This blog was first published on Howard Williams’sArchaeodeath blog.

As a recon. trip for the Past in its Place project, Dr Patricia Murrieta-Flores and I took a look at some of its more famous sites in the Vale of Llangollen where archaeology, folklore and literary culture collide. We visited Valle Crucis and the Pillar of Eliseg and considered their roles and relationship as sites of memory since the early Middle Ages. We also visited two other sites of interest to the project.

We scaled the heights of the prehistoric hillfort and medieval castle: Castell Dinas Brân. This short-lived thirteenth century castle is intriguing because its prominent situation within the Vale and traces of earlier occupation allude to a possible prehistoric and early medieval life before it was a castle.

It also has a fascinating biography, attracting folklore associated with giants, bardic poetry and, from the mid-18th and 19th centuries, travel literature and art recording and celebrating its sublime character.

We explored the ruins and the minimalist heritage signboard, before looking at modern traces of commemoration persisting at the site.

First, there are the arrangements of stones used to map out messages by visitors. Second, there is a tree, clearly a focus of commemoration and perhaps ash-scatterings. Third, there is a location, this time unmarked, but where previously I have noticed is a favourite location for ash scatterings.

Second, we visited Plas Newydd. Home to the Ladies of Llangollen – Butler and Ponsonby – for over 40 years, it served as a hub for the fostering Romantic movement in Llangollen. The house is situated in an antiquarian landscape where the past was imagined and fostered through landscape and retrieved material culture.

While the house is closed until April, there is an overtly commemorative component is the house itself on its outside: other of the Ladies’ names. Hence, through the display of its contents and its external names, serves as a form of funerary monument for the Ladies and their Romantic patronage for the arts in the Vale. Their gravestones are also commemorative, translated from St Collen’s churchyard to the Llangollen Museum.

Within the grounds, as devleoped by Butler and Ponsonby and their successors, key antiquarian features include a stone circle and relocated medieval churchyard cross, and a font brought from Valle Crucis Abbey and framed by a poem by the Ladies.

So here in the Vale we have juxtaposed the medieval ruin and a landscape recreated from medieval ruins. Together, they constitute elements of the antiquarian landscape of memory constructed during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Vale, a process that implicated both Valle Crucis and the Pillar of Eliseg.

This is a reblog from Howard Williams’s Archaeodeath blog.

Over the last decade, there was a long-running oral history project recording ‘moor memories’ on Dartmoor. In this blog I wish to talk about different kinds of ‘moor memories’ beyond the personal recollections of its recent inhabitants. I wish to consider how archaeology and literature reveal the complex and varied uses of material culture, monuments and places, including natural features, in the creation and reproduction of social memories over the long term for communities inhabiting Dartmoor in the prehistoric and historic past. Part of this relates to memories of the dead as well as memories of the living.

Dartmoor is one of the most archaeologically potent zones of the English landscape in two ways. First, Dartmoor is rich in surviving traces of prehistoric, medieval and post-medieval human activity. Prehistoric remains include stone rows and circles and cairns, hut circles, coaxial field systems and the famous Dartmoor reeves (long linear boundaries demarcating large sections of the moors and their field systems). Medieval and post-medieval remains including deserted farms and their field systems, wayside and boundary crosses, traces of quarrying for copper, lead, stone and (in particular) extensive evidence for tin mining and smelting.

Second, Dartmoor is potent for the long tradition of close interaction between archaeology, folkore and literature, both in terms of academic research and popular reception. This might be encapsulated in the Victorian clergyman and scholar, Sabine Baring-Gould, whose interest in Dartmoor’s folklore and archaeology led to the first excavations at Grimespound. With regard to popular reception, one only has to recall the inspiration of the folklore, archaeology and landscape on Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. There are many more examples including place-names that must have been coined to reflect the stories and associations of Dartmoor’s medieval inhabitants.

Despite this archaeological richness, current approaches to the archaeology of Dartmoor remain memory-free in terms of how they interpret archaeological remains and present them to the public. Some categories of archaeological material might be seen as ‘funerary’ or ‘ritual’, others relate to ‘settlement’ and land division. Many recognise the rich ‘palimpsest’ of the Dartmoor landscape. Still, it is rare for these traces of past lives and past deaths to be approached with regard to social memory. Indeed, while some prehistorians have engaged with this theme, the full range of archaeological data, from prehistory to the contemporary past, rarely gets considered in relation to memory work – the practices and technologies by which memories are created, transmitted and reproduced.

