Watercress beds - Letcombe Bassett

Nice piece of rural industrial archaeology here- the watercress beds at Letcombe Bassett. Fallen out of use now, but the concrete blocks forming the beds and leats are still visible on the Letcombe Brook between Letcombe Bassett and Letcombe Regis. Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) is a native herb and grows in on cold, running water. In the 19^th century there was quite a trade in it, with many growers in the south of England sending it up to Covent Garden where it was sold. Elsewhere in Oxfordshire, there were important beds at Ewelme – there were also beds on the down edge at Ramsbury in Wiltshire  The chalk stream at Letcombe was also used for growing cress. I can’t find out much about the chronology of the watercress growing in the village- the beds seem to be shown on the 1^st Edition OS map, but are not marked as such. The beds are clearly labelled though from the 1870s. The use of concrete for bunds and channels which can still be seen presumably indicates a phase of 20^th century investment. It was still active into the 1970s and several newspaper reports from the time write about the threat posed by the drought of 1976, and I think the beds were still being worked until the 1980s? 

Notes from the field: Letcombe Bassett

Over Christmas I got a chance to go out for a short walk with my wife and the nippers up at Letcombe Bassett, a village I’d not been to before. It has got a lovely little church and some good solid box-frame late medieval box-frame houses (which I'm planning to blog about another time).  However, what caught my eye as we headed up the hill following a footpath past the church was a series of earthworks to the south of the church. The trusty OS 1:10 000 map did not show the actual features and it wasn't clear whether the ‘Old Quarry’ label referred to that area or other adjacent lumps and bumps.

Later on I chased up the earlier OS maps, and nothing is shown even on the 19^th century First Edition map, although it was clear that the church and the earthwork sat together in a larger roughly rectangular enclosure defined by field boundaries and the edge of the churchyard. Pleasingly, with the recent freely available access to Lidar data I was able to get a better sense of the shape of the earthworks I saw. The lidar plot showed a roughly square embanked enclosure approximately the same width as the churchyard.

Stupidly it was only at this point that I thought of checking the Historic Environment Record (doh!), which indeed flagged up these earthworks describing them as an enclosure and house platforms of probable medieval date. I’d suggest that we can go a little further than that- the distinct smaller embanked enclosure and its juxtaposition immediately next to the church at the top of the village make it more likely that we are looking at the site of the manor.  The manor of Letcombe Bassett went through various hands in the medieval period, and ended up in the hands of Queen’s College (Oxford University) in the mid-16^th century. I've not had a chance to do much research, but there is a College Farm in the village. I'm guessing that as an absentee landlord, the College no longer required a manor house, and the Letcombe estates were farmed from College Farm. This would give the 16^th century as a possible point at which the putative manorial enclosure fell out of use. 

Downs and Vale: Landscape archaeology and boundaries

Lidar image of Segsbury hillfort 

Whilst rifling through the piles of British Archaeological Reports in the library the other day I came across Paula Levick's recent Later Prehistoric and Roman Landscapes on the Berkshire Downs (2015). I had to have a peek as I've long flirted with the archaeology of the Downs. When I did my Masters many moons ago I did a long essay on Iron Age/Roman field systems on the Berkshire Downs, and my first ever conference paper (Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference – Reading -1995) was a critique of Vince Gaffney and Martin Tingle's Maddle Farm Survey (the realisation that Vince was sitting in the front row did nothing for my first night nerves...). I'd spent time digging with Oxford Archaeology on the Neolithic/Bronze Age site at Tower Hill and been tangentially involved with a project at Beedon as well.

However, I hadn't really kept up to date with scholarship on the area since then late 1990s - and there has been a lot, particularly with Gary Lock's Hillforts of the Ridgeway project. The discovery of Levick's volume gave me a serendipitous opportunity to catch up. This blog entry though isn't so much about the work itself, rather an opportunity to ponder more generally about how this kind of big landscape archaeology is framed, with particular reference to the neighbouring Vale of the White Horse.

The report is based on Levick's PhD carried out in the Dept. of Continuing Education at Oxford, and is a good, thorough analysis of the Iron Age and Roman landscapes of an area of the central Downs, which includes the substantial univallate hillfort at Segsbury. She uses the immensely detailed cropmark dataset generated by English Heritage's Lambourn Down Mapping Project, which she supplements with Lidar data, geophysical survey, the traditional historic mapping resources (tithe maps/enclosure maps etc), as well as some interesting work integrating the results of metal detecting surveys carried out with the support and oversight of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The results are a thoughtful reanalysis of the conventional LBA-RB chronology of the area, suggesting that some areas were not as empty in the BA as previously thought.

However, reading it, as someone who now situates themselves as medievalist rather than a Romanist, and someone with an interest in Vale I became increasingly aware of the incredible influence of chronological and geographic boundaries on the way these kind of landscape studies are carried out.

My first qualm is with physical edges. This work and the Maddle Farm survey both focus on the chalk uplands with very little engagement with the neighbouring Vale. There are perfectly good reasons for this- the research agenda of the MVS was to look at the hinterland of a Roman villa situated within the Downs. In the case of Levick, the key dataset was the cropmark survey – cropmarks are far better defined on the chalk downs than they are on the greensands at the Vale-Downs interface. This inevitably means that the focus of this kind of landscape study is on the area with the greatest data, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. PhD theses have to be pragmatic about defining their datasets and study regions.

