Dunstanburgh - Week 2

To jump ahead, click on the day you want: Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, weekend

Monday - Day 6
 On our journey up from York, we stopped off in Newcastle to pick up as many documents relating to the castle's history as we can lay our hands on: everything from old maps to newpaper cuttings. Later on in the investigation, we'll have to visit the County Records Office and other archives, to look at the originals. Documents - hmmm. Yes, well, documents are nice, if you like that sort of thing, but you always have to take them with a pinch of salt, and you always have to look beyond them to see if the physical remains are telling a different story. When there's a mis-match between the two kinds of evidence, my instinct is always to let the physical remains tell their own story, and then try and explain why the documents are painting a different picture. I'm suspicious of documents: people don't always set out to tell the truth in documents, and even if they do, they can always exaggerate, make mistakes, or just plain miss things out. But I suppose it's also partly down to the person doing the research: nobody's completely objective, are they?

 So by the time we get to Dunstanburgh, Jacqui's been hard at work for several hours. She's English Heritage's Archaeological Science Advisor for the North-East, and she's taking 'cores' through the deposits in the low-lying ground to the north-west of the castle, a boggy area which continues the so-called harbour. This is the closest we'll come to excavation in this investigation. Jacqui's working with a team from Newcastle University - Tim and Chris - who are both Dutch. I'm guessing, but I imagine this means they have plenty of experience of studying deposits from low-lying areas near the sea! Certainly, they manage to make pushing the coring- tool into the ground, and heaving it out again, look totally effortless, but I know it's really hard work. Each time they pull it out, there's a metre-long sausage of black sludge caught in the coring-tool's metal tube, which they examine rapidly and then put on one side for analysis back in the lab. Before we have a chance to explain about the jetty we discovered last week, Jacqui's already stared to tell us that the whole harbour idea is rubbish. "There's definitely been fresh water in here from time to time, but the sea hasn't been here for about 10,000 years - if at all!" Well, that settles that, then.

This is a good reminder: we're investigating a medieval castle, and we're also interested in the effects of the Second World War. But this landscape's been used for far longer. Some of Jaquie's sludge-sausages go down around 4m into the ground, mostly made up of peat, which she reckons started to build up around 5,000 years ago - more or less the time that the first banks and ditches were being built at Stonehenge, but still a whole 1,000 years before those giant stones were put up. Or, to use a technical term: 'old'. The peat contains all sorts of organic material: seeds, pollen, insects, fragments of wood (some quite large lumps, in fact). These will provide a record of how the natural environment's changed in this area over the whole of that 5,000-year time span. The fragments of wood can be radio-carbon dated, which will give us a rough idea when key changes were taking place: when humans started to make an impact on the natural world, when they first began to clear the wild woodland and grow crops. We're looking at the big picture. But Jacqui's looking at an even bigger one!

 We help out by precisely plotting the position of each core she takes, and by collecting enough data to make sure that we can provide her with a detailed contour model, so that she can relate the underground deposits to the natural ground surface. Except that the ground surface isn't entirely natural. Even this boggy area has been drained and ploughed: the surface is covered with dozens more ridges-and-furrows. But unlike the ploughing that we surveyed on Days 1 and 3, where the ridges were wide and had a distinctive curved shape, like an S in reverse, the ridges here are narrow and fairly straight. This tells us something: the reverse-S pattern is caused by using oxen to pull the plough - it's typical of the medieval period, and a bit later. The reverse-S shape formed gradually over the course of hundreds of years, just because it took so long to turn the lumbering oxen round at the end of each strip. The straighter, narrower plough ridges we're finding today are characteristic of ploughing using horses, which means the cultivation's almost certainly of later date - perhaps not much more than 150 years old. Not all that exciting, but it's important Jacqui knows as much as possible about events that might have affected the ingredients of her sludge-sausages!

Tuesday - Day 7
Disaster! Within an hour of starting, we find we've got a serious equipment failure (sounds familiar?) I'm beginning to dread Tuesdays. This time it's the state-of-the-art equipment. The Rover Receivers communicate using cutting-edge wire-less technology, known as 'Blue Tooth' - presumably nothing to do with the Viking King, Harold Blue Tooth, whose idea of hi-tech was to sharpen his axe for a change. Fortunately, we learnt from last week's nightmare, and have brought the slightly-less-hi-tech kit, with old-fashioned wires, as back-up. So off we go again!

