means but
(26:54):
it just means i would feel a bit better in terms of
if i was doing that knowing what i was.
Looking for a bit more yeah so that process of
field working walking becomes more useful and.
More people aren't just picking random stones.
That's the other thing so do you think hamster leaves archaeology.
Is is it's set to a stay now do you think
(27:15):
this is something that's gonna continue as a
project maybe not necessarily every
year but there will be aspects of archaeology happening
and information going out to people from
now on yeah so during the
summer we open the church once a
month and we do sort of tours
(27:37):
of the church about the history of the church because there's some unique i
know that word's used a lot but unique features of hampstead
church that aren't found anywhere else as far as we know
in the uk we're going to be applying for funding to
have another load of geophys done on
some particular areas like i said one
of the links we've made from the big dig with one
(27:58):
of the professionals seems to be very like hopeful yeah
and they're very very keen to get involved and we
need to reach out to some of the other local
archaeological groups the belief in the
northeast project linked us up with thought fuels oh
yes yeah i don't know is that how you say it yeah fuel this or thought
food yeah thought fuels and they're very
(28:19):
keen to come over here and we're keen to go over there to try and make links
because they've done a lot of the church survey but like the graffiti that's
right yeah which we haven't done yeah oh you've not done that yes no oh right
oh that's another fun task yeah yeah it's really it's so interesting and it's
amazing and what naughty choir boys get at.
(28:40):
And somebody is researching into, because we had war graves in here that were exhumed and moved.
So somebody's done research into that. And for Remembrance Day,
there's a talk in here about those people and their history.
And Hampstead Forest was used as a house prison wall for a time.
(29:02):
And indeed, during the archaeological, the big dig,
one of the pieces of tree graffiti that was
recorded was from a prisoner of war wasn't it
yeah yeah which i didn't know about and that was fascinating and then we've
got some other sites that we want to sort of ones that have already been geophys
we're thinking of doing that field walking and we've also awaiting carbon date
(29:26):
on our church door right what.
Will that tell you what's carbon dating? So carbon dating is where,
you know, you're asking really technical things.
It's just for people who don't know what carbon dating is.
So we took a minute sample of the wood from the church door and apparently the
(29:49):
carbon that gets deposited within it at the time it's growing,
they can remove that, test it and analyse it and they can understand from that date.
But I think there's other information and other things happening that have spiralled
on from that that will mean that that will happen sooner than that feedback.
(30:10):
I do definitely think there is a thing about recording this sort of oral information.
I personally have been involved in something like that before.
And it was all done, although we're recording audio at the moment,
I don't think it's a very successful way to record it.
Because people never listen to it right again you
(30:31):
listen and it's really then hard to find information
back once you've listened to them right so i
want to do something where i'm always one for going with what how people are
sort of leading it and because people are now sending stuff into the village
magazine naturally yeah go with it right yeah yeah so i was thinking of like
(30:53):
trying to encourage more and more and even putting out some questions for to sort of
get people to answer to jog their
memories and things like that to try and build up a bank of information and
none of this stuff is useful unless it's
made available yeah so one of the other things i
want to do is pull all the research
(31:14):
that we've got not only from this project but geophys stuff
which is available on the count what's
it called the council wonder oh the keys
east to the back the records archaeological records thing right i
can't think what's she called she's at the belief in
the northeast the historic environment record so our geophys
(31:34):
is available on the historic environment record system but also we've got loads
of documents that we want to make available generally so we've got a record
of all the graves in our three churches can you believe in that one village
yeah and we've already done lots of research.
Into various people and poets
(31:56):
and people who have lived in the village and stuff
like that and just begin to build up this massive bank of information
that people can research oh you're gonna have
to write a book when do you have time to do stuff like that well all this information
i mean it oh yeah definitely gonna have to build a website yeah you know a hamsterly
website where you know where this this can all be made available for future
(32:20):
generations i hope so So that's the idea.
And, you know, I know when I'm researching things, it's really useful to come
across stuff like that. Yeah. It's really helpful.
And what about video? Do you think you might do some video, you know,
for some of these interviews with people, you know, about the village?
If only I knew somebody who's really good at doing like recording and videos
(32:44):
of things and sort of documenting histories.
Maybe with a bit more tech training. But no, I think videos are always a good way to involve people.
Well and you know and i think there's some stuff we can do with the school i'd love to do some,
direct stuff for the school because the big dig was on the weekend so
(33:06):
it was quite hard for school to get involved yeah and i would like to get them
involved in something because i think i it sounds naff doesn't it but i remember
as a kid watching time teen and getting obsessed with it and just loving it
yeah and that's what got me into
this whole thing and you know be fab to inspire more all young people.
Yeah. Well, A.D. Davis, thank you very much for your time and look forward to
(33:30):
talking to you again. Thank you.
We'll be back next time 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 Bitmatic Productions.
(33:50):
Music.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.