10.2 Ground plan of the Middle Bronze Age (C. 1500 BC) round-house excavated at Fengate, Peterborough, in 1976. The shallow circular gully was to take water running off the roof. This was taken into the field boundary ditch system, to the right. The doorway, framed by four posts, is at the top of the plan and faces south-east. The pair of larger posts provides the door frame; the outer, smaller posts are for the porch. The circular walls (not visible on the ground) would have lined up with the larger doorposts. There are nine roof-support posts. The three smaller stake holes at the centre may be something to do with a spit or frame for the hearth.
© Francis Pryor
We spent quite a long time cutting turf and laying it carefully on the roof, which we had pre-prepared using hazel brushwood. We laid it in two layers: the first with the grass face down, the second with it up. I gather this was what was traditionally done in Scotland and it allowed the roots of the upper layer to grow into, and bind with, the one beneath. We watered the new green roof regularly and it looked magnificent – a sort of conical Wimbledon Centre Court. And then at last it rained. We’d been waiting for days for the chance to test our new creation. It started quite slowly and I looked up at the sky. I hoped the clouds would get darker and more threatening, as this rain was only a little worse than drizzle. But if anything it was starting to clear up. It was very disappointing.
10.3 The reconstructed turf-roofed Bronze Age (C. 1500 BC) house at Flag Fen, Peterborough, during maintenance in late summer. The sedge cone crowning the roof is being removed before replacement. Behind the house is the young hedge growing along a low bank beside the main droveway. The sheep are Soays.
© Francis Pryor
I nipped back through the smart new front doorway to tell the team inside the bad news. As I stepped across the threshold I felt something cold down the back of my neck. Had an earthworm dropped off the turf? I shuddered, and as I did so I noticed that I wasn’t alone. Several people were fending off drips. The smart green roof leaked like a sieve. It was a very disappointing moment.
I spent the next few days on the phone to friends and colleagues in Scotland and Scandinavia and I learned that traditionally the turves are laid on quite a thick layer of carefully laid bracken, reeds or straw.c The idea of this is to guide water to the ground slowly, without dripping through. Then the weight of the turf will hold all the roof-covering in place. We removed the turf and added a layer of reeds and straw, which we were given by the local Internal Drainage Board. Then a few weeks later it was autumn and the skies grew darker again. This time it looked like real rain. And it was: good, no messing, thundery English rain. And the roof held it back superbly. After about half an hour of consistent downpour, we noticed some drops had come through, but these mostly ran along the underside of the reed/straw layer. Only a very few actually dripped onto the floor – and it really was chucking it down outside. I can remember mentally thanking those kind people in Scotland who had so generously shared their expertise with archaeologists and historians.
*
Post-war experimental archaeologists, such as Peter Reynolds and John Coles, realized that if a hole was left at the centre of a conical or pitched roof for the smoke to escape through, it would encourage a draught to develop, which would eventually dry the thatch and upper roof timbers. However, it would also take only a few rising sparks from the hearth below to set it alight, and that was precisely what happened, in 1958, to an experimental thatched prehistoric house at Allerslev, in Denmark.9
The traditional turf-roofed blackhouses of Lewis were rectangular and were provided with a double-thickness stone wall and a pitched turf roof, without gable ends.10 The ridges were rounded and gentle, to accommodate the turves. No provision was made for chimneys and the hearth was at the centre of the building. Smoke simply filtered out through the roof, thereby staining it with carbon – hence their name. Blackhouses built more recently (they are increasingly popular as holiday cottages) have stone gable ends, with fires and chimneys.