 Following the bottom of the slope west of the castle gatehouse is a long, wide, slightly-curving pond. The water's not more than ankle deep, but the sheep and cows going down to drink have trampled its edges into a total mudbath. Harry's map marks this as 'The Great Ditch' - basically a moat. This formed part of the castle defences built in 1313, according to references in medieval documents, although it seems a surprisingly long way from the castle wall. According to the documents, the ditch was originally 80 feet (24m) wide and 12 feet (3.6m) deep. A quick check with a tape measure tells us that the muddy pond we're looking at is exactly 80 feet wide, so it looks like Harry's reached the right conclusion. Which means that suddenly none of us are very keen to go and map the edge of the shallow pond, in case the mud turns out to be 12 feet deep. Obviously, it must've been a huge effort to dig this massive trench, but the weird thing is that the two guidebooks I've read hardly mention it.

   And the weirder thing is that the Great Ditch just stops - it's only 100m long, not a complete moat - so it couldn't have been a very effective defence. Why? Was work on it abandoned half way through? Perhaps Earl Thomas ran out of cash. If so, it seems odd that the pond has such neat, squared-off ends: it looks finished. Or was it not actually defensive? Was it always just an isolated pond, perhaps used for keeping fish for Earl Thomas' tea on a Friday evening? This still isn't quite a perfect explanation: most medieval fishponds are rectangular, not curved. Harry's map suggests that a track approached the castle from the west and crossed the low-lying ground at the south end of the Great Ditch. When we first looked at the map, I had my doubts about this possible route from the west, simply because the ornate gatehouse faces south, towards the harbour, as we now know as a result of last week's discoveries. But now we've come to look at the area on the ground, Harry's idea seems an excellent theory: there's a low bank that would have made a good dry causeway across the low-lying ground, which runs right past the end of the ditch. So that explains why the south end stops. But the north end… well, that needs more thought. Trev and Stewart gradually stop chatting - I can tell they're thinking over all the possibilities too… we all feel we're overlooking something important.

 As soon as the tide's out, we start work on the shore north of the castle headland. It's a truly grim area to work in: nothing but huge basalt boulders, bigger, sharper and more slippery than the ones on the south side of the headland. Definitely not the place to try to land a boat! Worse, there's absolutely nothing of archaeological interest. All the same, it's nice to have reached the northern limit of the area we're investigating in detail: it feels like good progress. Beyond this, modern ploughing and a golf course have erased most of the humps and bumps we're interested in. But we can see another pillbox not that much further down the coast, and one of the fairways has the rippled surface we all know and love: more medieval ploughing. At some point, we'll have to stroll down there to make sure there's nothing really important.

Wednesday - Day 8
 We start the day working our way along the track that winds round the western foot of the castle outcrop. Every so often we come across neat piles of rubble next to the track - mostly chunks of the red sandstone used to build the castle. The rubble's clearly deliberately heaped up, as though waiting for collection. By the way, if you read the caption to the 1673 drawing and you're still wondering what's odd about the walls, it's the fact that on that drawing, they're still there! Today, only the wall foundations survive around the castle's west side: so it looks as though the defences were deliberately demolished some time after 1673 and the stones rolled down the hill to be collected at the bottom and then carted off for recycling in other buildings. Trev makes the day's star observation: "But it's not just straightforward demolition, is it? They've knocked down the walls but kept the best towers - it's as though they wanted to preserve them for their dramatic value, like sculptures in the landscape". All the guidebooks agree that Dunstanburgh is one of the most dramatic castles in England, but as far as I know nobody's yet pointed out that somebody - in the fairly recent past - deliberately set out to make the ruins look as stunning as they do. Can we find out whodunnit?

 This line of thought makes us take a closer look at the natural pillars of basalt rock standing at the foot of the impressive Lilburn Tower. The Lilburn Tower's a medieval skyscraper: the turrets sticking up above the three-storey tower are visible from miles around, so it's always been interpreted as a watch-tower. We can't help wondering why the natural basalt pillars were left - they must've been awkward to build around, and they're an obvious supply of useful building stone. So why weren't they removed? Were they too left because of their sculptural value? If so, this time it must have been the medieval builders who had an artistic streak in them - or at least their boss, Earl Thomas. Seen from the right direction, some of the pillars look like human figures, and their shapes seem to be almost deliberately echoed by the tall, thin outline of the Lilburn Tower.