Perhaps the reluctance lies in the long struggle to disentangle archaeology from myth and legend that is replete in the landscape and led in some antiquarian writings to the attribution of many natural features to human manufacture. Perhaps it is also the result of a long-established discourse to use the landscape of Dartmoor to write landscape history – an aspiration towards objective narrative regarding what people did in the past – not how, what and why they remembered and forgot their past through inhabiting and transforming the landscape… and talking about it.

Still, in the ongoing project The Past in its Place, we hope to use a segment of Dartmoor to explore the relationship between memory and landscape through the intersection of literature and archaeology. We take as our inspiration important work on the archaeology of folklore conducted in the SW of England and elsewhere, and work on the prehistoric of Dartmoor in particular that has engaged with the temporality of landscape.

Last week, I made a preliminary expedition to a few sites that touch on our theme, and in particular, how at different times, the medium of stone is itself the mechanism for the composition and iteration of social memories.

Dartmoor has so many exciting sites to see and is such a variegated landscape, that nowhere is ‘typical’. In only half a day, there was only time to see a small fraction of the sites I would have wished. Still, I wanted, in only half a day, to show my colleagues Dr Naomi Howell (University of Exeter) and Dr Patricia Murrieta-Flores (University of Chester) some different dimensions to it, both in terms of archaeological remains and in terms of topography, tied to literature in some instances, and tied to memory work through the medium of stone. I made a decision to, in this particular trip, avoid the prehistoric evidence that dominates discussions of Dartmoor’s archaeology and instead look at the more recent past and its traces of memory work. I want to here focus on the relationship between movement, inscription and memory, and how stone in particular – but not exclusively – is used to mobilise this relationship.

Movement and memory are key to understanding the archaeology of memory on Dartmoor, and stone often constitutes the medium for the relationship between them. From prehistoric tracks and field boundaries to the tramways that hauled stone off the moors, memory and movement are intrinsically linked in the landscape.

First up, we went to Haytor – to explore this most visited of tors upon the moor, and to consider its industrial landscape – stone quarries and tramways. The tramways fascinate me. Not only are the quarries and tramways ‘memories’ of an abandoned industry left clearly inscribed on the land, they demand negotiation and engagement through movement along and around them. Haytor also interests me since, in terms of memorial culture, the last stones quarried here were taken to provide stone for the Devon and Exeter War Memorial in Northernhay Gardens, Exeter. Stone is here a medium for commemoration, not only for its enduring qualities, but the ‘sacredness’ of its origin – the ‘heart’ of Devon.

Next, we walked the parish boundary between Buckland and Ashburton parishes to Buckland Beacon. We noted how 1837 boundary marks and field boundaries defined the parochial division, another relationship between memory and movement, marking the boundary and marking movement along it, as well as commemorating the act of its redefinition. Each stone had the date of its construction and, upon its sides, the initials ‘A’ for Ashburton and ‘B’ for Buckland. Thus, the boundary served to demarcate, but also to facilitate how to navigate, the landscape.

Then we went through Widdicombe to Dartmeet. Above Dartmeet with encountered the Coffin Stone where folklore has it, coffins en route to Widdicombe church were rested. It was smote in two by lightning to punish and destroy the coffin and corpse of a sinner rested on it. The stone is inscribed with initials of the dead and crosses commemorating those that passed by after they had passed away.

At Dartmeet we identified a further physical trace of memory and movement – a half-surviving clapper bridge – once used routinely to convey pack-horses laden with tin and other materials off the moor. I made my bid for freedom by jumping across to the surviving central section. Nothing went wrong, despite my best efforts….

Finally, we walked along an ancient trackway to the Nun’s Cross (yes, it was a medieval granite-hewn cross, not an angry woman in a wimple). Otherwise known as Siwards Cross, this striking monument is a waymarker situated at an intersection of medieval routes across the moor. Here we encountered the wrath of Dartmoor’s weather as the second we reached the cross – near-horizontal sleet. Still, in the darkness and cold of that deluge, we realised the value of the stone as shelter and for navigation in the difficult and barren terrain.