I just mentioned that the roof ridges of some turf houses were rounded, which is fine if the roof is fairly long and narrow, but if it is conical, it doesn’t work – or at least that’s what we experienced. Yes, you could tie and pin turves in place for a few weeks, but they soon either crumbled in hot, dry weather or disintegrated in rain and frost. So I talked the problem over with a professional thatcher I had got to know quite well: what would he recommend? I thought he was going to suggest long straw, but coming from Huntingdonshire,d he was familiar with villages along the fen-edge around Willingham and Cottenham, where the cottages often have their ridges covered with saw-toothed sedge cut in what is now the nature reserve at Wicken Fen, a short distance to the east. He had some left over from last season – would I like to try it? But he warned us to use stout gauntlets. As a long-standing gardener, I’m used to cutting back pampas and other tall grasses whose leaves can give your hands deep cuts without you knowing it: they are so sharp. But the leaves of saw-toothed sedge were in a different class. I’ll swear they could cut your hands without you touching them.
We tied the sedge into a series of bundles, which we spread and tied into place on the crown of the roof, rather like a hat, but overlapping the top tier of turves. Over the following winter it was disturbed by birds and small mammals, but it stayed in place. After a couple of years we needed to reset and repair it, but it didn’t take long and was a small price to pay for such a dry roof. It also gave me an important insight into the sort of routine tasks that would have occupied people’s daily lives – which was one of the main reasons we erected the house in the first place.
While we were working on the roof, I got to thinking about the roof space beneath the turf and sedge. In the past I had simply ignored it; after all, it would have been filled with smoke, fuggy and altogether pretty unpleasant. At about this time I had just discovered Manx kippers and traditional East Anglian bloaters from Great Yarmouth.11 A few years later, I also came across the produce of traditional English smokehouses. A Mr Enderby of Grimsby wrote to say how much he had enjoyed one of my books, and would I like it if he sent me a couple of fillets of their smoked haddock, as a thank you. Of course I said yes. When they arrived, Maisie steamed them for supper. It was quite unlike anything I had ever eaten before: Mr Enderby’s smoked haddock hadn’t been dyed yellow and had a superb flaky texture, but it was still moist and had a captivating smoky/salty taste. Served with a knob of butter and home-grown leek and potato mash, it vanished from my plate in seconds. I’ve since formed a small group of archaeological Enderby fish fans and every Christmas we order hundreds of pounds’ worth of fish from him – and it’s all prepared in the last traditional fish smokehouse in Grimsby.12 We tend to forget that proper traditional artisanal English food can be every bit as good as anything from France. So what would have hung in that smoke-filled roof space in the Bronze Age?
When I learned about round-houses in the mid-1960s, the first reconstructions were just being built. In those days, most of what we knew about Iron Age round-houses and settlements came from excavations carried out in the last years before the war by an exiled German professor of Jewish heritage, Gerhard Bersu, at Little Woodbury, in Wiltshire. In many respects I think it was one of the most influential prehistoric digs ever undertaken in Britain; although partly written in an internment camp over eighty years ago, the report looks and reads like something prepared yesterday.13 It was Bersu who pointed out the significance of post-holes and how they allowed the accurate reconstruction of buildings. One member of the digging team, who was later to become a leading professor in his own right, Stuart Piggott, illustrated possible reconstructions of the buildings. Bersu’s meticulous excavations suddenly brought British prehistory to life – even if most people didn’t realize what he had achieved until very much later, in the late 1960s.
The first serious attempt to reconstruct life in an Iron Age round-house, using high standards of experimental archaeology, was organized in 1970 at Little Butser, in
Hampshire. It was run by Peter Reynolds, a very charismatic archaeologist, who gave the project the high profile it needed in order to survive. I visited Little Butser many times and my wife, Maisie, worked there twice in the mid-1970s.14 While she was there, she was gored by a bad-tempered Dexter cow – the small traditional Irish breed whose bones closely resemble those found on Iron Age sites. Three years later, the same cow featured in the BBC television series Living in the Past, where to everyone’s surprise it also caused endless disruption.15 I hope Peter hadn’t lent her to them mischievously; I wouldn’t have put it past him – especially if the Beeb hadn’t offered him a decent price.e
Most people who have worked with experimental reconstructions acknowledge that the roof space would have been hung with the odd ham, fish fillet or eel, and when one visits reconstructions it is not unusual to see such things suspended above one’s head. But when I started work on the turf roof of the Flag Fen house, I was very struck by the smoke in the roof space: it really was very dense and intense – and even when the fire was out, it smelled incredibly strongly of smoke. I suspect this was because Bronze and Iron Age householders would have taken enormous pains to burn nothing but dry seasoned wood, whose smoke is less visibly dense, but is far more concentrated in smell and also, I suspect, in its ability to cure food. In effect, this meant that every household also comprised a self-contained smokehouse – which is not to say, of course, that in certain places, such as seaside or fishing villages, there weren’t also specially built smokehouses, complete with racks – like their medieval and modern counterparts, but on a smaller scale.
