Dunstanburgh - Week 1

To jump ahead, click on the day you want: Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5.

Monday - Day 1
 Why?? Trev and I have only just arrived and we're still more than a mile from the castle - its splintered towers are looming above the horizon in the distance - but already we can see the big question for this investigation: Why on earth was it built here? Most medieval castles were sited to dominate river crossings, or towns, or important roads, or else they were built in the home towns of wealthy nobles. But not Dunstanburgh. Its awesome defences, begun in March 1313, stand perched on remote sea-cliffs north of the tiny fishing village of Craster - basically miles from anywhere. The castle's not even reachable by road today, but you can visit it on foot: for opening times, visit our database entry.

 It's a beautiful autumn morning and we've met up with our partners in this project, the team from The National Trust : Kevin, the local Warden, and Harry, who's responsible for looking after all archaeology on the National Trust's properties in the North-East. This is the first time we've met and they're great company, always pointing out interesting things: an unusual geological formation, eider ducks, a golden lichen. The National Trust owns this stretch of Northumberland's coast, although English Heritage looks after the castle itself, so it's Kevin's job to put us in touch with the farmers and to make sure we don't drive the landrover through any important wildlife habitats. Harry's the one who asked English Heritage's "world-class experts" (... er, I think that means us) to try to find out more about Dunstanburgh. All the same, it's pretty obvious he's already done a good deal of excellent landscape detective-work himself. He hands us a map, covered in written notes and sketched lines marking things he's already spotted on the surface. This is exactly what we're going to be doing: examining all the 'humps and bumps' and other remains we can see with the naked eye - no excavation involved yet! - and then trying to work out what it all means. You can find out more about this simple-but-effective technique by clicking here. In fact, Harry's map already shows loads of the kind of features that we'd usually expect to be the first to discover. So I begin to wonder: Is this investigation going to be a waste of time, or can we improve on Harry's map?

 My eye is immediately caught by part of the map where Harry has written 'Alleged site of medieval harbour'. That word 'alleged' implies he has doubts. Looking at the inlet of slightly marshy ground south of the castle, I can see why he's sceptical. Today, it's cut off from the sea by a low bank - what looks like an old storm beach - and what little water we can see is so shallow that it's difficult to imagine anything bigger than a windsurfer sailing in, even 690 years ago. But Kevin shows us an iron pin driven into the rock above the inlet, which used to hold a ring, to which - so the story goes - medieval sailors once tied their ships. So here's another big question for us to answer, if we can: is this really the harbour referred to in the medieval documents?

 After lunch, we go our separate ways: hopefully, Kevin will be coming out to lend a hand sometime next week and Harry will drop in from time to time to see how we're getting on. Trev and I start work, surveying footpaths, fencelines and other boring modern stuff that needs to be mapped. But it's not long before we get distracted by the archaeology. We can see that most of the landscape around the castle has been ploughed for a long time in the past - the turf has the typical rippled surface left by ancient 'ridge-and-furrow' ploughing, and it's catching the low afternoon sun nicely. But up by the south wall of the castle, we make our first important discovery. The ploughing has extended right up to the castle, right over the outer bank of the defences, flattening the original bank and creating a series of low steps in its outer face. This tells us that the ploughing is not all of medieval date: it continued, or perhaps began, after the Middle Ages. Ancient ploughing, just like modern ploughing, would've quickly erased most traces of any earlier humps and bumps visible on the surface, so we'll have to bear this in mind. It means that in these ploughed areas, we'll have to work very carefully to detect any earlier remains. It may well turn out that however closely we look, we won't be able to recognise them: these areas will have to be examined using geophysical survey or excavation. But it's only the first afternoon of our landscape investigation: early days yet! We've got a lot more to find before the guided tour I'm leading (which was on Sunday 23 November, by the way - sorry!).

Tuesday - Day 2
 Disaster! Within an hour of starting, we find we've got a serious equipment failure: the Base Battery is dying fast. The Base Battery powers our GPS Base Receiver, which sits on the hill overlooking the castle quietly logging satellite data, while we wander around the landscape mapping everything we can find with Rover Receivers. We got brand new, state-of-the-art equipment (costing around £20,000) only two weeks ago. The Base Battery was pretty much the only thing that didn't get replaced, and it's crucial. The most accurate Global Positioning Systems (GPS), like the ones we use for our most detailed investigations, use a Base Receiver to calibrate all the readings we take with the Rover Receivers. Like this, each point we record on the ground is accurate to a few millimetres. Mapping features that can be seen on the surface doesn't often need this kind of accuracy, but we love the technology: it makes everything so much quicker and easier than it was ten years ago. Standing on the highest point of the hill where we've put the Base receiver, Trev manages to get mobile reception and before long he's arranged for the manufacturers to courier a replacement battery up to us by tomorrow. Phew! 