Inscribing and Depositing Memories

Relating to the relationship between movement and memory, we found in our short visit a range of means by which memories are inscribed upon the landscape in stone. A clear example of the link was provided in our visit to Haytor. Close to the tor is a tree that seems to be regularly used to memorialise the recent dead, not through textual memorials, but through ash scattering and ribbon tying. This tree is public and private – right next to one of the most visiting sites on Dartmoor, and yet secluded and special. This is a common way of memorialising through association with beauty spots.

Next, we went to Buckland Beacon which bears two striking inscriptions. First is the Ten Commandments Stone – actually two stones – bearing an inscription of the Ten Commandments plus other biblical inscriptions, situated in a striking location with views south over the edge of Dartmoor. The stones were inscribed in 1928 and relate to a particularly idiosyncratic turn of events relating to faith and the recent British landscape. A second inscription is a patriotic one, commemorating the silver jubilee of King George V and the use of the Beacon as a part of a chain of fires to commemorate the event. The site was the focus of more recent beacons, including QE2’s diamond jubilee. We also found deposition here – two caches – one a Flora margarine pot, one a tupperware container – each with notebooks and the memories/statements/names of those who had visited. The latter also had a collection of artefacts left by visitors – the paraphernalia of geocaching.

A further successive inscriptions, again linked to routes of movement, were found near Widdicombe. Here at a fork in the road (careful I said, forks in the road can puncture your tyres) are two memorials to commemorate our glorious QEII: first a stone raised as a megalithic memorial to the Silver Jubilee in 1977, the second a megalithic memorial to the Diamond Jubilee of 2012.

Of course the Coffin Stone also links movement and memory to inscription, since initials of those mourned were inscribed upon the stone, together with crosses. And finally, the Nun’s Cross has text inscribed upon it. Difficult to read in the poor light and sleet, does the name ‘Siward’ inscribed upon it commemorate history or myth? Was this a Saxon cross or one that imagines a Saxon past through this inscription?

What is interesting is the relationship between text and granite – the hardest of rocks to inscribe. Most of the texts discussed here were near-invisible, revealing the relatively ephemeral nature of text as a medium of commmoration in this kind of rugged stoney landscape. Yet the monumental medium of stone means that text is always only part of the story. Tied to the places where it is inscribed, the act of inscribing, or depositing, is more important, or as important, as the legibility of what is cut or placed.

These examples suffice to illustrate the varied ways in which movement, inscription and deposition have proven strategies of remembrance in Dartmoor’s late-historic landscape, linked to stories about the living and stories about the dead. I hope to report on more moor memories in future blogs, including those of prehistoric and medieval origin.

Today we welcomed a new, sixth, archaeologist to the Department of History and Archaeology. Dr Patricia Murrieta-Flora joins us from Lancaster University.

At Chester, she has been appointed to a three-year position as a Senior Researcher on the Past in its Place project involving researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Chester.

Paty is a GIS expert and gained her PhD from the University of Southampton and she has worked in applying spatial technologies to the study of prehistoric and early historic landscapes in Iberia and England. Paty has her own wordpress blog here.

Paty will be working on the project’s Strands 2 – Ancient Habitiations – and Strand 3 – Topographies of Memory.

For Strand 2, we are looking at a range of prehistoric and early historic monuments and their immediate localities, exploring their spatial and temporal genealogies through texts and material culture.

For Strand 3, we are looking at archaeologies of memory over the longue duree in some contrasting regions of England and Wales.

The next three years are going to be great to work in collaboration with an expert in computer applications in the archaeological investigation of social memory in past landscapes.

I have blogged about Project Eliseg on previous occasions, and the public talks I have presented about my work on the Pillar of Eliseg (e.g. Holt, Llangollen, Corwen and Keele). However, every visit to the monument itself is different: it changes with the weather, the seasons and with the activities of the farming regime of the field surrounding it. Equally important is the fact that each visit also varies depending on the company: their responses, ideas and questions.

