All Gone

Today was our last day on site at Fairy Holes. It’s been a very productive and quite intense fortnight and we are pleased with the results. However, today our focus was more on tidying up than thinking.

As the photos I took at dinnertime show, by shortly after noon we had all the soil out of the grab-bags and back where it belonged in the various caves. This just left us an enormous quantity of muddy equipment to sort out and trek back down the hill to the farm. Of all the sites we have excavated on the project Fairy Holes has the most difficult access, with lots of very steep and trackless slopes to negotiate before you get to a recognisable path.

Special thanks today have to go to Tony and Carol for their voluntary help on the project, especially today when their hard work saved Sam and I from a very late finish. After an injury and some sterling evacuation work by Daniel on the quad-bike and Pete’s car: Sam, Tony, Carol and I were left as the only hands able to move all this stuff back to the van. Once there we had to get it all as clean as possible and packed away. We were finished by 5.30, which would never have happened without their help.

On Monday I have to start unpacking all the finds and working on the post-excavation analysis. Given all the mud over the last few days quite a lot of things are going to need more cleaning. I have two cleaning products of choice for archaeological equipment. One is the trowel (buckets, shovels and anything else robust enough to stand being scraped clean) and the other is baby wipes (hands, cameras, survey equipment and computers). This is not a fail-safe system. The minibus, for example, doesn’t respond particularly well to either.

We will be back at New Laund in July to do four more weeks of excavation on and around the enclosure site but until then we will continue with weekly updates on the progress of the project.

Rick

Slip sliding away

It drizzled for most of the day today, except for a brief interlude at midday when it chucked it down for about 45 minutes. This made moving from cave to cave a very tricky task indeed. The hillside is steep and muddy and with all the rain the surface dissolved into something about the consistency of chocolate mousse. Everyone fell over, usually when carrying something which needed to be kept clean or dry or both.

Today was really our last chance to get all the recording and drawing of the archaeology completed. We will have to spend most of tomorrow filling in the holes and cleaning equipment. Very wet conditions and lots of recording are not a good combination. It is not so much the physical effects of the wet on what you are writing, 6H pencil on drawing film stays legible underwater and even black biro on paper is fairly robust, but the way that the rain gets in your brain and makes you stupid.

Still, at least we had caves to hide in. I fled furthest from the rain, into the deep part of the cave at the end of Musson’s old excavation, where I was adding to the section drawing to show all the extra material uncovered by Tony and Carol yesterday. Once this was done, I took a column sample of soil through the undisturbed cave deposit so that Martina can hopefully get a sequence of preserved pollen. This is what the section of plastic gutter sticking to the section is for. I have pushed it into the sediment and then excavated around it to leave it standing proud. The next task was to ease my trowel in behind it and lever the sample off as a single block of soil. The gutter protects the soil and keeps it in its original orientation, notice it is usefully marked ‘this way up’. Once it is out of the ground it is wrapped up in many layers of tin foil, cling film and gaffer tape to keep it safe and moist.

Sam was finishing off the drawings in both the east and west caves, so she had the most slopping about between sites to do. This is the east cave. You can see we have removed all of the darker brown upper fill. This has brought us down onto the top of a paler, more silty, layer which we haven’t had time to excavate. This cave also goes much deeper, behind the standing section, so there is the potential for more work here.

The west cave is much smaller. It is really just an enlarged fissure. This photo shows how narrow the base is and also the three successive layers of fill. It is the middle, dark brown,  layer which contained most of the animal bone from this cave.

Nikki and Scott spent all day drawing an 8 metre long cross-section through the excavated entrance to the main cave. This was the biggest drawing job of all. When I took this photograph, just as they were finishing, the rain had finally stopped.

This meant that Pete was also finally able to photograph the area around the new cave. This shows the  limestone bedrock outside the cave. The entrance is under the moss-covered rock-face on the right.

Just as we got in the bus to come home the sun came out.

Rick

Lassie vs. Mrs Tiggywinkle

This all started at dinnertime today. We were sitting on the platform outside the main cave drinking coffee and trying to guess the species of this largish bone Pete had just found on the new cave (wild pig was the favourite) when a roe deer came crashing through the trees at the bottom of the slope.

Shortly after this we realised we were being watched, turned round and found a large blond Alsatian staring into the cave with that tongue hanging out head on one side expression that dogs use to fool you that they are thinking.

