Issue 100
May / June 2008
Contents
There is more content online than usual for this bumper issue!
news
Early Scottish gardens unturfed
Kent Anglo-Saxon cemetery could be royal
Poetry to assist transfer of Hadrian's Wall collection
features
John Wymer
Mike Pitts introduces an archaeologist with a fine eye for illustration
The Lost Royal Cult Of Street House, Yorkshire
The excavation of a unique Anglo-Saxon cult cemetery
Born digital: Making People Believe
How computers have changed the world of archaeology
The Office: Heritage and Archaeology at Fortress House
John Schofield finds unexpected things on Savile Row
Green Men & The Way of All Flesh
Richard Hayman uproots a fashionable myth
on the web
Recommended websites
Caroline Wickham-Jones considers archaeological imagery, and The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland has a new website
100 letters & news
Some of the letters we received and news stories we revealed in the past 100 issues
CBA correspondent
Campaigns, comment and communications from the CBA
Communication is king, says Mike Heyworth, celebrating nearly 60 years of magazines
Extra online content
science
Sebastian Payne asks, what do forensic archaeologists do?
Mick's travels & more travels
Mick Aston looks for early saints in Cornwall, and an introduction to visiting Cornwall's sites & monuments
my archaeology
Phil Harding, the man with five guitars
ISSN 1357-4442
Editor Mike Pitts
Mick's travels
In Search of Cornish Relics
Filming recently with Time Team in central Cornwall, Mick Aston wondered about the many towns and villages named after early Christian saints. He set out to see what he could learn about them.
Anyone who visits Cornwall cannot fail to be struck by the number of places named after saints – there seem to be hundreds of them, but few are the "normal" saints we come across elsewhere in the country (I am thinking of St Mary, St Peter, St Martin and so on). A little superficial research leads us to see these saints as "Celtic", and associated with remote times between the Roman period and the middle ages. But what do we really know about them? Is there any reliable history? And what archaeological traces have they left behind?
In the last half century, following the pioneering work of the Cornish historian Charles Henderson, a group of scholars have laid the foundations for a much better understanding of this period. They include Charles Thomas (on numerous aspects), Lynette Olson (on early monasteries), Elizabeth Okasha (on inscribed memorial stones) and Oliver Padel (on place-names).
I used to visit Cornwall a lot – I spent my formative teenage years walking all over western Cornwall visiting field monuments, making sketch plans and producing drawings of inscribed memorial stones and crosses. So it was a pleasure to return there in October 2007 when Time Team filmed a programme near Padstow.
In the middle ages men and women considered holy and saintly, were retained after death in shrines in various churches. Their relics, whether their bones, or items and objects associated with them, would be kept in reliquaries; these and the shrines that contained them would be visited by the pious and pilgrims who hoped that the saint would intervene in their lives and perform miracles. So how can we find out about the saints in Cornwall?
Lives of saints, written to commemorate their deeds, can be notoriously unreliable and formulaic works, unless they are compiled near to the lifetime of the saint in question. The Life of St Samson, who travelled from south Wales, probably Llaniltud Vawr (now Llantwit Major), across Cornwall to Brittany (where he founded the cathedral and monastery at Dol, probably in the sixth century), contains numerous details which can still be traced in the landscape. He is said to have evicted a destructive serpent or dragon froma cave: Lynette Olson suggests the cleft in the river cliff near Golant, though when I visited it looked like a mine adit.
An early monastery, called Docco, already existed in the sixth century at St Kew near Wadebridge. A monk there, Juniarus (one of the earliest ever named monks in Britain), came out to greet Samson. But he was not allowed in, as the Docco monks had fallen away from their previous way of life – "we come short of our former practice".
What on earth did a decayed British (or "Celtic") monastery in Cornwall look like in the sixth century, and when indeed had it been founded? At St Kew today there is a fine late medieval church with a big cross standing in a circular churchyard, probably the original "lan" or cemetery enclosure. Inside is an early inscribed memorial stone with ogham (an early Irish alphabet of straight marks usually cut across the corner of a stone) and the name IUSTI.
Samson clearly used the transpeninsular route of the Camel estuary and the river Fowey, via Bodmin, to cross Cornwall from Wales to Brittany without having to risk the dangerous passage around Land's End and the Lizard. Not long afterwards, St Petroc, arguably the patron saint of Cornwall, did the same. He established, or took over, a monastery at Padstow (Petroc's "stow" or holy place) before moving on to Bodmin (a name which was thought to mean "home of the monks") where the hermit Guron gave him his hermitage to found another monastery.
