Welcome

My Fenland garden in the autumn

I don’t know how you discovered this site, but I’m glad you did. There’s all sorts of stuff here.  I’ve been an archaeologist for over forty years and have excavated several major sites, mostly in the Fens of eastern England. I’ve also tried to bring archaeology to a wider audience, with a number of books, radio and television programmes, of which Time Team is the best known. When not writing or digging, I’m also a sheep farmer and keen gardener. But like most people, I get bees in my bonnet – obsessions, call them what you like. Most of  my worries are about the general disregard for the achievements of people in the past and the failure of politicians, both local and national, to learn the lessons of  history. Hence the title of this blog: In The Long Run. So to sum up, this will be the place to see stuff about archaeology, gardening, farming and rural life, books, broadcasting, history and the occasional intemperate rant. It won’t be very formal, because I don’t ‘do’ formality. But I do hope it’ll be fun.

Time Team Series 20. My Third Episode: Day One

The more I think about it, the more I’ve come to appreciate the Production Meeting in the hotel on the evening of Rig Day. That’s where everyone involved in the shoot come together and there is what the press today might describe as ‘a frank exchange of views’. But the thing is, everyone there has a stake in what we all decide and then, as Archaeological Director, I have the job of making it work in the ground. So I tend to shoot down impractical or airy-fairy ideas. But on this occasion everyone seemed very down-to-earth. Essentially there’s almost too much to work on: three houses, a huge park which we know changed radically over time, and then of course there’s the history which in this case we’ll need to crack. Happily we have a splendid historian, Suzannah Lipscomb to help us. Last night she made several very sensible suggestions which I think are going to make my task a bit simpler over the next three days. It was obvious she’d done her homework and knew her stuff. Anyhow, the upshot of the discussion was that we should first concentrate on the second of the three houses: the one built and used in Tudor times.

So John Gator and the geofizz team started work there early, while Tony was filming his opening of Day One PTC (Piece To Camera). Then we filmed a strategy scene, which was essentially an up-sum of what we’d decided in the Production Meeting – plus a bit of spontaneous bubble and squeak. Those early discussion scenes can sometimes be rather stodgy, but so far in this series we’ve managed to make them a bit lively. And this one worked well as it consisted of just three people: Tony, Phil and me. Then I filmed a scene with Stewart Ainsworth, our long-term landscape archaeologist, and then did another scene with the geofizz team all about the amazing all new, 8-array, high tech ground-penetrating radar. By then I was GAGGING for a cup of tea, which arrived, by hand and although slightly less than piping hot, it was wet, and welcome. Then as a last straw, the brand new battery died on the radar.

Pause. Hold everything. Film a scene about something. Anything. Then lunch. Blessed midday respite. Then after lunch the new geofizz results will be through. Another delay. What now, I wondered: film a scene about grass growing in a country park???

Then we get the geofizz results and they’re spectacular: the walls of the great Tudor house are there for all to see. So we put in a trench and Phil gets down to work. But where are the walls? Answer: they’ve been robbed-out to recycle the bricks and tiles. Everyone’s faces fall.

So we open another trench: loads more bricks. Must be part of the same wall? But is it? Spectacular chunks of decorated Tudor terra cotta. MUST be the wall! Ten minutes later we hit the natural. No, it’s not the wall, but a 17^th century ditch back-filled with Tudor rubble. By now I’m feeling pretty fed-up. Talk about an emotional roller-coaster! Then at the very last minute, as Tony is about to film his end-of-day PTC John Gator and the geofizz team announce that they’ve made some amazing new discoveries. But that’s for tomorrow. Now I must get something to eat. And a pint of something hop-filled and malty. Even better than that: Phil’s paying!

Time Team Series 20. My Third Episode: Rig Day

Archaeology is very good at examining the social effects of long-term historical change. In this episode we’ll actually be returning to the huge after-effects of the rise of the modern industrial world. One by-product of that era, if one can use such a word to describe Hell, was, of course the Great War. Another was the creation, sometimes over two or three generations, of great wealth, which was followed, human nature being what it is, by decline. Frequently the decline was hastened by booze or gambling, or both; very often, too, the slide towards penury was accelerated by death in war.

