Up on the Cliffs: Recent Excavations at East Wear Bay and South Foreland
Recent excavations at East Wear Bay and South Foreland
By Andrew Richardson
In July and August 2015 Canterbury Archaeological Trust (CAT) led excavations on two cliff top locations on the south Kent coast. This article presents the initial results of both projects.
East Wear Bay
This summer saw the first season of the East Wear Bay Archaeological Field School, which took place at Folkestone on the cliff top overlooking the Bay. This newly launched venture is intended to become an annual fixture for some seasons to come and aims to do two things. Firstly, the school provides high quality archaeological field training delivered by CAT. Students this year included people from a range of backgrounds, from local sixth-formers considering studying archaeology at university, to undergraduates and recent graduates looking to increase their field experience (and employability), to those simply looking to begin or develop an interest in practical archaeology.
In addition to student fees, funding was provided by a number of partners, including the KAS, which provided a much-needed initial grant that allowed the project to go on to secure further match-funding. Places for a number of local young people (aged 16-24) were funded by a grant from the Roger De Haan Charitable Trust, with a Landscape Heritage Grant from the Up on the Downs Landscape Partnership Scheme (itself funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund) providing further support. Volunteers from Folkestone Research and Archaeology Group (FRAG), Dover Archaeological Group (DAG) and the KAS also gave much needed help with both finds processing and on-site support and supervision. A number of anthropology students from Texas State University also provided very able assistance and next year it is hoped the project will play host to a number of fee-paying students from Austin. The field school this year also played host to students from the University of Kent and Lille 3.
The second major aim of the field school, and of the wider East Wear Bay Archaeological Project (EWBAP) of which it forms a part, is to carry out the excavation and recording of the deposits along the cliff top that are at immediate threat of loss to erosion. The site has seen a number of episodes of investigation since the first digs carried out there in 1919 by staff from Folkestone Museum, most notably S.E. Winbolt's eight week
excavation in the summer of 1924 which laid bare the floor plan of two successive major Roman villas. More recently, the site saw excavation in 1989 by the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit and in 2010-11 by CAT as part of A Town Unearthed. This long history of digs sometimes leads to the question “why are you digging it up again?” The truth is, the prehistoric and Roman archaeology overlooking East Wear Bay is extensive, deep and well preserved, yet only a small percentage has been archaeologically investigated. The villa buildings themselves, important though they are, represent only a small part of a much bigger (and older) site, far more of which has already been lost to the sea than has been excavated and recorded. Yet every dig that has taken place has revealed more about a site with a long and complex history, and which can increasingly be seen to have played a seminal role in contacts between Britain and the near Continent, most especially during the Late Iron Age.
We now know that, during the 1st centuries BC and AD, East Wear Bay was the home of a great industry, producing rotary querns and mortars (and perhaps other items) fashioned from the locally available Greensand. These querns have been found across Kent and on numerous sites north of the Thames as far afield as Hunsbury hill fort near Northampton. Curiously, they seem to be completely absent from sites in France, perhaps indicating that the vessels carrying them (most if not all)
all would have left the site by sea) were bound for the Wantsum Channel, the Thames, and the coastal inlets of Essex and Suffolk, rather than for Gaul. There is also evidence suggestive of salt production, whilst pottery appears to have been made at or near the site. At the same time, and increasingly from about 15BC onwards, imported goods including Spanish and Italian amphorae (for the transport of fish oil and wine respectively) and a wide range of Gallic fine-ware pottery, plus large numbers of imported Gallic coins, reached East Wear Bay, indicating strong and regular cross-channel trade links (despite the lack of querns going back across the Channel; what did the holds of those ships carry instead?). Production of querns and import of goods continued into the early Roman period, although the site appears to have undergone something of a downturn following the Claudian conquest in AD43 and the subsequent establishment of Dover as a major port of entry in Roman-controlled Britain.
Around the last decade of the 1st century AD, a large (and in terms of Roman Britain, very early) villa was constructed at the heart of the site, marking a profound change of use from coastal industrial and trading settlement, to high status Roman-style residence. The question of who instigated this change remains open, but the use of Tufa (quarried by the Romans in the Dour valley and used at about the same time in the construction of the Classis Britannica naval fort in Dover), along with flint nodules and some Ironstone in the construction, along with the finds of tiles produced by the Classis Britannica, suggests action by the Roman state and/or military, or someone closely linked to it. The readily-available Greensand was not used in the walls of this villa (unlike its successor, constructed sometime after AD170, which was built almost exclusively from Greensand). This strange choice
of construction materials, on a site with a long established tradition of quarrying and working the Greensand, alongside the apparent downturn in activity at the site in the decades preceding the building of the villa, also lends weight to the view that the first villa was not simply the result of wealthy local inhabitants ‘upgrading’ to a high-class Roman way of life.
So what did the 2015 season add to this already fascinating picture? This year’s trench, covering some 68 square metres, was located to expand on a much smaller area dug in 2010 to the north of the villa complex. This had revealed a sequence of intercutting Late Iron Age and Roman ditches, in which was interleaved a series of stony deposits indicative of possible quern production. The 2015 dig confirmed that here was an actual quern production area, comprising a large spread of Greensand debitage, one or more laid stone surfaces, and large quantities of querns in various stages of production, ranging from a large slab of unworked Greensand (the raw material quarried from the cliffs to the south) through to nearly finished half or complete querns, many with partially drilled holes. The discovery of this workshop area, dating to the 1st century AD, and perhaps the first of its kind to be excavated in Britain, represents a find of considerable significance. Moreover, despite being covered in places by only a shallow depth of topsoil, the production surfaces survive in remarkable condition, and give the impression of being much as they were when the stonemasons downed tools for the last time (one wonders what the reason for that downing of tools was). At the end of the dig the writer removed 50 whole or partial querns from the site (necessitating several van journeys) and many more remain in the ground awaiting the completion of the excavation of this trench next season (July-August 2016).