At Padstow the site of the monastery is marked by the parish church, and excavations nearby have located the cemetery with rows of burials with radiocarbon dates in the seventh to ninth centuries. At Bodmin, the site of the early hermitage is marked by a spring and well-head, and the parish church still has the 12th century ivory clad casket (a reliquary, in fact) which probably held St Petroc's bones. This is a rare object, not just in Cornwall but in the rest of Britain. It can be visited on some days in the summer when the church is open. Bodmin also had a ninth century gospel book, another rarity, which is now in the British Library.
As well as these examples there were early monasteries elsewhere in Cornwall. St Piran had a site somewhere in the sand dunes north of Perranporth. Years ago, I visited the concrete bunker put up to protect the remains of St Piran's oratory – an early church site subsequently overwhelmed by sand. This has now been reburied to conserve it, but there have been plans to dig it out again. Nearby a replacement church with an early cross has recently been re-excavated.This church too was abandoned, and the parish church for the area is now at Perranzabuloe, built in 1841, a little to the south of Perranporth.
From the air, one of the clearest early monastery sites is St Buryan near Land's End. Here the medieval church, with a fine early cross, sits in a circular enclosure, with other concentric boundaries beyond, rather like the plans of early Irish monastic sites. St Buryan was a female saint about whom little is known. There were other early medieval monasteries in Cornwall at Crantock, Launceston, St Neot, St Germans, Probus and Constantine.
Near the Lizard peninsula a whole area of country may have belonged to several religious communities. Meneage, commonly attached to church and settlement names (St Martin in Meneage, etc), seems to mean "sanctuary", "monkish" or "monk's land". In the middle is the early monastery site of St Keverne with a fine late medieval church.
Since Lynette Olson's research (her book was published in 1989: see end note) several other likely early monasteries have been suggested.
At Lanteglos by Fowey, a grant of land in 924–939 in the reign of king Athelstan, by Maenchi a Cornishman to Heldenas, suggests an unknown monastery with a local Cornish saint St Hyldren or Heldeno. The site is probably marked by a fine church in a narrow valley outside the port of Fowey, just off the estuary.
At Phillack, near Hayle, between the sand dunes and the estuary, a glass phial said to contain the blood of St Piala was found in 1856–7 – though the placename derives from Felec.On the basis of the early cemetery and stones, there is likely to have been a monastery here.
Shrines with saints bones and other relics (such as bells – some of which still survive in Wales and Scotland) must have existed inmany churches before the Reformation in England in the 16th century. William Worcester, writing around 1478–80 (he seems to have been some sort of travelling salesman), records 22 entries representing 19 shrines to saints in Cornish churches (see list). John Leland in the 1530s, the king's antiquary (the only one we ever had – perhaps the office could be reinstated!) records others, and they are known to have existed in other churches as well. St Endellion parish church seems to be the only place with a saint's shrine (15th century in date) to have survived in Cornwall. The Cornish place-name "merther" (like the Welsh merthyr) refers to a saint's shrine, so where this place-name element occurs in Cornwall (as at Merther Euny in Wendron) there were probably also saints' shrines in earlier times, though there is nothing to see at any of them today. Oliver Padel has recorded nine instances of the name, all in western Cornwall.
The Reformation, under the 16th century Tudor monarchs, did a thorough job of clearing out the relics of early saints and their shrines, which would have been of great archaeological interest to us today. But there are still a few traces in odd corners of our medieval parish churches. Also we have hardly started to look at the places associated with these early medieval saints – their churches, cemeteries, holy wells, crosses and properties. A great deal of archaeology remains to be done and much will certainly be learned.