This time, I was joining a fieldtrip run by Dr Adrian Maldonado – my replacement this academic year – with students on the MA Archaeology of Death and Memory. Adrian was superb in getting the students discussing the complex biography of the monument from its Bronze Age origins as a burial mound, through its early medieval reuse as the location for a stone cross with a memorial inscription and through the medieval and modern uses and  reuses of the monument. We also discussed Project Eliseg’s excavations on the site from 2010-12. Afterwards we had an amazing hot pork and apple sauce bap at the Abbey Farm before exploring Valle Crucis.

The Pillar and its mound looked particularly fine in today’s sunshine (yes, sunshine, would you believe it!). More information can be found on the Project Eliseg website and our Youtube video blogs. Inspired by Adrian and his students, I thought this blog might be a useful point to outline, in material terms, some basic information about the Pillar’s complex biography evident on the surface and revealed through our 2010-12 excavations. In the spirit of a genealogy, rather than a biography, I begin with the present and move back into the past.

21st century – Archaeology, Reconstitution and Restrictions

There are plenty of traces of 21st-century activity on the site. Our excavations and the subsequent consolidation by Cadw have altered slightly the shape of the western side of the mound that had previously become worn by footfall.

The wooden-post fence-line around the base of the mound is a construction by Cadw following our first, 2010, season of excavation to guide visitors around to the east side of the monument where there is a small stile allowing access up to the monument. Sadly, upon observation and discussions with visitors, this isn’t visible and many visitors simply don’t approach the monument anymore. Meanwhile, those with disabilities have no effective access to the monument. It was particularly embarassing to learn that an eminent medieval archaeologist couldn’t access the monument in this account.

20th century – Heritage and History

There is no modern heritage presentation of the site, which is one of the reasons why we got permission to dig in 2010-12, to inform subsequent heritage interpretation. Instead, one is left with the starkly antique signboard. I am not sure of its precise date and chronology, so I am happy to be corrected. What is interesting is that, while the sign is largely accurate, it is monolingual. The sign too has a biography however, since the sign below it is later and bilingual. Adrian and the students noted that its position prevents it being seen from the road, meaning that you have to have entered into the field first to read it. This prevents the danger of people stopping their cars in a perilous position to read the sign, but equally it restricts interest and notice from passers-by.

What features on the monument itself are 20th century? Visible before our fieldwork, but now hidden, are the octangonal concrete pillars that mark the edge of the scheduled area with ‘MOW’ on their tops. Meanwhile, the iron fence around the top of the monument mark its protection as an Ancient Monument. These are key material culture of heritage conservation. In addition to this, there are traces of the stone’s consolidation with iron pins and concrete, ensuring it stays in place. Other traces on the monument are not exclusively 20th-century, but are shared by the centuries following its construction – but the acid rain of the 19th and 20th centuries might have caused a large portion of the erosion.

19th century – Tourism and Trees

The trees that were planted on the mound have left subtle traces on the surface. Meanwhile, the foot-fall of the many tourists that visited the monument in the 19th and 20th centuries created a depression on the western side prior to our consolidation. A range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artefacts recovered during excavation reveal the many people visiting the site. Moreover, during excavation it became apparent that the reason the cross-shaft and base sit on a visible drystone base within a saddle is because the original reconstitution of the monument in the 1780s was subject to erosion from visitors and livestock, taking away the soil that had been thrown up around its base and revealing the drystone base that I think was originally intended to be obscured from view.  

18th century – Reconstitution and Rededication

The entire monument, as it appears today, is the product of Trevor Lloyd’s reconstruction. His re-dedication of the monument to himself (very modest of him) is revealed in the Latin inscription on the eastern side. The drystone base upon which he re-positioned the cross-base, and inset into it the cross-shaft fragment, are all his work. He may have done this to make the re-erected monument more visible from the summer lodge he constructed beside the fishponds next to the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey. 

17th century – Absent Presences

There are no exclusive and conclusive traces of seventeenth-century Pillar apart from absenses. The cross-head was presumably still in place when the cross fell down c. 1640 and the remaining reconstituted monument foregrounds its absense. The lack of the legible ninth-century Latin inscription is implied by faint traces, but the seventeenth century saw Edward Lhuwyd transcribing them, thus saving them for modern academic study as discussed in detail by Prof. Nancy Edwards.