 But what are we going to do in the mean time? Well, I'm always saying that the hi-tech kit's great, but you can do everything we do with two sticks and a piece of string - because the really important equipment is eyes and brains! So here's the chance to prove it. Our GPS kit only works where the receivers can see enough sky to detect at least 5 satellites overhead, so the obvious next step is to carry on our investigations indoors, or in the woods, where the GPS wouldn't work anyway. A really detailed technical survey of the castle walls was made a few years ago, and with a few tweaks, we'll be able to incorporate this into our plan of the landscape, so we don't really need to do much work inside the castle buildings. And there's nothing really of interest in the wood nearby. This leaves one other thing: the Second World War defences along this coast. Northumberland was a prime site for a German invasion, so the coastal strip is littered with pillboxes, weapons pits and other defences. All this 20th century activity had an impact on the castle - the ruins were occupied by a unit from the Royal Artillery Corps - and there's an unusual pillbox facing inland, bizarrely enough, just down from the medieval gatehouse. One of the most important Second World War defensive installations was a Top Secret radar installation, about a mile south of the castle. The National Trust's keen to know more about this in its own right, both because it's a rare structure and because it's potentially of real interest to visitors - or would be if it wasn't hidden just below the brow of the hill and surrounded by thick, spiky gorse bushes. Even a few of the locals in the pub have said they never realised it was there.

 The Second World War aspects of this investigation are really Stewart's job, but we're sure he won't mind us doing a bit of the work for him before he arrives! Using nothing more than a good old-fashioned tape measure, plus pen and paper, we draw up large-scale plans of the insides of the two main surviving buildings. One building, with no windows but lots of air-vents, must be a generator house. The other, we discover by climbing onto the roof from the top of the landrover, is where the radar aerial was mounted, so the rooms below must be where the radar operators sat all through 1940, eyes fixed on the screens day and night, looking for signs of German aircraft approaching low above the sea. These radar installations, known as 'Chain Home Low', were Top Secret because they were the first ever invented: it was vital the enemy didn't find out about their existence. We try to work out exactly what happened where inside the building by tracing the ducts and switches for the electricity cables, stripped out long ago: we're looking for faint marks in the old paintwork, screw holes in the wall. Trev spends half an hour scraping through half a century of compacted cow poo to trace the line of a duct that must have run under the floor - sometimes I think I shouldn't let him have all the good jobs. It must've been a very noisy place to work: the walls and ceiling have been covered in a mixture of paint and cork chippings, which - we guess -would've helped to deaden the noise. Trev notices that the interior has been revamped at some point: old screw holes have been painted over. Was this just a visit from Changing Rooms, or does it mean that the function of the building changed at some point?

As soon as we've recorded all the details of these standing buildings, we start looking for the sites of all the demolished buildings that must've gone with the radar station: many of these were built in an earlier quarry cut into the back of the rock escarpment. Stewart's going to be interested by the Second World War remains, but we suddenly get excited by the quarry. It was obviously dug before the Second World War, but exactly how old is it? Looking at the main quarry face, we see that below the hard, black basalt rock, there's a layer of red sandstone: apparently the same type of rock that the castle's built from. We haven't thought about where all that building stone came from until now, but it's another important question, and suddenly we want to know if this could be a medieval quarry, or if there are others along the escarpment, closer to the castle, that might be more likely candidates. A brisk walk as the sun sets confirms that this is the nearest quarry of any size to the castle. But, the more we think about it, this one doesn't really seem big enough to have supplied so much stone. Anyway, it looks like we may have found an unexpected link between the medieval castle and the Second World War.

Stewart, the third member of our team, has been away helping to set up a new project investigating the remains of the Roman amphitheatre in Chester, and arrives in Alnwick by train before 8pm. It's a while since we saw him and we expect him to start telling us all about the latest Time Team programme he's just filmed. So we carefully put on our best 'I-don't-care-if-you-are-a-TV-star-anyway' expressions. To our surprise, he's become dangerously obsessed by radar installations and can hardly talk about anything else. He's obviously been reading all the technical manuals from the 1940s, and now knows exactly what every switch and cable was for. But he's also dead keen to track down anyone who may have worked at the Craster radar station, or local people who may have memories or photographs of the site when it was in use. If that's you, while Stewart's out here in the wilds of Northumberland, please contact Harry at the National Trust, by clicking here. Thanks!

