This is a reblog from Prof. Howard Williams’s Archaeodeath site.

Offa’s Dyke is sixth century, not eighth century?

I rarely post responses to breaking archaeological news, and at first glance this news does not relate to the archaeology of death and memory. However, this morning’s news comes from Clwyd Powys Archaeological Trust and relates to new discoveries regarding a national monument: new radiocarbon dates from Offa’s Dyke. The dates seemingly come from a reliable context: re-deposited turf from underneath the bank. You can read the first press release here and the BBC story here. It is relevant to the Past in its Place project because Offa’s Dyke delineates the eastern end of the Vale of Llangollen study area for Strand 3 of the project.

I aim to show why this has implications not only for understanding the political and military development of Mercia and its Welsh rivals, but also the literary and memory culture of the Welsh border in the Early Middle Ages. Death and memory comes in because these results, if correct, have knock-on implications for understanding the Pillar of Eliseg and its landscape context.

These results come from emergency excavations following the shameful destruction of part of the dyke near Chirk last summer.

Of course, the usual provisos apply: this is only one section of the monument, the radiocarbon dates have yet to be published, and there are inevitable problems in dating any earthwork based on the material it covered over. Still, these results are extremely important: the first to be obtained from the monument despite decades of digging.

The key results published in the press release are that the part of Offa’s Dyke near Chirk might date to the late sixth century, not the late eighth century.

The Rise of Mercia and the Construction of Earthworks

CPAT’s press release challenges convention and that is always fun. This is true not only for our understanding linear earthwork building as a military and political practice in the Early Middle Ages but also our understanding of the development of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia and its relationship with both British and Anglo-Saxon rivals. It also runs counter to a trend: the shorter and more modestly built Wat’s Dyke is now thought to date later than Offa’s Dyke to the early ninth century. If correct, the radiocarbon dates might suggest that the entire earthwork is a late sixth-century construction: a time when Mercia was only coming into the light of history as an aggressive, expansionist military force and political entity in the West Midlands (and so was Mercia the group building the sixth-century dyke? Or, perhaps more likely (and hinted at in the press release), the results open up the possibility that while ‘Offa’s Dyke’ was indeed late eighth century, it had a more complex history of evolution over the two centuries prior to Offa’s reign.

Early Medieval Literary Culture and Memory

Furthermore, these results also have the ramifications for our understanding of the literary and memory culture of the Early Middle Ages , because until now the only real dating evidence for the earthwork has been the ninth-century Life of Alfred the Great by the Welsh monk Asser, ascribing the earthwork to King Offa  who reigned from Chester to London between AD 757-796:

There was in Mercia in fairly recent times a certain vigorous king called Offa, who terrified all the neighbouring kings and provinces around him, and who had a great dyke built between Wales and Mercia from sea to sea (translation by Keynes and Lapidge 1983: 71).

So was Asser wrong? Was he simplifying a complex situation? Or are we simply expecting too much from Asser who was lifting from Gildas anyway? Was Offa really nothing to do with the dyke, or was he simply  the last king of Mercia to extend and effectively use a pre-existing earthwork, making it thus effectively ‘his’? Was Offa simply the best and meanest Mercia king in memory, and perhaps the one with the right ancestral name from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, worthy of association with this earthwork in the context of the later ninth century? Indeed, is Asser recalling a tradition of earthwork-building from the Migration Period Continental Offa – a mythological attribution to a famed earthwork – rather than evidence of the historical deeds of the eighth-century Offa in any case?

The Vale of Llangollen as a Landscape of Contestation

Regardless of whether Asser was wrong or has simply been misunderstood by generations of historians and archaeologists, and regardless of whether the radiocarbon dates apply to the construction of the whole dyke or just the segment near Chirk, there is no question that these results promise to have implications for understanding the Vale of Llangollen in the Early Middle Ages.

For me, this is important because of my on-going collaborative work, as part of Project Eliseg, investigating the early ninth-century monument known as the Pillar of Eliseg, supposedly set up to honour the king of Powys who was a contemporary of Offa: Eliseg.  I have recently discussed the Pillar of Eliseg and its landscape context as part of my other ongoing project: the Past in its Place. If these results are correct, they remind us that this territory was a landscape of contestation far earlier than was previously realised.