Once he had sniffed us all hopefully and wandered around a bit we realised that he was lost. We tried ‘Go home, there’s a good boy!’ in bright and encouraging tones but the only result was that he looked at us as if to say ‘are you my new mummy and daddy?’ Then his mate turned up. His mate was a mouthy Jack Russell and was clearly the boss dog of the pair. Terriers of any kind and small holes are not a good combination. Not wanting to have to spend hours caving after someone else’s dog we encouraged them both to move along. This worked as well as you might expect but they did condescend to do some exploring of the wood around the cave and we were all able to go back to work.

Josh and I were surveying up from the caves to the top of the wood. This was so that we could relate our cave survey to known points on the OS National Grid. I was on my own hammering in wooden pegs for survey points when I realised that Lassie and Jack were back with us. The Alsatian was very excited about something in the undergrowth. I assumed it was a stick until he started running around in circles with a rolled up hedgehog hanging from his mouth. The Jack Russell immediately barged in and stole it from him, before dropping it with a yelp after getting a nose full of prickles. He then demonstrated that learning from experience is not a dog thing by repeatedly returning to the attack, giving me a very good view of what an effective defence hedgehog spines are. Even though the hedgehog was winning I decided that spending all afternoon being hassled by a determined terrier was probably not a good thing. I put on my best alpha dog voice and after about six repetitions of ‘DROP IT!’ they finally got the message and vanished off up the hill in a bit of a sulk.

Elsewhere on site proper work was going on. Vast quantities of mud have been shifted by Tony and Carol who were working by the vertical section at the end of Musson’s excavation. As this photo shows, the centre of the cave floor follows a natural fissure in the limestone and so it is much deeper here. This undisturbed cave fill included some animal bone but no signs of Bronze Age human presence, perhaps not surprisingly at this depth into the cave. All that remains to be done now is to amend our existing drawing of this face to include the extra depth and then to take samples for pollen and other environmental evidence through the depth of the deposit.

The other three caves are also fast reaching the point where all that is left to do is drawing and sampling. This is a good thing, as the dig has to end on Friday. Realistically this leaves us tomorrow for any final excavation and Friday for tidying up and filling in the holes. Tomorrow is likely to be a very busy day.

Rick

Tunnel of Mud

I went to the very end of the main cave today. This is not very far, about 24 metres as the bat flies, but it took me all day. This is because I took the total station in with me to survey the cave and the confined spaces and difficult sight lines made it a very complicated survey job.

This is my triumphant photo at the end of the day of the total station set up just outside the final chamber. I took this standing in the chamber looking at the muddy crawl back towards the entrance. A total station like this is essentially just a traditional theodolite with an on-board computer to process and store measurements. Like any theodolite it measures horizontal and vertical angles. It also uses a light beam to measure distances. By combining these two bits of information, direction and distance, the total station can calculate the position of any point that can be sighted through the telescope.

Of course, to relate those calculations to the site grid the machine needs to have been set up somewhere where it can measure the position of at least two known points. In practice this means that surveying is usually a process of constructing a web of control points all around the object that you are mapping. The more control points you put in, the more reliable your survey should be.

This is where the problems start when surveying a narrow muddy hole like most caves. First of all you have got to get the equipment down the cave with you. Then you have to set it up on its tripod and see if you can see at least two of your existing survey points. You can see the points, good, now can you get your head behind the telescope to take the reading? Once the machine is set up like this you can measure the position of everything that you can see from that place. This is often not very much. Then you need to get past the tripod without knocking it over to hammer in more control points.

These need to be visible from where the total station is currently set up and visible from where you are going to set it up next. This is the big limiting factor in how much of the cave you can do from any one station. Twice today I set up the machine in places where I thought I could see  back to my previous survey and discovered that either the roof was too low to get the equipment level or there was a previously unnoticed bit of cave wall in my line of sight. Other complications are the wet and muddy surface and the lack of light. I was terrified I was going to drop some important bit of kit into the water and lose it forever. Between this, the slippery surface, low roof and desire not to kick the tripod over I ended up moving in a strange slow motion dance with lots of kneeling and pirouettes. Imagine someone doing Tai Chi inside a small pipe while wearing steel toe-capped wellies, waterproofs and a safety helmet and you will get the general idea.

Meanwhile, outside the cave it was apparently quite a nice day. Pete has continued to take the fill out of the new cave he discovered. As you can see from this photo it is getting smaller as he moves back. He has had quite a lot of animal bone out of here but so far no other finds.

Tomorrow we will have a lot more people back on site so we should be able to get on much faster with the remaining digging.