Wedneday - Day 3
 With a new Base Battery and three of us working at the same time, we're really starting to motor. We begin by looking at the bank across the mouth of the so-called harbour. We take hundreds of points so that we can produce a really detailed contour model of the ground, which will show conclusively whether it's possible the tide could have come into the inlet. We spend a lot of time walking up and down the beach - hey, it's a tough job, but someone's got to do it. We're looking for anything that might once have been part of a harbour, for example the footings of a wall, or just a few stones laid flat to build a slipway. Nothing.

 But we do take a few minutes to record the wreck of a ship, though it's not a medieval one. On Monday, Kevin told us that the rusty skeleton amongst the boulders was once a trawler: during the Cold War, the Polish fishermen who owned it deliberately crashed it onto the rocks and claimed political asylum from Communism. It's strange: English Heritage has just finished a project examining all the major monuments from the Cold War period (click here to find out more), but this very human story about what must have been, in many ways, a personal tragedy really affects me. Sometimes, it's easy to forget that great events in history are made up of the stories of individual people.

 At lunchtime, we all take a stroll up to the castle to say Hello to the English Heritage Custodian, whose job is to look after visitors and keep an eye on the site. Archie is a really nice guy who obviously knows a lot about the castle. He asks whether we're managing to discover anything new, when the castle's so well known and has seen so much research in the past. I'm in the middle of explaining how people before have always studied the castle's gatehouse and towers, but haven't really bothered about the landscape beyond the walls, so it's there we need to look, etc etc, when Stewart interrupts us: "What's this then? Looks like a half a Roman tombstone, upside-down". So there goes my little speech, straight out the window. There, at eye level, right in the middle of one of the main walls of the castle, is part of a Roman tombstone, reused as a medieval building block, and never spotted before. Oh well. But it just shows, you don't find anything if you don't look!We spend most of the afternoon on the slope west of the castle gate, plotting grassy banks that we're interpreting as the perimeter of a large livestock pen, overlooked by a building, possibly a farmhouse or a cow shed, whose wall foundations only survive as low banks today. These remains are marked on Harry's map, and he's correctly observed that the enclosure is not medieval: it is later than ridge-and-furrow ploughing, which means that it is probably only 200 or 300 years old. People often ask how we can tell which is earlier without excavating. In this case, it's basically very simple: where the bank around the livestock enclosure meets the plough furrows, the furrows suddenly disappear, then re-appear beyond the bank, while the bank is in perfect condition. Therefore, the bank must have been built on top of the plough furrows. If it was the other way round, we'd expect to see the bank reduced to a much slighter bump, with gaps where the plough broke through it. It's the same principle as the bank outside the castle wall that we saw yesterday: there, the ploughing has flattened the bank, so must have begun after the castle's defences were abandoned, which probably means some time around the 16th century. So, in a nutshell, that's how we work out how old things are. It's not rocket science, it just needs a keen eye, a questioning mind, and a good helping of experience.

 I spend the evening reading a guidebook written in 1936 which Trev found in a second-hand booksh op last week. Unlike Trev, who likes to call himself 'Scarborough's Greatest Living Archaeologist', I'm not an expert on medieval history, so a lot of the information is completely new to me. The construction of Dunstanburgh began in 1313, at the orders of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, nephew of Edward I, cousin of Edward II, and the richest man in Britain after the Kings. It sounds as though Earl Thomas was a pretty nasty piece of work, disliked by many of those around him, who put most of his energy into treacherously undermining Edward II's authority, and even murdered the King's gay lover, Piers Gavaston (in Scarborough, Trev informs me). Edward eventually got his own back: in 1322 he captured Thomas and executed him. In 1362, the castle came into the ownership of John of Gaunt, the 3rd son of Edward III - in other words, another immensely wealthy and powerful political figure. In 1380, the King made him Lieutenant of the Northern Marches, and this led him to take a more active interest in Dunstanburgh, making several important changes to the castle's design. The old guidebook's an excellent account of the castle's history, but in places it's obviously a bit confused: at one point it talks about "Dunstanburgh's obvious strategic advantages", but later admits that it was poorly sited and completely ineffective in stopping Scottish raids. And it implies that Thomas built the castle as a secret hideaway when his political opposition to the King got too hot - which doesn't exactly square with the castle's vast scale and highly visible location, or the trendy design of that ornamental gatehouse. It all comes back to the question we asked on Day 1 - why was it built here? The guidebook also makes a big deal of the harbour, stating that in January 1514 four of Henry VIII's warships took refuge in the inlet. I just don't believe this: unless Henry VIII had hovercrafts in his navy!