It will be interesting to learn how archaeologists and historians respond to this news…

Reposted from Prof. Howard Williams’s Archaeodeath blog, this post explores the Vale of Llangollen in the Early Middle Ages.

The Pillar of Eliseg

I here summarise the paper I presented at this year’s EMWARG conference. I focus on the landscape context of the Pillar of Eliseg, a subject of numerous previous talks and blog entries on the Archaeodeath site.

Introduction

Stone monuments of the Early Middle Ages are profitably considered as an important commemorative medium. They were more than stores of social and religious memories for early medieval individuals and communities through their carving and placement. They also constituted memories through the stone’s provenance, translation, installation and subsequent ongoing and shifting contexts of use and reuse. In these intertwined fashions, stone monuments were key components of early medieval memory work. We might regard them less as repositories of memories, but as technologies of remembrance that enchained people through practices to particular visions of past, present and future. This approach foregrounds early medieval stone monuments as components in what Paul Connerton helpfully refers to as inscribing practices – acts of inscription and collective ritual – and incorporating practices – including embodied and habitual actions of engagement.

Integral to this approach to early medieval stone monuments are three themes: materiality, biography and landscape.

1. Materiality: Recent work has revised and overhauled our perspectives on the commemorative materialities of stone monuments. Readings of the form, imagery, ornament and text inscribed on stone have increasingly been situated in relation to interpretations of other material dimensions including stone provenance, mass, texture, colour and patina. The deliberate allusions and interplay between commemorative media – skeuomorphism – is also a key focus of enquiry.
2. Biographies: Over the last two decades in particular, work has increasingly engaged with the biographies of monuments. This work regards stone monuments less as commemorative ‘moments’, but as unfolding projects looking back to their sites of extraction and production and forward to their use, reuse and relocation).
3. Landscape: The third element is the principal focus of this paper. Over the last decade in particular, there has been a more careful consideration of the spatial settings and relationships between stones within sites and locales, and their wider landscape situation. Hampered by difficulties of locating contexts for many stones, for those in situ or with possible and probably contexts, attention has been drawn to the reuse of prehistoric and Roman stones and the reuse of prehistoric and Roman sites as settings for monuments. Furthermore, relationships with routes, boundaries, settlements, religious sites (chapels, shrines, holy wells) and burial sites as well as the relationship with topography, vegetation and view-sheds have received increasing consideration.

These themes are the focus of a forthcoming book project that I am co-editing.

The Pillar of Eliseg

As a case study in approaching early medieval sculpture as memory work in which each of these three themes are pertinent, I wish to explore recent work on the Pillar of Eliseg near Valle Crucis Abbey, Llangollen, Denbighshire, also known as Llandysilio Yn Iâl 1 (SJ 2027 4452) (Edwards 2013: 322-336). Situated to the western side of the Nant Eglwyseg, this striking and unique-for-Wales monument is dated through the text upon it, to between AD 808 and around 854/55. Raised by the ruler of Powys, Cyngen ap Cadell, its lengthy Latin inscription honours his great-grandfather Elise ap Gwylog and his military victories against the English (presumably the Mercians during the last years of the reign of King Aethelbald and the early years of the reign of King Offa) and the subsequent recovery of Powys, possibly around AD 757 (Charles-Edwards 2013: 417). It might be the case, but not proven because of the partial survival of the text when transcribed in the 17^th century by Edward Lhuwyd, that Cyngen ap Cadell himself made a similar, parallel recovery at the beginning of his kingship following subsequent Mercian incursions early in his reign by Cenwulf (Charles-Edwards 2013: 418-19). If so, the Pillar might be regarded a victory monument that juxtaposes, compares and celebrates together the restorative military endeavours of multiple generations of the rulers of Powys.

The Pillar’s text, form and materiality worked together. In her 2009 Antiquaries Journal article, and subsequently in her 2013 Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales, Professor Nancy Edwards presents a reinterpretation of the text as political propaganda. She also considers how the material form of the script – Latin half-uncial – makes sense in the context of a land charter. Its performative nature is explicit in the text: it was to be read out loud. Furthermore, the cylindrical form of the shaft may have evoked Roman triumphal columns and its location on a far-older mound were key to the text’s commemorative message linking imagined pasts to the present, honouring the legendary forebears, immediate ancestry and current household of the rulers of Powys. Presenting a contrasting history of the origins of Powys to the Historia Brittonum descending from a positively viewed Vortigern, married to the daughter of Maximus, the cross reveals the competitive, conflicting and temporal manipulations possible in ninth-century genealogies and origin myths (Charles-Edwards 2013: 449-50).