Yet, the one thing we know about the use of the Downs in the medieval and post-medieval period is that administrative units and agricultural regimes crossed the topographic boundaries between Downland and Vale (between chalk and cheese). The parish boundaries of the villages along the northern scarp all extend from the greensands up to the top of the Downs – and had complex patterns of arable and pasture, with the ploughing up of much of the downland only happening relatively recently. I don't think there is any a priori reason to assume that these kinds of relationships did not exist in deeper antiquity. But by focussing in on specific topographic regions (however understandable) we miss the chance to draw out this crucial relationship. Inevitably, the different topography has meant that the archaeological record itself varies significantly, both due to differences in land-use and agriculture in the past, different geologies and environmental processes (e.g. colluvium build up etc), as well as the different impact of medieval/post-medieval post-depositional processes. To some extent, the Vale of the White Horse survey, Martin Tingle's follow-up to the Maddle Farm Survey attempted to address this issue, but there was no real integration of the two data sets.

A second implicit boundary in so much landscape work is that formed by the Romans. For many archaeologists (and I include some work I've done myself), the 1^st to 4^th century is a conceptual 'fold' in the landscape palimpsest. Many studies run from the Neolithic through to the Roman period, and others take the early medieval period as their point of departure. Although there are honourable exceptions (e.g. Peter Fowler's West Overton work and Chris Gerrard and Mick Aston's Shapwick project spring to mind, as well as Steve Rippon's Fields of Britain project) there are all too few attempts to take the longue durée approach and follow through the long-term narrative presented by the landscape. There is seemingly an underlying assumption that the arrival of the open-field systems of the central province in the later Anglo-Saxon period creates a profound point of rupture, with an erasure of earlier field systems so thorough that there is a de facto blank slate. This is a pretty major assumption (as the Fields of Britain project has outlined), but even if it was true, it begs the question, what field systems and settlement patterns were being used in the early to mid-Anglo-Saxon period? If there is continuity and development from IA to RB, why should there not be similar continuity from RB-AS? And crucially, can we recognise this in the field archaeology? Of course, there are methodological problems; as with topographic boundaries, the archaeological footprint varies- most noticeably in the massive decline in datable pottery, the chronological marker most used for analysing field walking survey and excavation work. But with the growth of OSL techniques, we should (in theory at least) be able to move beyond this limitation. There are also other data sources available, most strikingly AS charter boundaries (of which there are some good examples from this part of Berkshire). As Paula Levick has also shown there is also some potential from drawing on PAS data.

There is surely the potential for a more integrated approach to looking at the landscape of the Down and the Vale, one that tries to cross these chronological and topographic boundaries. It would be a challenge bringing together the diverse data sets, but that is half of the fun of archaeology.

More on mumming plays

I've blogged previously on mumming plays - both on this blog (see here) and on another blog I run (see here and here). This entry is following up on this and building on some wider work I'm doing on the distribution of mumming plays. The image below shows a map of the sites of recorded mumming plays within the Vale of the White Horse and its immediate hinterland. Data taken from English Ritual Drama (1967) Cawte, Helm and Peacock

Walls

Wantage Tar Barrels

There are quite a few places in England which have traditions of parading lit tar barrels around the town/village, as part of the celebrations of New Year (e.g. Allendale) or Guy Fawkes Night (Ottery St Mary; Hatherleigh). In the past this practice seems to have been quite wide spread, but has largely disappeared. It turns out that Wantage also had this tradition in the 19^th century.  According to Kathleen Philip’s splendid little book Victorian Wantage in the weeks before Guy Fawkes night, the local youth acquired big barrels from the old gasworks, rammed them full of anything that would burn and then on the night itself, lit them and rolled them around town – one group started in Newbury Street, another in Mill Street and they all met in the Square. She refers to the barrels and effigies being hurled around the statue of Alfred – this was erected in 1877, which give some chronological peg to hook this on to. Philip says that she found no written record of this tradition, but heard about solely via local informants – presumably in the 1960s. The 1822 Wantage Improvement Act explicitly forbade making  ‘any bonfire or burn any effigy or throw or let off any cracket, squib, rocket, fireball or any other firework’, which suggests that similar practices were known far earlier in the 19^th century.

It’s worth having a look at the section on Ottery St Mary in Steve Roud’s excellent book The English Year for more on the background of this wider tradition.

NB: the image is not of Wantage - it's from the Ottery St Mary celebrations

Wayland's Smithy

Hoping to be a little more on top of the blog this year so here goes with the first post of 2014. We return to the scarp slope of the Downs again, this time for a quick look at some recent blog postings by other people, about Wayland’s Smithy, the splendid Severn Cotswold long barrow that stands a couple of miles east along the Ridgeway from the White House. Unlike so many Neolithic barrows in the south, it stands more or less complete (or at least more or less completely restored), with easy access into the burial chambers. However, unlike West Kennet long barrow near Avebury, which commands clear views in all directions, Wayland’s Smithy is tucked up by a shelter belt of trees, limiting views from the barrow in most directions (although I remember once twilight visit in the middle of winter when the icy lights of Swindon could be seen glittering down in the vale). The trees also hide the barrow from the surrounding landscape, and it’s not really possible to see the barrow until the last minute if one approaches from the Ridgeway. Either way, the trees give the site a deceptively secluded feeling that belies its hilltop location. Although the 1st Edition OS map shows that the barrow itself was covered in trees in the mid – 19th century, the present shelter belt appears to have been planted at some point after 1910. Photos of the Smithy taken in 1916 by William Taunt and available on the EH Viewfinder website, show the site as it was before this tree planting and the 1960s excavation and subsequent conservation by RJC Atkinson and Vale native Stuart Piggott.

Pleasingly, Wayland’s Smithy has been featured in a number of recent blog posts. Digital Digging provides a good, basic overview of the site and its archaeology (), whilst the Landscapism Blog provides a more impressionistic perspective of the Smithy and the nearby White Horse. Finally, Dan Hicks has provided a short post on a model of Wayland’s Smithy made in the 1860s.