In practical terms Britain’s rise to industrial prominence was often signalled by the building of vast stately homes in beautifully landscaped parks and gardens. At first they were built and enlarged several times, then, usually towards the end of the 19^th century, the builders came less frequently. Gardens grew less lavish; easier and cheaper to maintain. After the Great War many country houses went into a steep decline. The Stock Market crash of 1929 was often the final straw and many great houses, such as Witley Court, in Worcestershire (which I visited on my holiday last week), burnt to the ground. Then came the Second War when many were requisitioned and in the process were vandalised, often deliberately. Evelyn Waugh describes the situation very evocatively in Brideshead Revisited. It’s easy to think of those conscripted soldiers as mindless vandals, but I wonder whether it was ever that simple. Remember, people in the ‘30s and ‘40s didn’t think of the great country houses as beautiful creations: to many ordinary folk, these were the places lived in by the people who’d earned their fortunes off the backs of working men. So I can sort of sympathise, just as I find it hard to be very critical of the angry Scottish crowd who attacked Fred the Shred’s opulent Edinburgh home after the collapse of RBS. Indeed, while we were walking around at Witley Court, I remember hearing an elderly Black Country woman talking rather bitterly to her friend about the families of Lord Dudley’s employees: ‘Bet they didn’t live in places like this…’

With all that in mind, do try to find a copy of a recent book by John Martin Robinson, Felling the Ancient Oaks: How England Lost its Great Country Estates (Aurum Press, London, 2011). It’s an excellently written volume, profusely and superbly illustrated. Worth every penny of thirty quid. If the destruction of great country houses before the Second War was bad, it grew very much worse in the 1950s and early ‘60s. At its height a house was being demolished every week. I discuss the effects on the landscape in The Making of the British Landscape (p. 608 and 694).

So it’s great to get the chance to investigate the remains of a once very great estate where not one, but no less than three successive country houses were destroyed.  This particular estate’s in East Anglia. The story begins in the Middle Ages. The house grew larger in Tudor times and again in the Georgian period. Unlike Witley Court, which was burnt in 1937, this particular great house survived until 1953, when it was demolished. Strangely, however, a substantial remnant of the estate still survives in the hands of the original owners who have invited Time Team to come and investigate. It’s going to be a very complex archaeological problem, with loads and loads of information.  I often find such sites the hardest of all: after all, if there’s little to go by, you can let your imagination fly free, unfettered by mere facts. Maybe that’s why I enjoy prehistory so much.

Here Comes Summer…

I got home from filming the last Time Team (the Machine Gun Corps training camp), then spent three frantic days trying (and failing) to catch-up in the garden, before setting off for the West Country on a pre-booked holiday in one of the Vivat Trust’s excellent cottages. This ‘cottage’ was in fact a small tower built in the 1830s overlooking the River Severn in the picturesque Worcestershire village of Upper Arley. The weather changed over the weekend and suddenly summer was here. But as so often happens when you decide to stop the rat-race and take a break, you go down with a cold – which is what happened to me. Still, never daunted, we set off and arrived at our tower, having visited the wonderful gardens at Hidcote Manor, en route. My niece Rosie is a gardener there – surely, the gardening equivalent of digging at Stonehenge, or Tutankhamen’s Tomb. She, and of course the garden, were splendid and helped me forget about my sniffles and sneezes.

All in all the holiday was superb: the sun shone, lambs bleated, pink campions winked from roadside verges and in the distance a steam train whistled. The Severn Valley Railway ran along the other side of the valley and I was able to relive my childhood at Arley station. The steam engine was, I think, a Black Five. I haven’t seen one of them for over forty years… And about twenty minutes’ walk along the river from our tower, was the superb, single span, Victoria railway bridge, built in 1861.

Arley Station on the Severn Valley Railway

Victoria Bridge (1861) across the Severn

The underside of the Victoria Bridge

I just can’t understand why so many people go abroad for their holidays, as there is just so much to do in Britain. ‘Staycations’ are seen as somehow second best. Barmy. Absolutely barmy. No, I’m absolutely convinced there’s a direct link between creeping brain death and the time a person spends lying on a beach.

Meanwhile, back to the garden for another frantic burst of extreme weeding. Then next week I’m heading south and east for another Time Team. This one will be older than the Machine Gun Corps – but younger than the Iron Age, which began the current series for me. That’s one of the things I like about Time Team and, for that matter, holidays in Britain: things are never the same. It’s all about variety – and yes, it is the spice of life.