Together, these disparate multi-media commemorative monument projected Cyngen and Confarch’s aspirations to lordship and military might forward into the future together with their hopes of eternal salvation. Edwards suggests that the monument may have served as an assembly place and possibly served, or was intended to serve, as a site of royal inauguration. Furthermore, through her detailed attention to the monument’s life-history, Edwards not only reveals the origins of the cross, but also shows its persistent presence in the landscape over eleven hundred years. I have previously regarded this as the creation of a cyclical transtemporality through text and context, concerned as much with projecting an aspired future as recollecting a distant past (Williams 2011).

Project Eliseg

The materiality and biography of the Pillar of Eliseg have been revealed further still through the ongoing research of Project Eliseg (Edwards et al. 2010; Edwards et al. 2012). This collaborative fieldwork project between the universities of Bangor and Chester and supported by Llangollen Museum and Cadw has received generous support from a number of funding sources, including the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Prehistoric Society, the Cambrian Archaeological Association, the Aberystwyth and Bangor Universities’ Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies University of Wales, Bangor University, University of Chester and Cadw. Co-directed by Dai Morgan Evans, Gary Robinson, Nancy Edwards and myself, we have attempted to enhance and extend our understanding of the commemorative programme of the Pillar of Eliseg. Three seasons of work on and around the mound took place in the summers of 2010, 2011 and 2012 (http://projecteliseg.org/).

I have discussed the project in many previous blogs such as here. Our fieldwork was restricted by working on a scheduled site, excavating only a small sample in the area deemed most disturbed. It is evident that the monument as a whole has been heavily disturbed through barrow-digging, vegetation, animals and human visitors, and retains the important restriction of having on top of it a very heavy re-arrangement of fragments of a ninth-century cross. Still, our project has seen moderate successes, although post-excavation work is ongoing and results and interpretations presented below remain interim.

Following on from a geophysical survey conducted by Alex Turner and Sarah Semple, the 2010 season examined without result a concentration of geophysical anomalies in the field to the north of the mound. We also stripped areas of the mound to reveal its surface appearance beneath the turf. In 2011, we began excavating into the mound on its western side, revealing multiple stages to its construction and revealing burial cists. In 2012, we returned to complete our work, excavating three burial cists – one proving to be undisturbed and packed with cremated human remains of at least 8 individuals. We also completed our field recording, as well as conducting a detailed topographical survey of the mound and its environs.

Materiality and Biography

In terms of biography and materiality, we await final confirmation from radiocarbon dating, we have found conclusive artefactual, monumental and stratigraphic evidence that suggests that the mound was originally a kerbed cairn of Early Bronze Age date. It was subject to a sequence of secondary burials and structural augmentation over an as-yet unspecified duration. Unfortunately, we found no conclusive evidence of early medieval reuse of the mound, although the largest cist, empty when excavated, could have originally contained a burial of any date from the Bronze Age to the Early Middle Ages.

Still, the composition and character of the mound helps us understand how the mound was perceived in the Early Middle Ages and selected as a site for raising a striking royal stone cross upon it. What became clear during excavation was that the superficial location of the secondary cists we discovered. We know that, by the ninth century, there was a long tradition of burial associated with ancient monuments in the Welsh landscape. Moreover, monuments were becoming mythologised, evidenced by broadly contemporary sources such as the Stanzas of the Graves (Petts 2007; Edwards 2009). Yet the superficial position of the cists prompts to imagine it was extremely likely that anyone encountering and superficially digging into the mound in the Early Middle Ages would have uncovered comparable secondary cists, if not these very ones (given that two out of three were disturbed). Indeed, digging need not have been necessary: cists may have eroded out and been exposed upon surface inspection, then as now, especially on the steep southern side. Therefore, while there are no surviving folkore and legends associated with the mound, this evidence  hints that the mound would have been understood to be a funerary monument: in ‘theory speak’, the Bronze Age cists had an agency, encouraging the mound’s reuse in future generations, if not the specific character of its reuse.