Rick

Head in the clouds

The area weather forecast for today was dry but cloudy. What it didn’t mention was how low the cloud would be. Fairy Holes is only at about 150 m above Ordnance Datum but we spent the afternoon getting very wet indeed inside the clouds. Fortunately the students were all off site today as they had to be at a fieldwork exercise for a different part of their course. There were only six of us on site so we mostly fitted inside our various caves.

The only person who had to be outside all day was Pete, who has been working on the new cave he discovered on Thursday. He has cleaned up a vertical section through the deposits that fill it. This shows that most of the soil in the cave is a greyish brown topsoil which doesn’t seem to be very old. Beneath this layer is a much more orange cave earth. I think this means that this cave is likely to have been visible and accessible to people in the Early Bronze Age when burials were taking place in Fairy Holes cave above it. I’m reasonably optimistic that we will get some prehistoric archaeology in this cave too.

Once it was cleaned and he had drawn this face Pete started to remove the topsoil layer over the area up to 1 metre into the cave. This is a more systematic sounding way of saying ‘as far as he could reach’. So far he has found some animal bone and some small pieces of chert.

Up on the main cave we have had some very welcome help from Tony, Carol and another Pete from Northern Boggarts Caving Club. Pete has been digging in the first chamber of the east cave, while Tony and Carol have been helping to excavate some more of the redeposited backfill from Reginald Musson’s 1946 excavation. They have filled in another missing bit of our story as they have found several pieces of worked chert from about 8 metres into the cave. Musson’s report mentions chert tools in this area of the cave. I think the bits that Tony and Carol have found are some of the waste flakes from the manufacture of those tools.

Sam and I have been digging the same layer but in the area nearer to the entrance. We are finding quite a bit of animal bone in this layer, although by his account Musson found a lot more. This is also the area where Sam found pottery and cremated bone on Friday and she found another bit of cremated bone towards the end of the day today. There are big hollows in the limestone bedrock of the cave floor here. Wishful thought of the day was that maybe the burials were originally at the bottom of these hollows and therefore some of them may have been missed by Musson and still be there for us to find.

We’ll let you know tomorrow.

Rick

I love it when a plan comes together

When we decided to re-excavate Fairy Holes one of the main research questions we wanted to answer was the type of activity that took place here. Musson’s work had given an Early Bronze Age date to the cave and he thought it was probably used for settlement. As other Early Bronze Age caves, for example Fezior Nick up near Settle, seem to be burial sites we had always wondered about this interpretation. Now we are exactly half way through our short excavation we have finds that allow us to come up with a very neat interpretation, pulling together evidence from both our dig and Musson’s work, and answer this question.

Of course, archaeology being what it is, we will almost certainly be revising this theory on Monday in the light of some new finds. This afternoon Sam found this new sherd of prehistoric pottery just inside the entrance to the main cave. She also found the curved bit of bone next to it. The pot sherd is part of the Early Bronze Age Collared Urn which Musson found in 1946. It is in fact a bit of the collar, the thickened bit around the rim of this type of urn. Now I have seen this I think the sherd we had yesterday, which I thought was Beaker, is part of the same Collared Urn. It comes from the narrow curving neck beneath the Collar (see what I mean about archaeological theories being constantly revised).

The bone is interesting as you normally only get this kind of fracture on long bones when they have been cremated. Early Bronze Age burial archaeology was the topic of Sam’s PhD, she has seen an awful lot of Bronze Age cremated bone, and she was convinced that this was part of a cremation burial. Later on this afternoon, very close to where the first bit was found, she found a second small fragment with unmistakable signs of having been cremated.

The area where Sam found the cremated bone and pottery is near the shovel and trowel in the centre of the photo. This is beneath the limestone rubble which we think was what was left of two dry-stone walls recorded by Musson. He wondered if they were the remains of some kind of shelter within the cave. Now that we have found cremated bone here, I think that these walls were part of a dry-stone ‘cist’ which protected the urn and the cremation burial it contained. Similar structures are known from other Early Bronze Age cave burials in Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Everything we have seen so far suggests that, rather than the cave dwellers Musson imagined, Early Bronze Age people used Fairy Holes for burial.

Further into the cave, Anna and Olaf have been cleaning up the vertical section through the cave deposits at the end of Musson’s excavation trench. We have photographed this and they are now working on a measured drawing and interpretation to compare with Musson’s publication of the same section. Once it is completely recorded we will also be taking a sequence of samples for pollen analysis here to link up with the similar series we have taken at all the other sites.