Further reading: Oliver Padel's Cornish Place-Name Elements (English Place-Name Society 1985) is of great interest, as is his Local saints & place-names in Cornwall, in Local Saints & Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed Alan Thacker & Richard Sharpe (Oxford University Press 2002). For William Worcester, see John H Harvey, William Worcester Itineraries (Clarendon Press 1969). See also: Lynette Olson, Early Monasteries in Cornwall, Studies in Celtic History (Boydell 1989); Elizabeth Okasha, Corpus of Early Christian Inscribed Stones of S-W Britain (Leicester University Press 1993); Charles Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? (University of Wales Press 1994); and Graham Jones' new book, Saints in the Landscape (Tempus 2007)
Cornish saints and or shrines described by William of Worcester in the late 15th century (after Padel 2002)
Alternon: St Nonnita (f)
Bodmin: St Petrock (m)
St Breage: St Briaca (f)
Cardinham: St Mebbred (m)
Fowey: St Barry (Finbarr of Cork) (m)
Illogan: St Illogan (m)
Lanteglos: St Wyllow (m)
Lanreath: St Mancus (m)
Lansallow: St Hyldren (m)
Launceston: St Stephen (m);
head of St Gennys (m)
Lelant: St Euny (m)
Minster: St Matheriana (f)
Morrah: St Morian (m)
Morwenstow: St Morwenna (f)
Pelynt: St Nuntus (m)
St Cadix (St Veep par): St Sirus (m)
St Ives: St Ia (f)
St Just in Penwith: St Just (m)
Sithney: St Senseus (m?)
more travels: mainland Cornwall
Jon Cannon explores one of England's most beguiling counties.
Cornwall's unique monuments – from fogous to engine houses – are easy to take for granted as ubiquitous backdrops to the holidays of the rest of England. The flipside of this is that – though the county may lack a show-stopper (no Avebury, no Durham cathedral) – it virtually drips with Historic Environment. The entire landscape from the Tamar to Land's End is its "site".
This great finger of land points south-west into the Atlantic. A granite backbone stretches along the length of it, from Bodmin Moor to the Scilly Isles. The emergence of this material some 300–270 million years ago cooked the sedimentary stones around it, creating the mineral-rich metamorphic hinterland that makes up the rest of the landscape. The north coast is high and wild; the south coast more gentle, with many wooded creeks. The A30 follows this central backbone, from the former county town at Launceston to Land's End itself.
Launceston is arguably the most picturesque town in a county with many good historic urban areas and not one major city. It has a dramatic medieval castle (daily Apr–Oct, English Heritage, admission fee), and one of the county's more remarkable churches. St Mary Magdalene, though basically a work of the west country's distinctive late medieval granite vernacular, is a highly self-conscious structure, its intractable walls carved from roof to ceiling in elaborate patterns.
From Launceston one can pick up the B3254 and drive 15km or so south-west for a circuit of Bodmin Moor that also samples many of Cornwall's most characteristic site types: more of each can be seen elsewhere. At Stowe's Pound (SX 257726), probable neolithic and bronze age enclosures are associated with a gravity-defying rock formation and a settlement site; nearby the Hurlers (SX 258714) is a fine stone circle complex. There is a medieval holy well at St Cleer to the south-west; an early medieval carved stone, King Doniert's Stone, SX 236688; and a neolithic chambered tomb or dolmen (Trethevy Quoit, SX 259688). West again, the church at St Neot has wonderful medieval glass; other Cornish churches have late medieval screens and pew ends.
From St Neot one can follow moor-hugging smaller roads west and north 25km to Camelford, near spectacular Rough Tor ("Rowtor": SX 145807). Here prehistoric people made a fine job of aggrandising an already dramatic landscape: highlights of a complex group of sites include a hilltop enclosure, a great cairn surrounding Showery Tor and an impressive banked "avenue" leading towards the granite peaks.
From Camelford the north coast at Tintagel is just 10km away. Here on the atmospheric headland – a virtual island – within Tintagel castle (daily, English Heritage, admission fee), excavations have revealed a large group of buildings and exotic goods: clearly, this was a post-Roman settlement of very high status. The visible remains of the castle, however, are a testament to the power of a medieval aristocrat: Richard, Earl of Cornwall seems to have virtually filled the county with myth-evoking structures in the mid 13th century.
Thirty kilometres west down the A39 and south along the B3274, cross the A30, and one enters china clay country, a memorable industrial landscape. Wheal Martyn China Clay Country Park is the industry's main museum (daily Feb–Sep, admission fee). But for sheer atmosphere visit the surreal granite outcrop-and-hermitage at Roche (SW 990596) or sample the view from the iron age enclosures (one containing a church) at St Dennis (SW 950583) or Castle-an-Dinas (SW 945623).
Another 15–20km further west off the A30 (or A39) one reaches Truro, a county town with a Victorian cathedral and good archaeological displays in the Royal Cornwall Museum (Mon–Sat). South-west on the A394 towards the Lizard one can reach Falmouth, the approach to which is guarded by the multi-period (but essentially Henrician) artillery castle of Pendennis (daily, English Heritage, admission fee) and, across the estuary on a ferry, the well-preserved Henrician St Mawes (not Sats Apr–Sep, daily Oct, Fri–Mon Nov–Mar, English Heritage, admission fee).