In addition, the excavation revealed the presence of a large round house, represented by a semi-circular drainage gully and some post-holes, located immediately to the east (down slope on the seaward side) of the quern-making area. That this was a residence of people connected to the Greensand industry was underlined by the highly unusual stone-lined chamber cut into the floor of the house and an area of apparent floor comprised Greensand paving on a Chalk rubble base. The small chamber resembles a cist, a stone lined burial chamber, but although it contained some burnt bone in its lower fill along with fragments of burnt clay (possibly daub, perhaps associated with a later ditch) appear to have collapsed inwards, suggesting it remained open for a considerable period before partially collapsing under the weight of the surrounding soil. At this stage its function remains uncertain, although completion of its excavation next year and analysis of the palaeo-environmental remains recovered from its internal fills (which were 100% sampled) will hopefully shed more light on this question. Clearly however, it remains a very unusual feature within a British roundhouse, and underlines the easy access this community had to abundant supplies of hard stone.
The excavation of this round house (the second to be identified on the site) and quern making area will be completed during the 2016 season. Subsequent seasons will see new trenches opened along the cliff edge, with the eventual aim of achieving a buffer zone of cleared archaeology that will keep well ahead of the ongoing erosion for many years to come. There is no question that considerable unexposed archaeological structures, deposits and finds currently remain in the threatened zone, with much of the area along the cliff edge at immediate to medium-term risk of loss. The East Wear Bay Archaeological Field School, and the wider project of which it forms a part, offers our best hope of doing something about this. The alternative is to continue to impotently watch the gradual loss of this unique cliff-top location, with its exceptional quality of preservation and recording, leaving only scraps to be collected in later years from the beach.
The Field School, although led by CAT, relies on the support of a wide range of partners, and seeks to draw in fee-paying students from far and wide, including international students such as those from Texas State. This year’s students had a great experience, were a pleasure to work with and train, and rapidly become effective at both excavation and recording; it is hoped they go on to develop
their interest in archaeology further. We hope to see some of them again next year. But it is unlikely student fees alone will be sufficient to resource the rescue and eventual publication of this rich and complex site, hence the continued need for additional sources of funding. The Kent Archaeological Society was and is one of the project’s key backers (and was the first to put grant funding into it). It is hoped that in future years that support will continue, both from the Society as a whole and in the form of much-welcomed in-kind support from individual members.
South Foreland
At the same time as the dig at East Wear Bay was being carried out, during late July and early August, CAT led an enthusiastic team of volunteers in excavating a series of fourteen small trenches within the grounds of the South Foreland Lighthouse. This iconic lighthouse was formerly run by Trinity House but since 1988 has been in the ownership of the National Trust and has become a popular visitor attraction and destination for walkers along the famous White Cliffs of Dover. The dig was timed to coincide with the Up on the Downs Big Summer Festival and was undertaken as part of the preparation of a Conservation Management Plan on the lighthouse and its immediate environs, a project that is jointly funded by the National Trust and Up on the Downs. Volunteers who took part were drawn primarily from the National Trust’s large and dedicated cohort of lighthouse volunteers, plus local archaeological and detecting volunteers. In addition, Zac Portet, an archaeology undergraduate from Exeter, worked very vigorously throughout the project.
The overarching aim of the excavations (effectively a series of small evaluation trenches) was to assess the extent and nature of any archaeology surviving within the curtilage of the lighthouse grounds, whether that related directly to the lighthouse, previous lighthouses, known historical activities at the site, or earlier or completely unknown features. In the event, most trenches yielded features of interest, and a large quantity and range of finds were recovered. Evidence of ancillary structures, including a culvert, relating to a previous lighthouse were uncovered, and a large number of finds relating directly to the current lighthouse were found, including a series of spent graphite rods from 19th and early 20th century carbon arc lamps (front cover image), plus a number of lighthouse-keeper’s buttons. A significant
find was part of the concrete base for Marconi’s direction-finding radio emitter, set up on the slope in front of the lighthouse in the early 1920’s as part of a ground-breaking experiment. This was one of a series of cutting edge experiments by globally famous scientific pioneers such as Marconi and Faraday that took place at South Foreland during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But the story of the site goes back much further. The Marconi radio base cut through an earlier structure. This somewhat ephemeral feature had a flat base cut as a shallow terrace into the natural Chalk, with a curved end (the other end had been cut away by the Marconi aerial) and internal post and stake holes. The fill yielded quantities of late Roman pottery, animal bone and mussel shells, along with a copper alloy buckle and a Roman coin of Maximianus. Three other Roman coins were found in the immediate vicinity; one of Allectus, another of Galerius (the fourth was illegible). According to David Holman, these coins could have been minted between AD293-7, and certainly not much later. Given the superb view from the site of not only the Straits of Dover and the French coast, but around to the Goodwin Sands and the approaches to the east Kent coast and Wantsum Channel, it is tempting to wonder whether this enigmatic little structure is related to the conflict between the usurper Allectus (and perhaps his predecessor Carausius) and the wider Roman Empire? Certainly, this might have been a period when it was felt wise to have eyes on the cliffs watching over the Straits.
It is planned to complete the Conservation Management Plan for South Foreland by early spring 2016. Hopefully a future Newsletter article will summarise the findings from this in-depth study into one of Kent’s most stunning, and iconic, places.
For more information on East Wear Bay, South Foreland, and many other projects, visit the CAT website at www.canterburytrust.co.uk or ‘Like’ us on facebook.
You can find out more about the Up on the Downs Landscape Partnership Scheme at www.uponthedowns.org.uk