Thursday - Day 4
We spend the morning finishing off the area we started yesterday where the mouth of the so-called harbour meets the beach. The vegetation - lots of rushes - certainly suggests that the inlet might have held some water, but the more we look, the less we believe that this can ever have served as a harbour. We're starting to think that we'll need to check whether the documents might have been completely misunderstood - could the ships just have been anchored somewhere offshore? Or in the little harbour at Craster, only a mile or so away?

On top of the bank that separates the 'harbour' inlet from the sea, we find wall foundations, which Harry has already noticed and marked on his map. We have a good idea what these are. Last night, in the excellent 'Cottage Inn' where we're staying, we were looking at a view of the castle painted by Turner in 1798. In the foreground, just where we're standing, was a long, white-washed building, apparently part of a little fishing community next to the beach. Amazingly, the modern track to the castle passes right over the demolished building: every week, hundreds of visitors walk through the living room without noticing!

At lunchtime, Trev takes quietly sneaks off to an area of gorse bushes that accidentally caught fire earlier this summer and is now just a forest of black twigs. It's a good place for monument-hunting and he comes back and smugly announces he's found a Bronze Age burial mound. Stewart asks him if he's sure. "Well it's in the right place, on the edge of the escarpment and it definitely looks right: circular mound, edging stones. And I found this in a molehill nearby." He holds up a tiny piece of worked flint, exactly the kind of fragment that would be produced by the manufacture of stone tools around 4,000 years ago, when bronze was still a rare commodity. The burial mound's a totally unexpected discovery - it probably won't help us to understand the castle, but it's important in its own right.

We spend the afternoon zooming up and down along the ridge and furrow ploughing south of the castle. Stewart's enjoying himself: every time we get back down to the shore end, he finds more evidence for the Second World War use of the headland: first the site of a building that appears to have been removed, perhaps a concrete pillbox that was thought to spoil the view of the castle after the war. Then the occasional stumps of metal posts that would have supported coils of barbed wire all along the foreshore. Then shallow rectangular pits that would have been used as emplacements for mortars and machine guns. All these little details are contributing to his understanding of how the stretch of the coast on either side of the Top Secret radar station would've been defended. But frankly, I'm getting a bit bored: I haven't found anything really exciting yet!

 I spend the evening reading the current English Heritage guidebook, and I'm glad to see that thinking has moved on a long way in the 60 years since the one I read yesterday was written. The opening sentence is - almost word for word - the question I asked at the start of Day 1: Why here? It goes on to talk of the castle in terms of a giant status symbol, much more about showing off Earl Thomas's wealth and political power than about practical military dominance. This is a much more modern interpretation of castles and explains the flashy design of the gatehouse, which would have been ultra-modern in 1313, when it was first built. It also helps to explain the conspicuous siting of the castle - especially the gatehouse. But there's an interesting difference between the guidebook and Harry's map. Harry suggests that the castle would have been approached along a trackway from the west, while the author of the current guidebook believes it was meant to be approached from the south, via the track from Craster we've driven along every morning. And I must admit, I've also been assuming that it would have been approached from the south, because that's the direction that the gatehouse faces, and the gatehouse was very clearly meant to be seen and admired. A puzzle - who'll turn out to be right? The guidebook also plays down the documentary references to the harbour: it points out that only two of Henry VIII's warships were at Dunstanborough, and these may have been anchored offshore. It concludes that the marshy inlet was not a harbour, but that there may have been a minor landing on the beach for use by fishing boats. I like this theory: it sounds a lot more sensible to me!

Friday - Day 5
 Ooops - spoke too soon! This is the first morning we've arrived before low tide, so we decide to start by mapping the sea edge while the surface is exposed. It's a difficult area to work in, with slippery basalt boulders making it a real assault course to walk across. English Heritage has a specialist Maritime Team, who'll be interested in anything we find in this zone between the high and low tide marks. The first thing we find, not much further out than the wreck of the Polish trawler, is a fish-trap. It's a large horseshoe-shaped bank of rubble, with the open end facing inland, so that fish would have been trapped behind it as the tide retreated: simple. It's difficult to guess when this might have been constructed - it could be as old as the castle, but it could just as well have been built by the fishermen who lived in the cottage on Turner's painting, 400 years later. We'll probably never know.