After lunch, we return to the bank of boulders that divides land from sea on the north side of the castle. Basically, it's the same picture as on the south - the boggy area where Jacqui was taking her cores on Day 6 is the equivalent of the 'alleged harbour' we were looking at last week. It's a low-lying inlet, separated from the sea by this bank of boulders that seems to have been thrown up by storms. On top of the bank, there are several mounds of overgrown soil - some look as though might have been tipped from wheelbarrows, but one is much larger. To be perfectly honest, we haven't got a clue what these are: they look like the kinds of waste tips you might find at a quarry or a building site. And there are signs that part of the cliff nearby might've been quarried, but why bother to make such a neat tip of the waste, when you could more easily chuck it down into the sea? Our ideas quickly reach a dead-end.

 But there's something else, something much more exciting, which we don't find so difficult to explain. The modern footpath cuts through a wide bank with facing-stones neatly laid along both edges. On its north side (away from the castle) is a dry ditch - nothing like as big as The Great Ditch, but twice as big as any of the modern drainage ditches we've seen, and much more carefully dug. The bank and ditch crosses the narrow neck of dry ground where the natural storm bank reaches the castle headland. It's the obvious place to build a defensive outwork, and the size and careful construction of this barrier immediately suggest that's exactly what we're looking at. Although it's got stone facings, it seems quite likely that the bank would have just acted as the foundation for a wooden palisade - effectively, an outer wall built in timber. Following the line of the bank, we discover that it originally climbed the steep side of the castle outcrop, and extended all the way to the castle's massive stone wall on the crest. The gap where the footpath cuts through is modern, worn away by hundreds of visitors who walk over the medieval outwork every day without noticing. But a few metres away is another gap, which seems to be original: presumably the site of a gateway through this northern outwork. Neat!

On the other side of the footpath, the outwork descends the slope into the boggy inlet and just ends. Stops dead. There's no sign that it's been altered or damaged in any way; in fact, the bank has a well-built stone terminal, as though that's where it was designed to end. So why does it just stop? Suddenly, we all have a blinding flash of inspiration: this low-lying, boggy area was once a shallow lake, preventing anyone getting round the end of the outwork. This is the crucial missing link we've all been puzzling over. A check of the ground levels with the GPS confirms our brilliant new idea: if the water was deep enough to flood up to the end of the outwork, it would have stretched all the way round to the nearer end of The Great Ditch, creating a continuous sheet of water right up to Harry's causeway. That's why The Great Ditch is only 100m long - this is all that was needed to join up with the end of the lake. And what would have been the effect of this vast sheet of shallow water? Well, better defence for the castle, a nice place to keep the fish for Earl Thomas' tea and, last but not least, beautiful reflections of the pinnacles of the Lilburn Tower, its walls soaring upwards from the natural basalt pillars around its feet. Wow! - now that's what I call drama! We all agree: this must be part of the explanation for the tower's siting and design.

Thursday - Day 9
 Yesterday's big discovery means it's time we took another look at the 'Alleged medieval harbour' - back to where we started on Day 1! If the castle's northern perimeter was formed by an artificial lake, could the boggy inlet on the south have been used in the same way? In other words, could there have been a complete outer circuit of water? We talked over this question for hours in the pub last night, and we're pretty sure we already know the answer. A quick examination of the inlet, which we proved last week could never have been a harbour, confirms our new idea: it was flooded, but not by the sea. We can actually see a slight change in the slope around the edges of the low-lying ground, marking the old water line, which gives us a good idea of how deep the water used to be. The bank we originally thought was an old storm beach would have acted as a massive dam across the lake's seaward side; it would also have carried the track from Craster, as it does today. We're guessing, but it seems very likely that there would have been another gateway here, overlooking the harbour and blocking the southern approach. We use the GPS to check precise height differences: like the northern lake, this one was only 60cms deep, and it too would have created beautiful reflections of the castle, this time including that impressive gatehouse.