In the modern world we take the preservation of food for granted, whether frozen in packs, dried in packets, canned or bottled. Traditional methods of preservation, by smoking and curing in salt, are reserved for ham, bacon and various rather exotic lines on delicatessen counters. Today, such techniques are more about adding flavour than extending shelf life. I love such food and am frequently to be found in our local Polish shop, where the variety of delicious cured meats is endless. So I wondered about that late prehistoric roof space: would it really have been the scene of a few rather forlorn dangling bits of meat and fish, or would it not have been far more populated – with every rafter festooned with eels and fish and racks full of hams and cheese? Jacqui Wood’s cooking opened my eyes to the possibility of tasty food in prehistory, but the trouble with good-tasting food is that once you’ve tried it, you want it again – and again. We know for a fact that in the Bronze and Iron Ages Britain was home not just to pigs, cattle, sheep and goats, but also to salmon, trout, eels and even more exotic delicacies, such as sturgeon.f The roe of sturgeon is the basic ingredient of caviar, which is cured in salt – and sometimes smoked.
Would it be taking things too far to suppose that prehistoric families might have eaten caviar? I don’t think it is. I can remember that mealtimes in my childhood often seemed very adventurous: my parents enjoyed many exotic things, in retrospect as a reaction to the rather dull food of wartime rationing. Along with other grown-ups, they loved fresh oysters and squid, complete with tentacles, for example, which I detested at first, but eventually got to like and then to adore. I suspect that many Bronze and Iron Age children might have been on similar journeys themselves. Eating food has never been just about acquiring nutrition: delight and revulsion have always been involved. That is why I firmly believe that life inside a round-house would have been both interesting and exciting – and not just for adults. That mention of caviar, however, raises another important ingredient, which we take entirely for granted today, but which would have transformed life in later prehistoric times. It is time to step outside the round-house.
a ‘Yarg’ is simply ‘Gray’ spelled backwards, the cheese being named after the artisan cheesemakers Alan and Jenny Gray, who found a 1615 recipe for a nettle-wrapped semi-hard cheese in a book in their attic. The original recipe is thought to date back to the thirteenth century. www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/yarg-cornish-cheese-s-conquered-america-9647985.html
b See Scene 4, page 71.
c In Scandinavia, birch bark is used.
d Now, like the Isle of Ely, sadly incorporated into the enlarged modern county of Cambridgeshire.
e Peter Reynolds died in 2001, aged sixty-one.
f We found Iron Age sturgeon bones in our excavations at Fengate. They could have been caught in a local river, or out in the Wash.
Scene 11
Prosperity from Mud and Mire (1200 BC–AD 300)
The ‘Red Hills’ of Essex – Northey and Fengate – Tetney and the Lincolnshire Marshes – Cowbit and the Fens
I think it’s widely appreciated today that salt was very important in the past. The most frequently quoted example of this is the word ‘salary’, which derives from the Latin word for salt – sal – and reflects the fact that in medieval times certain people were paid, wholly or in part, in salt. It was a much-needed and valuable commodity.
My personal interest in salt goes back to 1977 when our team was excavating at Fengate, in eastern Peterborough. In those days, Peterborough New Town was expanding rapidly and all the local gravel pits were working flat out to provide developers and the New Town Development Corporation with aggregates and concrete. One medium-sized pit was located on the far side of Flag Fen on the edges of the large natural ‘island’ of Whittlesey. I knew most of the pit managers and had their permission to walk through the quarries from time to time – today, of course, such a casual attitude would be impossible.