In the west cave Connie and Cate have come down onto an almost completely sterile layer of clay at the base of the section they are digging. This site probably only needs one more day’s work to get out the rest of the deposits and draw the vertical section at the back. Further down the hill, Pete, James and Rob have been exploring the new cave we discovered yesterday. This is still a bit of a work in progress at the moment so I will wait to blog about this until we have dug a bit more and, importantly, we have some nice pictures to look at.

Wildlife of the day was a very relaxed Kestrel sitting on a branch by the road as we drove into work this morning. Apropos of the discussion in the bus on the way home, Jon Pertwee is clearly the best Dr Who, who is this Sylvester McCoy bloke anyway?

Rick

 

Deeper and older

As expected, the shelter we built yesterday did not survive the great storm. As the wind was showing no signs of calming down, we tidied the remains away and decided to work without a roof. Moving from the entrance into the depths of the main cave today felt like re-enacting the long tracking tunnel shot in The Great Escape. Around every corner was someone working on one or another of the processes needed to keep the dig running.

At the cave mouth James and Ant were drawing a plan of the exposed limestone bedrock outside the cave. Behind them, Scott and Chloe plan the rubble layer we think may be the remains of a dry-stone wall across the cave.

About six metres further into the cave Dan and Tom were removing some of the backfill left from the Musson excavations. Further in still was Curtis, you can just see his helmet in the back of this shot, sitting on a mound of backfill from the 1940s excavations.

He was sieving the spoil produced by Anna and Olaf working beyond him as they cleaned up the vertical section at the end of the area excavated by Musson. This, about 16 metres in, is as deep as we plan to go into the cave. Cleaning up the vertical face of the deposits here should allow us to see the whole sequence of sediments in the cave.

We have had lots of animal bone out of all these deposits but we have had two other exciting finds today. This is the first one. It is a sherd of prehistoric pottery from the section that Tom and Dan are digging. Obviously, it needs a bit of a clean, but I am fairly sure that this is a bit of a Beaker. This pottery style belong to the very end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, around 2200-2000 BC. If I am right, this dates the activity in the cave a bit earlier than we previously suspected. Musson only recorded Collared Urn pottery from his dig, which is Early Bronze Age in date but a bit later than Beaker pottery.

This shot of the cave from lower down the hill nicely shows how we came to make the other exciting discovery today. The working area we have is small and crowded and every so often someone turns around incautiously and some inconveniently round bit of kit rolls away and down the slope. Empty buckets are particularly prone to doing this, we seem to have to fetch about four of those back per day. The other day while Pete was down the hill in pursuit of a runaway bucket he saw what he thought was the blocked entrance to another cave. You can just see this in the photo as the brown patch on the near slope.

After a bit more investigation today we think that he was right. At some time in the past there must have been a lower entrance on the same fissure line as Fairy Holes cave but about 50 metres lower down the valley. Tomorrow we are going to have a more systematic look at these deposits and start to see if this cave was used in prehistory too.

Rick

 

The Weathermongers

There has been lots of archaeological progress today in all three caves at Fairy Holes but Olaf and I have spent most of the day taking the project title literally. We have been trying to produce a tarpaulin shelter outside the main cave that will consistently stand up to the winds which have been howling down the Hodder valley. Obviously the main problem is that the rock wall and trees we are trying to fit it all around are inconveniently spaced at irregular intervals. The mark one shelter took us most of the morning. We were just getting the third corner nicely tightened up when a particularly lively gust got under the tarp and all the eyelets ripped out of one edge.

Fortunately we had a spare one. We re-rigged all the ropes and then spent most of the afternoon assembling the shelter number two. It is not exactly the Mound Stand at Lords but it was working when we left today. The wind is blowing at a lively pace this evening so I have no confidence that it will still be intact in the morning. However, all this effort expended had the desired effect. Despite some very threatening clouds, it never actually rained all through the working day. If we have given up in disgust after shelter one collapsed it would have been pouring down within half an hour.

Everyone else has been doing a proper job of work. In the east cave, Sam, Josh and Pete have removed all the external deposits and are now working on taking cave earth out of the first small chamber. So far all they have found is relatively modern looking animal bones.

In the main cave we have removed the looser backfill from the 1940s excavations back to the eight metre mark inside the cave. Generally this has come down on to the bedrock floor of the cave but in one or two places there are surviving traces of a yellowish clay.