Testing the different ground levels also alerts us to something else. The shallow depth of the water in the so-called harbour means that the southern lake wouldn't have reached nearly far enough to join up with the northern one. Just as we're beginning to think we might have got it all wrong, Trev finds the remains of another large bank, a bit like the northern outwork, sticking out from under the gorse bushes. This one runs across the narrow gulley between the two lumps of higher ground. It's a natural pinch-point - the ideal place to build a dam - and Stewart now claims he's thought there might be something in this area right from Day 1. Yeah, right, Stewart, nice try…

 So now we've got another dam, giving us not just one artificial lake, but a string of three, forming a kind of giant moat around the foot of the castle headland. There are quite a few castles that have artificial lakes like these alongside them - although usually only one! They served various practical purposes, but they were also at least partly ornamental - you can think of them as an early version of landscape gardening (Time Team, Changing Rooms, now Ground Force…). In the Middle Ages, they were called 'meres', a word that still means a lake in parts of England, for example in the Lake District, where you get lakes like Buttermere and Grasmere. The word's also related to the French for 'sea' (mer) and that's no surprise, because the language spoken by the aristoscrats in medieval England was basically a form of french. One of the largest and most famous meres was at Kenilworth Castle, but that was drained in the late 1600s - today it's even dryer than Dunstanburgh's. But at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, the mere's still full to the brim. English Heritage's Landscape Investigation Team did some work there a few years ago, so you can get an excellent idea of the stunning views these shallow sheets of water would have created by clicking here.

 Next we start to look more closely at Harry's theory that a track approached the castle headland from the west - an idea that's looking more convincing by the minute. The low causeway bank we saw yesterday would have carried the track between the West and North Meres. And at the foot of the castle, there are signs that a big stone building has been removed: lots of stone blocks scattered around, remains of stone foundations visible in the side of a modern drain, and the track itself is carefully paved, with big, rounded basalt cobbles that must've been brought up from the beach. More than just a farm track then! It looks as though there must've been another gateway here, and this time built in stone, not just timber. Harry's idea of the track from the west is more important than he realised - this looks like the grandest of the three gates in the outer perimeter, probably the main approach to the heart of the castle. If only we could tell more about what the gateway looked like!

 When we start to look at it more closely, it's clear that the inside edge of the West Mere has been created by cutting back into the foot of the natural slope and throwing the earth up to form a bank running along the top of this sharp slope. Again, it looks as though there might have been a timber palisade on top of the bank. Perhaps this extra defence was needed because the perimeter is overlooked by higher ground just beyond the site of the mere. But what was this immense perimeter enclosing? Was it just arable land - the ridge-and-furrow ploughing we mapped on Day 3? Raiding by the Scots was always a danger in these parts, but this seems a lot of effort to go to just to protect a few fields of barley! Another long night of discussion in the pub is urgently needed!

Friday - Day 10
 After a series of important discoveries, it's time to knuckle down and get on with recording the big swathe of medieval ploughing on the hill to the west of what we're now calling the West Mere. After the excitement of the last few days, this seems pretty dull. In fact, the most interesting thing about this area is its name: locally, so we hear, it's called 'The Key', referring to a legend about how the last owner of the castle hurled the key to the castle gate from the top of the headland, and this is where it landed. Sounds a bit like King Arthur throwing Excalibur into Lake Avalon to me!

 But even this apparently boring area proves a minefield. Literally: anti-personnel mines! We'd almost forgotten the Second World War for the last couple of days, but here it is again, and this time it means business. A close look at the aerial photographs shows straight lines of shallow pits all across the hill and we soon find the first of them on the ground. English Heritage's public archive, the National monuments Record, holds the national collection of aerial photographs, with images from the earliest days of flying, covering the whole of England (and including Tim's excellent photos!). Looking at the photos taken by the RAF in the Second World War, we can't see any signs of the minefield, but we know why this is: one of the locals has told us that the mines were all dug out soon after the war with a mechanical digger. What we're looking at today is just the pits left by the digger: during the war, the minefield would have been totally invisible from the air. The mines were clearly laid at very regular intervals in dead straight lines. Easy enough to spot today, and easy enough to dig out if you've got a plan of where they were laid. Not so easy to spot when all that's visible is a trigger-wire no bigger than a stem of grass, and you're running at top speed across open ground under fire from dug-outs on top of the ridge in front of you and the inland-facing pillbox behind you. Every now and then, there's a gap in the pits, where we can see from the spacing there ought to be one. Just in case, we tip-toe very quietly round the outside...