The North Sea's calm today, so I seize the oportunity to map the edge of a spine of basalt rock that sticks way out into the sea. Looking straight down into the crystal clear water, I'm struck by how deep it is here, even at low tide. And standing on top of the spine of rock, I've got a great vantage point that Trev and Stewart, who are still scrambling around down among the boulders, haven't got. Looking across the bay I can see a broad rise in the mass of boulders, like a low bank of rubble running parallel to the natural spine I'm standing on. I decide to take a closer look. Picking a path across the slippery rocks is a tricky business and takes a lot of concentration. So it's a total shock when I find myself looking down at a line of carefully laid boulders - a dead-straight line - very clearly the footings of one face of a massive wall. Several metres further on, I find the other side of the wall: it's so wide that it can only be one thing: a jetty, creating a decent harbour between it and the natural spine of rock. Yup, that's right, the harbour which yesterday I was happy to accept was a total myth, or - at best - a little stretch of beach for landing rowing boats. I'm really fizzing with excitement: even Trev and Stewart will have to admit that this is Discovery of the Week (not that we're competitive, or anything). I start shouting and waving my arms to call them over, but by the time they've made their way across the boulders, I've already traced it for nearly 100m through the mess of boulders.

 To my disappointment, Stewart strikes a note of caution: "We don't know yet that it was built for the castle - it could be to do with the 18th-century fishing village". But a few minutes later, he answers his own question: "Al, I think I've found the end of the jetty, and it's bang on the axis of the gatehouse entrance passage." This is amazingly important: Earl Thomas' gatehouse didn't just face more-or-less south towards an approach track. It faced towards a specific point in the landscape, or rather - the seascape: the exact point at which the boats of Thomas' noble visitors would have docked. In other words, important people were expected to approach by sea, not by land. They couldn't have failed to be impressed by Thomas' wealth and power before they'd even set foot on his jetty.

A few minutes later, I start to notice something else. All round the jetty, but especially on the harbour side, there are hundreds of fragments of red sandstone, which we haven't seen anywhere else along the shore. This is the stone the castle's built of, and from this evidence, it looks as though the building materials were brought in by sea. Which explains why the quarry near the radar station is so small - it probably has nothing to do with the castle, after all. It also means the jetty must have been built by 1313, when the construction of the castle began. Perhaps stonemasons worked the raw material on the shore before carting the blocks up the hill to be set in place. Then I remember: on Monday, Kevin pointed out a couple of large blocks of neatly shaped sandstone lying on the beach, saying he'd always wondered why anyone had bothered to carry them all the way down from the castle. At the time we couldn't really offer any explanation either. But now it looks like perhaps these blocks weren't carried down at all, they were waiting to be carried up, and have been sitting in the same place for 690 years.

A bit later, and Trev makes another important find: he's noticed a small patch of stone cobbling surviving on the line of the jetty, despite centuries of wear and tear by the sea: this must be a remnant of the flooring on top of the jetty. Which means we can now work out exactly how high the jetty would have stood at the sea-end, which in turn means we can estimate what size of boat it was designed to serve. Excellent! Not just fishing boats, that's for certain! Stupid idea - I never believed it for a moment. Anyway, time to move on...

 We have to leave - reluctantly - soon after lunch to get back to our base in York: it takes a couple of hours in the office to process the week's survey data. And then there's the diary to write up! It's been a brilliant first week - I really can't believe how much more we already understand about how the castle was designed to work. We've ruled out Harry's 'Alleged medieval harbour', but found a genuine one that's far larger and more important to the castle's design than any of us had dreamed. Which leaves us with a marshy inlet, perhaps of no archaeological importance at all. But on Monday, we've got another English Heritage expert, Jacqui, coming to test1 the silt deposits in these marshy areas, so maybe she'll find something there to get excited about. And there are plenty of other big questions still unanswered, including that old chestnut: Why was the castle built here? But we've not yet even looked at the landscape to the north and west of the castle, or the area within the walls, so there's plenty of time to find out more. It's only going to get better next week!

Key to photo:
Yellow cross = our GPS Base Station.
Red dot = Earl Thomas' magnificent gatehouse, built in 1313.
Blue dot = the 'Alleged site of medieval harbour', marked on Harry's map.
Magenta dot = fishtrap, dating to ... um.... well ... quite a long time ago.
Orange dot = foundations of white-washed cottage shown on Turner's painting of 1798.
Green dot = livestock enclosure and farm buildings, probably of similar date to the cottage.
Yellow dot = Second World War pillbox, facing inland.

Back to top or click to move on to Dunstanburgh - Week 2.

You can e-mail any questions to us at English Heritage's York office, where we're based: al.oswald@english-heritage.org.uk