One sunny afternoon I took a stroll through the Northey quarry, where to my great delight I spotted what looked like the distinctive U-shaped profile of two ditches, whose slightly pale, rather washed-out-looking filling was identical to that of the Bronze Age field boundary ditches we had been excavating at Fengate, for the previous six years. I immediately ran across to them. Happily for me, the quarry’s mechanical excavator hadn’t done a particularly tidy job and much of the Bronze Age ditch filling had been dumped to one side. Of course, I looked at it closely. In my experience it’s always best to examine the surface of such deposits very carefully before you produce your trowel or spade. Very often, tiny pieces of pottery or flint tools will show up quite clearly, having been washed by many showers and morning dews. At first I could see nothing, but then I spotted something paler, and about the size of my thumb. At first glance it looked fairly straightforward. It was probably a piece of coarse Bronze Age pottery, just like the stuff we had been finding in the ditches at Fengate.
I pulled my trowel from the back pocket of my jeans, but then I hesitated. There was something odd and formless about it: it didn’t resemble any pottery I’d ever seen. I laid the trowel aside and leaned forward for a closer look. Yes, it was pottery – or perhaps fired clay – but its shape was all wrong; it didn’t seem even slightly pot-like. Normally, pots of this period are bowls or jars, with well-made sides, distinctive rims and good, flat bases. But this was very different and hard to describe. It looked more like somebody had squashed a bit of clay and then fired it. I pulled out my trowel and carefully cleared the soil around it. Then, very slowly, and with both hands, I lifted it out of the ground.
While I was trowelling, the thought occurred to me that it might turn out to be a broken weight from a prehistoric weaver’s loom; we’d found several of these in earlier years and they often proved to be quite fragile and crumbly. But when I held it up, it seemed quite firm – even hard. It had obviously been heated deliberately: it wasn’t something made of clay that had somehow fallen into a hearth or bonfire. And my first impression was right: it did look like a piece of squeezed clay, with slightly flattened ends. The more I turned it over in my hands, the more I thought I might know what it was. Slowly, it was starting to look more familiar – or was I deluding myself? I think archaeologists quite often have moments like that.
That piece of fired clay remained in the back of my mind for some time. Then one day I was sitting in the pub with some archae
ological colleagues and we were discussing the first digs we had been on. I told them about my time on one of the longest-running ‘rescue’ excavations of the day, at the huge gravel pits overlooking the Thames Estuary at Mucking, in Essex. I think a couple of the others had been there too and we had a few laughs – the way ex-students do. Then, while we were chatting away, everything suddenly fell into place. I knew exactly what that piece of fired clay was all about.
*
The piece of fired clay we had found in that gravel pit at Northey was part of what archaeologists refer to as ‘briquetage’. This is a French word used to describe bits of rather shapeless, brick-like fragments of fired clay. These had originally formed a series of basins and their supports to hold seawater, which was then heated up to make salt. The particular piece from Northey would have been one of several lumps of clay that had been hand-squeezed to prop up an evaporation vessel over a kiln-like fire. This would explain its flattened ends.
The reason the mention of a well-known site in Essex made me suddenly remember what salt-extraction debris looks like is quite simply that Essex has a very long coastline to the north of the Thames Estuary. It’s a flat landscape, subject to frequent tidal flooding, and is intersected by numerous creeks and pools. In certain areas, usually set slightly back from the lowest-lying tidal mudflats, are a series of low mounds, known locally as Red Hills.1 These are all that remain of ancient salt-extraction sites, which got their name from the distinctive red colour of the burnt clays and silts that accumulated on them while they were in use. Red Hills extend along the Essex and Suffolk coasts and up into East Anglia. They can be dated from the Bronze Age, through the Iron Age and into Roman times. The briquetage from Northey was dated to around 1200 BC, which would place it at the very start of the sequence.2
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 21