The Middle Ages – Naming the Monument

What is particularly frustrating is lack of direct evidence for activity around the cross in the period between its ninth-century construction and the seventeenth century. There was not conclusive evidence of medieval activity from the excavations. Instead, evidence of the veneration held for the cross comes from the place-name itself – ‘the valley of the cross’ by which the Cistercian monastery was known. This is an example where lack of activity might indicate respect rather than neglect. We can imagine monks and travellers passing by the Pillar when its cross was still intact and using it as a station in processions or as a shrine, but no evidence has been left of this.

The Ninth-Century Cross

Only two fragments of the original cross-and-base survive and its text is near illegible. However, the text, circular form of the shaft, and large stone base are a striking and distinctive survival of a monument type better known from among the Mercian rivals of the kings of Powys who erected this monument. Likewise, the cross-shaft, with its swags, has ninth-century paralles from Cumbria and is a distinctive early medieval form.

What is particularly lacking is any evidence from the excavations of ninth-century activity. While post-excavation work might reveal further traces, our dig didn’t reveal conclusive evidence of the site’s use as a settlement, burial ground or anything else for that matter. This isn’t surprising, since identifying any of these activities from archaeological evidence from Western Britain in this period is a huge challenge.

Prehistoric Origins

Finally, at the top of the genealogy is the prehistoric evidence: we have conclusively and convincingly shown that the mound beneath the Pillar was a multi-phased Bronze Age kerbed cairn with at least three secondary cists. Only one of the cits we dug was found to be undisturbed. In this one, the cremated remains of multiple individuals – adult and children – and artefacts (a bone pin and flint scraper) were found. This form of mortuary practice is well attested from North Wales, but this conclusively demonstrates a prehistoric data for the monumental sequence.

Conclusions

Post-excavation work on Project Eliseg is ongoing. Still, this brief sketch of some aspects of the monument’s biography reveal the changing fortunes and perceptions of the mound and Pillar and the practices that enwrap it.

A further point to be made about the cross – from its ninth-centur origins to the present – is a multmedia monument. Text, form and materiality, as well as its location on an ancient mound in a prominent valley terrace location, worked together to construct a monument claiming descent from ancient warleaders and saints. These could collectively and individually legitimate successive elite identities and authorities.

The irony is that the specific commemorative aspirations of this monument by those that commissioned it was unsuccessful. Concenn’s dynasty and kingdom did not survive the Viking Age. And yet this ‘failure’ opened it up to other perceptions and uses down the centuries, securing its persistence as a landmark in the Vale.

This post was originally placed on Howard Williams’ ‘Archaeodeath’ blog.

I have just returned from Norwich. I was attending a project meeting and conducting research linked to the Leverhulme Trust and European Research Council funded ‘The Past in its Place’ project.

The visit included three from Chester – Ruth Nugent, Patricia Murrieta-Flores and myself. We were joined by seven researchers – historians, literary scholars and geographers – from the University of Exeter. As well as the project leader Philip Schwyzer, there was Nicola Whyte, Sarah Hamilton, David Harvey, Naomi Howell and Joanne Parker. Paul Bryant-Quinn is the tenth member of the project.

Norwich Cathedral is one of our case studies for Strand 1 of the project: ‘Speaking with the Dead’ focusing on cathedral tombs and memorials. I had visited before, but I was keen to get back and explore the memorials in all their detail and variability, from medieval effigies to 19th and 20th -century ledgers and mural monuments.

Meanwhile, ‘Norwich and Mousehold Heath’ is one of our case study areas, investigating strand 3 of the project: ‘Topographies of Memory’, looking at landscapes in which memories accrued through literary traditions and cultural practices over the longue duree. One of our areas of interest here is in the commemoration of Kett’s Rebellion in texts and in the landscape.Our activities included:

1. A Project Meeting opened by a formal welcome to Patricia to the project
2. A visit to the Cathedral Library
3. A visit to the Records Office
4. A tour of the historic streets and churches of Norwich
5. A visit to Kett’s Hill and the ruins of St Michael’s church
6. Three separate explorations of the cathedral’s tombs and memorials, the second with the cathedral’s librarians, the third with expert death scholar, Dr Julien Litten, author of The English Way of Death.
7. A visit and exploration around Norwich Castle Museum led by Dr Tim Pestell, early medieval archaeologist and author of Landscapes of Monastic Foundation.

Here are some photos of our adventures.