 It's been an excellent second week - if anything even better than last week. It's long been thought that Dunstanburgh was built in response to a direct military threat, as tension with the Scots increased in the run-up to the Battle of Bannockburn on June 23rd, 1314. That battle proved disastrous for Edward II, Earl Thomas' arch-rival, and turned Robert Bruce into a Scottish national hero of legendary proportions. We now know that the castle, with its triple-gated outer perimeter, was larger and stronger than we initially believed. But we also know now that it wasn't just a military building, it was also the showpiece of Earl Thomas of Lancaster, the richest man in England after the King, at the height of the age of medieval chivalry. Silhouetted on the cliff edge, surrounded by its ornamental meres, with its elegant, modern towers, the castle was the perfect combination of architectural flamboyance and a dramatic setting. Above all, Dunstanburgh was a political statement, a symbol of Earl Thomas' wealth, power and status. The modern guidebook's got it right in essence, but the vast scale of Thomas' achievement is only now becoming clear.

 So there we are! We've only been inside the castle walls for about 5 minutes, and we already feel we've unlocked many of its secrets. So will next week have any surprises in store? Well, a conversation I had with Jacqui on Monday has been echoing round my brain all week. The old guidebook I read last week suggested that the '-burgh' part of Dunstanburgh implied that there had been a prehistoric fortification here before the castle. The ending '-burgh', or '-bury', comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for 'fort': it crops up all the time in names like 'Edinburgh' and 'Salisbury' and usually applies to Iron Age fortifications. And I'm reminded of Norham Castle, not that far away, which Trev and Stewart investigated last year: it turned out to have been built within an Iron Age fort which hadn't been recognised before (to find out more about that story, Click here). The current guidebook, on the other hand, dismisses this theory completely. It takes the view that Dunstanburgh was an invented name, a deliberate soundy-likey made up by Earl Thomas in 1313 to invite comparison with Edward II's castle nearby at Bamburgh, where there was definitely a genuine prehistoric presence. This sounds like just the sort of shabby underhand trick that we're coming to expect from Earl Thomas.

Key to the aerial photo:
red symbols = Earl Thomas' gatehouse and the Lilburn Tower
yellow blocks = probable gatehouses
yellow line = outer perimeter (the timber palisade)

 But Jacqui wasn't so sure: "Look at that hill! It's such a landmark! It's inconceivable it's going to have been deserted in the Iron Age - or before then, come to that. Or the Roman period, either". And I have to admit, she's got a point. And there are odd finds of prehistoric and Roman material from the castle headland. But at this stage, I'm keeping an open mind as to whether we'll find any hard evidence to back up Jacqui's theory.

Over the weekend...
 Over the past couple of weekends Harry, Kevin and a team of National Trust volunteers have been clearing the gorse round the Second World War radar station. When Trev discovered the Bronze Age burial mound in the area where the gorse had accidentally burnt off over the summer, it became really clear to us all that the more of the ground surface we could see, the more we'd find. That's precisely why we start most of our investigations once all the leaves have fallen off the trees: we usually find far more in winter than in summer. Fortunately, we've had fantastic weather this November, but we've got everything it takes to carry on in rain, wind and snow.

 And this afternoon, it's been perfect weather again for the guided tour, with clear blue skies and a calm sea. We had a good turn out of more than 70 people, almost all locals, which is excellent - Dunstanburgh Castle is the local people's heritage more than anyone else's. And in return, the locals have played their part in our investigation by telling us what they know of the site's history. One brings a copy of a 19th-century painting, which shows that the castle's west wall had been knocked down by that date, and the cottage on Turner's painting had also gone. And remember the fragments of red sandstone around the jetty? Another local remembers hearing from an elderly resident, now no longer alive, that in the 1920s, the Ministry of Works dumped lots of rubble on the beach after they'd finished 'tidying up' the castle ruins. So maybe I'll have to re-think my original idea. We've got a week left, and a week's a long time in archaeology!

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