The balance of evidence suggests that this was a long-abandoned prehistoric monument reactivated through use as a cross, but by individuals conscious that the mound was an ancient burial monument. Still, there is an account of excavations in the 1780s, prior to the re-erection of the Pillar, describing the discovery in the centre of the mound of a stone box containing a skeleton box with a silver disc. Edwards (2009; 2013) makes clear her view that a Bronze Age burial mound is an unlikely context for an eighth-century high-status burial. Certainly our excavations did not, and could not, secure a view on this matter either way: we had no permission to remove the heavy stone sculpture to investigate what lay beneath the centre of the mound. Still, given:

1. the possibility that mounds continued to attract burials away from church settings across early medieval Britain long after Christian conversion (bearing in mind how difficult it is to date the end-date of many early Christian cemeteries excavated in North Wales: see Longley 2009).
2. that we cannot be sure that the mound was not part of a Christian church focusing on the site that was to later attract a Cistercian foundation (bearing in mind that early  Christian church sites might have multiple burial foci, some focusing on anceitn mounds, as at Repton, North Yorkshire, Hall and Whyman 1996).
3. given that while most early medieval burials in Wales are findless, if accurately reported, a ‘silver disc’ could refer to all manner of artefacts – coins, disc brooches – that can occasionally, if rarely, be found in early medieval graves of the later seventh and early eighth centuries.

In the light of these points, we still shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the cross was part of a longer series of early medieval activities on the site, including its eighth-century reuse as a burial monument to honour Elise or other members of the ruling dynasty of Powys. Either way, we have demonstrated that the choice of site mobilised links to the ancient past, a mythologizing of place that mirrors the text and form of the monument (Petts 2007, 166; Edwards 2009, 149-51; 2013).

Our excavations also revealed traces of post-medieval activity on the mound, antiquarian disturbance and further indications regarding how the fragments were re-erected over the mound in the late eighteenth century, so the longer biography of the monument has been informed by our fieldwork.

The Topography of Memory

Nancy Edwards has explored varied dimensions to the landscape contexts of early medieval stone sculpture (Edwards 2001a and b; 2007). Yet both Edwards’ research and the fieldwork by Project Eliseg have been both focused upon the mound rather than the wider landscape (Edwards 2009; 2013). Hence, much remains to be explored regarding the wider early medieval landscape in which this striking commemorative cross was situated. How was the location integral to the commemorative project of the monument in the ninth century? Here, I would advocate that we need to think about the location from a multi-scalar perspective, thinking first about the immediate environs, then the wider Vale of Llangollen.

My working hypothesis is that, as I have argued previously, crosses like this need to be regarded as pivots within early medieval topographies of remembrance, located spatially and conceptually at the intersection between secular elites and sacred commemorative traditions focusing on churches (Williams 2006, 192). I have outlined some tentative suggestions regarding how the monument may have operated as a commemorative landmark informed by previous research and a sense of the topography surrounding the site today (Williams 2011). This year brings the opportunity to test these ideas further, as part of the interdisciplinary Past in its Place project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the European Research Council, I am working with Drs Patricia Murrieta-Flores (University of Chester) together with other project researchers to explore further the topographies of memory revealed in archaeological, historical and literary sources from the eastern part of the Vale of Llangollen. In the context of this ongoing research, I want to outline some tentative observations regarding the landscape context of the Pillar of Eliseg.

Place and Performance

Topography, metal-detector finds and aerial photographs combine to support and extend Edwards’ 2009 suggestion that the Pillar of Eliseg was one node in a assembly or central place. The site may have operated as a theatre for large gatherings and there are hints that high-status settlement and/or other ceremonial spaces were located in its proximity

Movement and Memory

I presented a series of strands of evidence to suggest the key relationship between movement through the landscape and the location of the Pillar as a mnemonic landmark. I argued that the Pillar was located in a topographical bottle-neck and a zone of movement in and out of the Vale. I also put forward the suggestion that the movement of the stone to the site was also a ‘translation’ that was memorable. Together, movement and memory were intertwined in making the monument’s text, form and materiality effective as a commemorative medium.