Time Team Series 20, my second episode: Lest we Forget

I’ll keep this one short, like the one minute remembrance silence that Tony spontaneously called for at the end of the final scene. I don’t think it was filmed, and probably just as well – we were cold, tired and not looking our best. But I don’t think any official Remembrance Day has affected me so much. For the past three days I’d found myself thinking about my grandfather Walter Marlborough Pryor who spent 4 years in the trenches, during which time he was awarded two DSOs and became Commanding Officer of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment – being given the position while in the trenches. By some miracle he survived the Great War, but would rarely talk about it. After he died, we found this little water-colour he’d painted. On the back he had written:

“Derelict Tank on edge of R. STEENBEEK at St. JULIEN – VIEW from Bn [Battalion] H.Q. in the line during 3^rd battle of YPRES August 1917. WMP”

I gather the Third Battle of Ypres, is sometimes known as ‘the tanks’ graveyard’. This is my small tribute to my grand-dad.

Time Team Series 20. My Second Episode: Day 3

A strange day, and in many ways a moving one. The morning was relatively routine: we caught up with our recording and other archaeological house-keeping. I also opened another trench where the geofizz signals looked very promising. It was OK, but not world changing; just ok. Then after lunch I had to do some scenes that took me away from the site, which I didn’t return to until about four in the afternoon, when I headed across to Raksha’s  trench. This was the one we’d placed over a series of cook-house huts the previous day. Down the centre ran what we’d thought was a cement-lined open shallow drain – maybe it was something to do with washing spuds or vegetables – that sort of thing.

Meanwhile Raksha was clearing rubble from the corner of the trench. Time was passing and the EoD (End of Day) scene was scheduled to start at five. So I gave her a hand trowelling and barrowing, as everyone else was busy with other things. As we worked Raksha explained that the limestone rubble we were revealing seemed to be part of a wall footing or something similar. She also pointed out that it was positioned more or less at the gable end of one of the cook-house huts. This set me thinking. At about that time I noticed there was another one of those strange shallow troughs that seemed to be continuing the line of her wall. And then it came to me: the troughs were nothing of the sort. They were in fact cement foundations for a brick or blockwork wall – for which there were clear impressions in the concrete. So this was, in fact, the first bona fide hut foundation we’d found in our three days on site. And we’d found it with about 20 minutes to spare. I called a crew over, and with Raksha we filmed a short scene, before rushing across the main park to film the EoD. It had been a very close run thing!

Time Team Series 20. My Second Episode: Day 2: Nothing is Ever as Simple as it Seems

The Machine Gun Corps was founded in 1915 as a response to Germany’s overwhelming superiority in machine guns and the way they were used. Put succinctly, the enemy were light years ahead of us, and it was something that was to cost thousands of lives. The high-ups in the government and the Army realised that training was all important and our huge county house park camp was built as a direct response to the new emergency.

The maps of 1915 and 1916 show that there was a general trend across the site, with early elements, built in 1915 towards the west, and later parts to the east. We don’t know how many months separated these two areas, but I don’t think it was long – and most probably less than a full year. But it now seems that the slightly later stuff, built probably in mid 1916, was significantly better constructed. It also seems likely it was better preserved by the forces of wind, weather and erosion that determine the extent to which ancient deposits survive deep in the ground. So based on yesterday’s geofizz results, I decided to switch our resources towards these better preserved areas. And by the middle of Day 2, it seemed  a wise decision. Then just before lunch I saw the results of our excavations there. And they weren’t very encouraging. All we’d found was a ditch, which I reckoned was probably medieval and nothing whatsoever to do with the camp. It was back to the drawing board.

After lunch one of the trenches we’d opened the previous day started to produce interesting evidence for the foundations of a barracks hut, but that was in the area where preservation was meant to be poor… It was all very difficult. Even in Phil’s trench we couldn’t produce direct structural evidence for one of the largest huts on the camp. Everything on site, it would seem, was built above ground – which of course makes plenty of sense if you’re building in cheap, untreated  timber, which rots when wet. In archaeological terms we were confronted with the equivalent of a small town constructed above the ground. And you can’t excavate thin air. So what do you do? The answer is you use subtle hints to prove where buildings originally stood: things like pathways and doorways, and roads that took sudden right-angled bends; drainage pipes and water pipes – together they can form coherent patterns. But it was proving one hell of a challenge.