This is the undisturbed original sediment and it is just where Dan is measuring on this photo. Further towards the front of the cave, about under Connie’s boots, there is an area of much more broken up limestone. We are getting ready to record this as we think it is the remains of one of the dry-stone walls across the cave that were noted by Musson. There is quite a bit of animal bone from all along this section and outside onto the platform. Ant and James have been cleaning off the deposits out here and found lots of pig bone quite deep down.

Cate and James have also made good progress with the west cave. As they get further down into the cave earth here they are getting more and more animal bone out of this one too. It is still too small to get more than one person in at a time.

We seemed to finish the day in a flurry of context sheets and photography. This means that tomorrow there are a lot of plans to draw of various sections of the caves before we do any more digging. Hopefully it will stay dry and the shelter will keep sheltering.

Rick

 

Eye of toad

As you can see, not everything you discover on an archaeological dig can be put into a finds bag.

Pete was cleaning up the surface outside of the eastern cave this morning and working down to the original bedrock platform when he found this very lively toad. After some photography we released him into the wild.

This, slightly more archaeological, image shows the small round mouth of the eastern cave very well. We have removed the topsoil from the area in front of the cave, without finding any evidence that this one was used in the Bronze Age. Pete, Sam and Josh are now working inside the cave (not all at once, they wouldn’t fit in) to take off layers of the sediments inside and search for prehistoric activity here. So far all the finds here have been relatively modern looking animal bones.

A few very cramped metres to the west is the main cave. Here we have removed most of the backfilled remains of Reginald Musson’s excavations in the 1940s. There are a few patches of what look to be undisturbed cave sediments lurking in the corners which we will remove and examine once we have recorded the cave floor in this area. This photo shows the area outside the main cave and how tight for space everything is. Jim and Tom are setting up the total station to record some finds while everyone else sieves, this all works fine as long as none of the other six people who are still in the cave want to come out.

Further west still Cate and James are still excavating the very small fissure cave we have called the west cave. There is only room for one person at a time in this one, you can just see James’s boots sticking out of he rock as he digs. So far there have been a very few fragments of very eroded bone from this one.

Both the east and west caves are much too small to have ever been used for shelter in the Bronze Age (or at any other time in prehistory). However, lots of other very small fissures and holes are used for a wide range of purposes in the Neolithic and Bronze Age so it is still highly likely that we will find prehistoric objects here similar to the ones Musson found in the main cave.

No toads were harmed during the writing of this post.

Rick

Hi Ho, hi ho

Spring and the start of the digging season seem to have coincided. At the end of last week we were up on New Laund Hill doing various surveys in the middle of a howling Pleistocene tundra. Today was the first day of the two week dig we are doing on Fairy Holes cave. The sun shone, birds twittered, Bambi and Thumper frolicked in the woods and we walked up the track to the caves with our mattocks and shovels like the 25 dwarves.

Long may it last. The forecast for Wednesday and Thursday isn’t great so we need to get the dig moving while the sun is with us. We are re-digging the area of the main cave entrance that was dug in 1946 by Reginald Musson. We have put in a longitudinal section line and are excavating the deposits to the west of the line through  the cave entrance and on to the platform outside. This is the area where Musson found Bronze Age pottery and also the dry stone walling across the cave. So far everything we have found is a bit more recent than that. In particular, you can see the blackened remains of many camp fires in the sediments just in front of Emily. This shot also gives you a good idea of how cramped we are for room on site. Neither the cave or the platform outside are very big and we need to find room for not only us and all our equipment but also all the sieved soil we are removing from the caves. While everyone is digging it is fine but as soon as one person gets up to move a bucket or go and sieve then everyone is inching around each other again.

To the west of the main cave is a very small fissure filled with what seems to be undisturbed cave earth. There is only room for one person and a light in this west cave at once. Cate and Jim are watching the back of James’s feet as he hacks away at the deposits here.

To the east of the main cave is another small cave. This one is much more accessible, Josh has been quite a long way down it already. Here we have set up another 1 metre wide trench that runs across the platform and down into the cave mouth. Again, this seems not to have been excavated before.

While we were all having fun in the woods, Simon has had a few hardy souls working with him on more resistivity survey on the New Laund Enclosure. They got three 30 x 30 metre grids surveyed today. If we can get something similar done tomorrow I should have some nice images of the survey results to post on Wednesday or Thursday.

Wildlife of the day – a heron flew across in front of my minibus on the way up to work this morning.

Rick