Sacred and Military Landscapes

I reviewed the latest evidence regarding what we know about the sacred and political geography of the Vale of Llangollen, a subject for which far more work is required. I suggested that the Pillar was located at a defensible location as well as an accessible one and related to both secular and religious networks of places and routes. The cult site of St Collen (Silvester and Evans 2009), the well of St Collen and a possible church site beneath the later abbey were discussed. Whilst hillforts are dated in the region to the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (e.g. Grant 2010), I explored the possibility that many were reused in the Early Middle Ages for a range of functions, providing a further settlement context for the Pillar. I also argued that the relationship with the near-contemporary early ninth-century Wat’s Dyke needs further attention and interpretation (Malim and Hayes 2008), and possibly also to short-dykes of unknown date (Silvester and Hankinson 2002), alongside established discussions of the Pillar in relation to Offa’s Dyke (Hill 2000).

Conclusion

Project Eliseg has been very much about breaking into the monument – using archaeology to investigate the mound’s biography and materiality. I have previously referred to this as the Pillar of Eliseg’s prison break. In this paper, I presented the flip-side, because the archaeological work as part of the Past in its Place project is very much about breaking out, resituating the Pillar within a series of landscapes. This is a multi-scalar approach to understanding how the monument may have operated and functioned in the early medieval landscape and subsequently through the Middle Ages to the present day with regards to topographies of memory.

References

Charles-Edwards, T. 2013. Wales and the Britons 300-1064, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Edwards, N. 2001a. Monuments in a landscape: The early medieval sculpture of St David’s, in H. Hamerow & A. MacGregor (eds) Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain, Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 53-77.

Edwards, N. 2001b. Early medieval inscribed stones and stone sculpture in Wales: context and function, Medieval Archaeology 45: 15-39.

Edwards, N. 2007. A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales. Volume II, South-West Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Edwards, N. 2009. Rethinking the Pillar of Eliseg, The Antiquaries Journal 89: 143-77.

Edwards, N. 2013. A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales. Volume III, North Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press

Edwards, N., Robinson, G., Williams, H. and Evans, D.M. 2010. The Pillar of Eliseg, Llantysilio, incomplete inscribed cross and cairn, SJ 2027 4452. NPRN 101160; 101161, Archaeology in Wales 50: 57-59.

Edwards, N., Robinson, G. and Williams, H. 2012. Project Eliseg: Preliminary Report Prepared for Cadw, December 2012. Unpublished Report.

Grant, I. 2010. Moel y Gaer hillfort, Llantysilio, Denbighshire, Archaeological Excavation. CPAT Report No. 1059.

Griffiths, D. 2006. Maen Achwyfan and the context of Viking settlement in north-east Wales, Archaeologia Cambrensis 155: 143-62.

Hill, D. 2000. Offa’s Dyke: pattern and purpose, Antiquaries Journal 80, 195-206.

Longley, D. 2009. Early medieval burial in Wales, in . Identifying the mother churches of North-East Wales, in N. Edwards (ed.) The Archaeology of the Early Medieval Celtic Churches, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 29. Leeds: Maney, pp. 21-40.

Malim, T. and Hayes, L. 2008. The date and nature of Wat’s Dyke: a reassessment in the light of recent investigations at Gobowen, Shropshire, in S. Crawford and H. Hamerow (eds) Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 15, Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, pp. 147-79.

Petts, D. 2007. De Situ Brecheniauc and Englunion y Beddau: Writing about burial in early medieval Wales, in S. Semple & H. Williams (eds) Early Medieval Mortuary Practices, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 14, Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, pp. 163-172.

Silvester, R. J. and Hankinson, R. 2002. The Short Dykes of Mid and North-East Wales. March 2002. Welshpool: Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust.

Silvester, R. & Evans, J.W. 2009. Identifying the mother churches of North-East Wales, in N. Edwards (ed.) The Archaeology of the Early Medieval Celtic Churches, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 29. Leeds: Maney, pp. 21-40.

Williams, H. 2006. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, H. 2011. Remembering elites: early medieval stone crosses as commemorative technologies, L. Boye et al. (eds) Arkæologi i Slesvig/Archäologie in Schleswig. Sonderband ‘Det 61. Internationale Sachsensymposion 2010’ Haderslev, Denmark, 13-32, Neumünster: Wachholtz

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.