Issue 67

October 2002

Contents

news

Hopeful dead clutching their tickets to heaven

Long survival of York’s Roman fortress defences

Drinking den below streets of Edinburgh

All the emotions on display in Southwark Roman cemetery

Treasure Act brings in the gold and silver once again

In Brief

features

Roads from Rome
Hugh Davies discusses Roman roads as a transport system

Shipwreck to slavery
Mike Parker Pearson on the story of an 18th century sailor

Great sites
Rosamund Cleal on the Neolithic site on Windmill Hill

letters

The origins of industry, Tolkien’s inspiration and museums

issues

George Lambrick on the power of public support

Peter Ellis

Regular column

books

Viking Weapons and Warfare by J Kim Siddorn

Prehistoric Cooking by Jacqui Wood

European Landscapes of Rock Art edited by George Nash & Christopher Chippindale

The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland by John Waddell

Vikings and the Danelaw edited by James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch & David Parsons

Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain edited by Helena Hamerow & Arthur MacGregor

favourite finds

Rob Ixer on a lump of lead ore that made a nice paperweight

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Simon Denison

favourite finds

Myths against minerals

Rob Ixer on a cobble of lead ore from a Victorian mine that ended up as a paperweight

My favourite object is a cobble of lead ore from Sark's Hope silver mine on the island of Sark, in the Channel Islands. This was an extremely rich cliff-edge mine that was worked for a few years in the 1840s, and I was able to use the cobble to show why the mine was abandoned.

If you go to Sark now, and you do the tour, you'll be told that the mine collapsed because of the tragic events of one single day. Much of the mine is below sea-level, and one September, during a storm, the sea flooded the mine and drowned the miners. On the same day, a ship carrying an enormous cargo of silver ore from the mine - on its way to Cornwall where it was to be smelted - was sunk in full view of the people of Guernsey, including the wife of the ship's captain. However, there are no contemporary accounts of any of this. The story is not in any of the newspapers of the time. It is a complete myth.

The cobble - a massive thing weighing about 10kg - was given to me in about 1987 by the geologist Nick Laffoley, who was the authority on 19th century mining in Sark. He had found it the previous year, and gave it to me because I had already published on the silver minerals from Sark, using the few tiny scraps of material that were available at the time.

This cobble is the one and only significant ore sample from Sark. There is practically nothing else that survives, either in museum collections or on site. So I was very excited to have it and expected it would be extremely rich in silver. Unfortunately when I analysed it I found there was no silver in it whatsoever. It was just lead ore.

But it was a rather beautiful object, so I decided to keep it as a paperweight. After I'd sliced off a couple of portions to send elsewhere, the part I had left was shaped a bit like a tortoise-shell, rounded and knobbly on top. The cobble had fallen over the edge of the cliff and had been worn down by the ocean for over 100 years, so it was smooth and wonderfully tactile. It was also brightly coloured in red, yellow and black. The thing was still pretty massive - it covered most of a sheet of A4. You had to lift it with two hands. It was a very effective paperweight!

I do, in fact, have other examples of exotic minerals in my house that I use for domestic purposes. I was once paid in Brazilian jade for a consulting job, and we use a piece as a door stop. Funnily enough, my dentist used to make elaborate little flowers out of jade, so I actually paid him with some of the jade for some dental work he'd done.

Sadly, Nick Laffoley died unexpectedly during the 1990s - he was still in his 30s - and a colleague decided to publish Nick's work on Sark's Hope mine on his behalf. So I decided to write up my petrological analysis of this paperweight as a supplement.

Mineralogically this stuff is extremely uninteresting, so I had to work really hard to find an angle to publish anything on. But then I remembered that the Victorians had created a mine map, describing in detail the mineralogy of the mine, and what was excavated in which year. Using this, I found I could relate this cobble to the very last year that the mine was being mined. And then I realised that this was the reason why the mine collapsed - they had simply run out of silver. So this piece of ore turned out to be extremely significant.

What had actually happened was that the previous Seigneur of Sark had mortgaged the island against the mine. And as the ore became leaner and leaner, their return became less and less, and the mine foundered. The family of the present owners of Sark - including the famous Dame of Sark who stood up to the Germans in the Second World War - only got the island because they foreclosed on the mortgage. They had been the bankers.

As the Guernsey Museum didn't have any of the ore, I sent them a one-inch slice of my paperweight. Unfortunately it got smashed in the post. So I gave them the rest of the paperweight. Now, all I have left are the smashed pieces that the museum sent back.

Rob Ixer was, until his recent retirement, an archaeometallurgist at Birmingham University

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