Hey Blog! The weekend before last, I was attending an archaeological dig with the Scouts, this time as a Young Leader, and the Saturday before that, I participated in another dig with my Young Archaeologists’ Club, so those are what I’m going to talk about today!
I have, in the past, told you about archaeology, so I will only do a brief recap. Look for previous posts on this subject if you want more. Basically, archaeology is the study of things left by people in the past – THINGS PEOPLE PAST is the general chorus at the beginning of every Scouts dig. Trenches are sections of a site which you carefully dig up by scraping back the soil with the straight edge of your trowel. In your trench you may find finds, which are small, portable discoveries like clay pipes, coins, or pottery shards. You may also find structural evidence, such as walls, post holes, or charcoal from burning. Now on to the digs I did.
The YAC dig was at Castleton again, but not on the same site as last year. We were looking for an early mill, pre-1700s and possibly connected with the mediaeval hospice which was situated a couple of fields away. The geophysical survey shows a filled-in mill-lade, at an odd alignment to the 1700s mill and perfectly aligned to an older building, which the experts guess is both the cottage mentioned in a document where it says a lead-miner family lived and a totally undiscovered mill. The chance it might be connected with the Hospice of Blessed Mary in the Peak is what drew the archaeologists, because it is that site they have been looking for.
The dig was interesting; I found a few small bits of pot and a lot of mud and tree roots. The walls of the supposed mill had already been found, so we didn’t do much in that context, which is why I was digging in the ditch for the mill stream, and then a little bit at the upper end of the building. Our session was only one and a half hours long, so we didn’t get as much as we would have if we had stayed the entire day. Still, the background for the dig was intriguing, and I hope they find their mill over the next couple of weeks the dig is on!
The second dig was only two days long, but I was there for all of it. This dig was at Willersley Scout Campsite, which is slap bang on top of the ruins of a ‘Georgian’ country house. It was demolished in the 1950s; blown up with gelignite – it took them five tries to flatten it completely! And even then, it wasn’t fully successful, as you will hear. A few years after demolition, the Scout Association acquired the site, and it is now a neat, flat, grassy area, perfect for camping on. Few campers realise they are sleeping on top of a Tudor manor house, a Georgian manor house, and possibly an earlier house as well!
The weekend’s activities consisted of Dig, where the trench was; Detecting, where the metal finds were found with a metal detector; Geophys, where you could have a go at “electrocuting the ground” as the scouts called it, to find features under the soil; Finds, where dating and cataloguing went on; and Investigation, where you could research the history of the site. I was helping as a Young Leader with the dig, so I didn’t take part in the other activities, but was talking to the younger ones and telling them what counts as a find and what to do with it (put it in the finds tray if it could be interesting; if it’s a plain old rock, ignore it!).
The dig was amazing. On day one, we found the front wall, and part of the facing slabs. I found a pipe stem – c. 1700s – and was assisting the County Lead Volunteer for Scouts when he found a rare and significant shard of Tudor Green Glaze pot – c. late 1400s. By the end of the day, the doorway was clear, and we could determine by the size of the bricks in the wall that they were all Tudor! It was clear this was more than a Georgian stately home; there must be a Tudor house which had been renovated by the addition of a façade about 300 years after it had originally been built. On day two, we extended the trench and found even more – the slabs around the entrance, where roman-esque pillars would have been added as part of the façade, much more pot (mostly 17- and 1800s, but with a few shards of Midlands Purple Ware from the 16- to 1700s too), a multitude of nails, loads of slate flakes off the roof, and about 50 modern tent pegs from metal detecting across the site!
The last task of the dig was to fill in the trench – but we have agreed that what we found is too much for just a single two-day excavation, and we will have to go back sometime – so we put down a layer of plastic to show where we got to, which will help us start quickly in our next dig.
In all, both sites are interesting, and I hope to return and do some more archaeology very soon, so I’ve got my trowel kept at the ready!