From Falmouth one can push south into the Lizard proper, whose highlights include three wildly contrasting sites: Poldowrian, a mesolithic-to-bronze age settlement location with an informal museum (SW 748169, Weds in Aug or by appointment on 01326 280130/434); Halliggye fogou, one of the most memorable of this enigmatic class of monument (SW 714239; daily Apr–Oct, blocked rest of year, torch needed, estate may charge fee); and the Lizard Wireless Station and Marconi Centre (National Trust, inquire for hours), from which Marconi began his experiments with wireless communication in 1901.
Heading over 30km north, back to the A30, and around Redruth and Camborne one enters the heartland of the Cornwall and west Devon mining landscape world heritage site. The Cornwall Industrial Discovery Centre (SW 672415, contact 01209 614681) is one gateway to the area: here beam engines bring life to the engine houses, otherwise ruined, which dot the landscape. Climb Carn Brea (SW 683407) and lose count of the number of abandoned chimneys visible from the top. But that is not the main reason to visit this granitic eminence; apart from an all-dominating obelisk of 1836, it is the site of another important neolithic enclosure and an iron age hillfort. Substantive remains of settlement – and many flint arrowheads – were found here.
Fifteen kilometres west along the A30 the sea is visible to north and south and we enter the far west. There are frequent glimpses of St Michael's Mount (not Sats, Mar–early Nov, National Trust, admission fee), a tidal island possibly mentioned in classical sources, on whose pyramidal sides is a medieval priory and castle romantically transformed into an aristocratic residence. Onwards past Penzance and the A30 begins to feel as if it is simply going to drive on into the sea.
West Penwith is one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Britain. Highlights of the south coast include the Merry Maidens stone circle (SW 432245) and nearby Tregiffian, an entrance grave with cup-marked jambs. Passing over Land's End and the Isles of Scilly, visible on a clear day, we head for the north coast. I am not alone in thinking of the B3306, following the north coast of West Penwith back to St Ives, as snaking through some of the most numinous historic landscapes in Britain. Here high moors, anciently-enclosed fields and Atlantic cliffs are crowded into a strip of land so narrow its limits can seemat once infinite and just within arm's reach.
Levant Mine (SW 368346; Tue–Fri and Sun Jul–Sep, reduced opening off season, National Trust, admission fee) is in a spectacular setting and uniquely has a beam engine still powered by steam. There are prehistoric sites galore: among highlights, many accessed by exploring the network of lanes running over the moors south-east from the coast road, are Chun Castle (SW 405339), an iron age hillfort; Ballowall/Carn Gluze (SW 354313) a complex prehistoric burial site; or Men-an-Tol (SW427349) with its unique Polo-shaped stone. Chysauster (SW 473350, daily Apr–Oct, English Heritage, admission fee) is one of the best-preserved Romano-British era villages in England; Carn Euny (SW 402289), with a large fogou and more courtyard houses, is more off the beaten track. One chances one's arm by claiming that Gurnard's Head (SW 433385), back on the coast road, is the "best" of the county's many late prehistoric promontory "forts": a happy holiday could be dedicated to these alone, with their counter-intuitive but unfailingly memorable locations.
After all this excitement one might want to take the journey back east at a civilised pace: what better than tomop up a string of historic houses and gardens? Among National Trust highlights, all charging an admission fee, are newly-acquired Godolphin, south of the A30 near Helston (contact 0844 800 1895 for admission, estate open daily), a well-preserved 17th century house, the garden of which has surviving medieval elements; elegant Trerice (daily but not Sats early Mar–early Nov; restricted opening Dec) north of the A30 near Truro and of a similar date; and almost back in Devon (and leaving the A30 for the A38 to Plymouth) Tudor Cotehele (not Fri mid Mar–early Nov), overlooking the Tamar. From Cotehele one can cross the border on the lovely A390, perhaps winding down with a once-more-with-feeling exploration of historic granite settlements and prehistoric landscapes in west Devon and Dartmoor.
Many thanks to the Cornwall Historic Environment Service. Visit www.historic-cornwall.org.uk or purchase Cornwall's Archaeological Heritage, by Nicholas Johnson and Peter Rose (Twelveheads Press 2003, £4.50)
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