I think we’re beginning to make sense of it all, but I still wonder where we’d be if we didn’t have good military plans, made by professional surveyors, using the famous Ordnance Survey twenty-five inch maps as a base. Having said that, we’re adding a wealth of detail about the way ordinary soldiers lived-out their six-week stay in the camp. For many of those young men, their short residence at our camp would have been among their last weeks on this earth.

Tomorrow we’ve got to find where the machine guns ranges were located. And this will be quite a challenge. And now I’m completely knackered. It has been a hard and very challenging day. Time for a quick bite, then bed and sweet oblivion… Night night.

Time Team Series 20. My Second Episode: Day 1

Each episode of Time Team starts with a Production Meeting in the evening of Rig Day. Normally these are held in a conference room at the hotel where we’re all staying, but this time Production have rigged a large marquee close by the site itself. The (Film) Director usually conducts these meetings and the Archaeological Director says a few well chosen words or encouragement when asked. My time came, and as if on a signal from a malevolent deity hovering a few feet above the tent, it started to rain. A few drops at first. Then a light spattering. Then a heavy spattering, turning to a solid downpour and finally to an old-fashioned Biblical, Armageddon-style, end-of-the-world, Jehovah’s-spitting-teeth-on-your-God-forsaken-little-Production-Meeting, storm. There was a short lull, after which the lightning began. Then the thunder and then more rain – heavier than ever now. It was hopeless: the noise on the tent roof was deafening. Nobody could stand up to the Almighty when He throws such a mega-wobbly. So I sat down, unable to compete and completely out-classed. Not a good start to a three-day film.

Afterwards, we’d been on the road for ten minutes before the storm quite suddenly abated; when we turned into the hotel car park all was sweetness and light. As we headed across to Reception I gave Phil Harding an oak log I’d felled a couple of weeks previously, as I know he’s looking for a source of freshly felled ‘green’ oak on which to carry out some experiments with flint and polished stone chisels. It felt like the start of any other Time Team. To be honest, neither of us had our heads even remotely in the Great War.

On site this morning reality kicked in. It was wet and cold. Not like the winter of 1914/5, but unpleasant, nonetheless. We waited while Tony did his opening pieces-to-camera. While Tony was holding forth, I was leaning against the Disco bonnet looking out across the huge park: it was vast, absolutely immense and with a great brick-built water tower high on a hill on the other side of the valley – that tower had been there when the camp was rebuilt back in 1915. Suddenly the scale of our problem struck home. I  began to feel small and irrelevant. How could we have had the brass neck to have taken on something so huge? We had three days to excavate what was in effect a temporary town, built in 1915 to train the men of the newly formed Machine Gun Corps. To the men who manned it,  this was the Suicide Squad. A machine gunner on the Western Front had an average life expectancy of about two weeks. And this rural park was where they were trained. Over 170,000 men passed through this camp and over 60,000 were casualties – of which some 13,000 were killed outright.

It was fine first thing in the morning, but then we were hit by a series of nasty storms, which set us back about an hour. It’s one thing to continue a trench you’ve already started through rain, but quite another to select the trench location, lay it out and then start digging – all in the wet.  But eventually we did manage to get going and by about eleven o’clock we’d opened our first trench across the spot where the YMCA hut had stood. I put Phil in it and I have to admit that by the end of day it was looking very promising with some wonderful finds, including fragments from a Horlicks mug. I can just imagine young soldiers drinking a hot milky drink before bed. The more I look at it, the more I realise that this camp was certainly well planned, but there are signs of haste everywhere. Clearly speed was of the essence. The war could easily have been lost if Britain and France hadn’t risen to the challenges posed by German machine guns. Thankfully they did, but now I’m beginning to realise just how much that effort had taxed the British army and the public at large. This camp must have been an extraordinary place: throbbing with life, but with that other, darker side never far below the surface. I imagine that life in the camp YMCA (the  Great War equivalent of the WW2 NAAFI) would have been much like a booze-less Public Bar in one of the many local Bomber Command airfield pubs, some 25 years later: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die…