Category: prehistory

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Dudley Ay It

We were driving home from North Wales, and it is a long way to East Anglia from there. So we were looking for a break in the journey somewhere: a place to rest overnight before A14-ing onwards to Norwich? While it might not be everybody’s destination of choice, Dudley, de facto capital of England’s Black Country, has some points in its favour, its West Midlands location midway between coasts being one of them. Besides, I wanted to have a look at Wren’s Nest, the geopark on the town outskirts, where all manner of weird and wonderful fossils from the Silurian period might be found.

I had been here before, several years earlier, a brief stop on a coast to coast pilgrimage that I wrote about in my book Westering. Back then I had passed through Dudley as I traced my way through the Birmingham – Black Country conurbation by way of its extensive canal network; an interesting route, although Venice didn’t spring very much to mind as I traipsed westwards through a decayed, post-industrial landscape.

I wrote then:

I arrived at a large, five-way roundabout and a dual-carriageway, which I followed further uphill towards Dudley Castle, which I could see, noble but not entirely fairytale, flying its flag on top of the hill ahead. The next roundabout held several large, Black Country-themed sculptures: a steel crucible, bronze cannon, heraldic lion and medieval plough. It looked as if Dudley was doing its best to make the most of its industrial heritage.  I wanted to take a closer look but was stuck on the wrong side of the dual carriageway with no safe means of crossing. Eventually, I spotted a footbridge ahead that conveniently led me straight to Dudley’s bus station at the foot of Castle Hill, an outcrop of the Wenlock Group limestone that had played a significant part in the town’s industrial development.

This time, coming from Wales by way of Shrewsbury and Telford, we came upon this same roundabout as we were driving around looking for the hotel we had booked for the night. Travelodge found, and bags deposited, we went off in search of food and drink. A peremptory Google search of the vicinity revealed a pub close to the castle that might be a possibility but when we arrived at the Fellows things didn’t look very promising. A tribute singer was belting out a cover of Red Red Wine by UB40 at deafening volume and the courtyard was packed with smokers who were intent on avoiding the aural onslaught inside. Besides, it was Sunday evening and the availability of lunchtime roasts had been and gone. It looked as if we would have to try elsewhere.

On the way up to the Fellows we had passed an even more unpromising establishment on Castle Hill, a single-roomed place that called itself the Star Bar, which resembled more a garage lock-up than a place for food and drink, although the former was clearly available as boisterous yam yam* voices echoed from behind it half-closed metal portal. Also on Castle Hill was a once-splendid Art Deco cinema that now served as a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall. Next door, a Tudor Gothic pile had similarly been converted to serve as a place of worship for the town’s Muslim community: Dudley Central Mosque. The building, I found out later, was Grade II-listed and had once been a school.

* yam yam = Black Country dialect

Across the road from the Fellows, a grand statue of the First Earl of Dudley stood at the top of the town’s pedestrianised shopping zone and market place. A little further on we passed St Edmund’s Church, an 18th-century replacement of earlier place of worship of Anglo-Saxon origin destroyed in the Civil War. To symbolise its dedication, twin crowns and the arrows of the saint’s martyrdom were on display in front of the church entrance.

This being Sunday evening, the area was largely deserted; its market stalls locked up, although some of the shop fronts gave the impression of having been closed up for some time. There were several interesting statues scattered about to restore some sense of civic pride. Most notable of these was that of local football hero Duncan Edwards. Born in Dudley in 1936, Edwards had been a Manchester United ‘Busby Babe’ and highly respected England defender before dying tragically, aged just 21, from injuries sustained in the 1958 Munich Air Disaster. Further down, just beyond the market place, was a life-size bronze statue of a top-hatted Victorian gentleman sitting on a bench: the poet Ben Boucher (1769 – 1851), who wrote ‘Lines on Dudley Market’, some of which were etched into the curved Portland stone bench. While Boucher lived a much longer life than the unfortunate footballer, the Dudley Poet’s own sad fate was to end up impoverished in the town workhouse.

This brief glimpse of the town centre reinforced the impression I had taken from my previous visit: one of decline and closure, one of faded glory. The re-purposing of grand old buildings; the closure of town centre shops and department stores – out-competed ever since the opening of Merry Hill Shopping Centre at nearby Brierley Hill towards the end of the last century. Counter to this sense of decline were the upbeat Town Trail pavement plaques that told with pride the town’s unique geological and industrial history. It was here in the Black Country that the Industrial Revolution had originated and then swiftly gained momentum in the late 18th century. A serendipitous convergence of factors had come into play. The area had all the necessary raw materials – coal, limestone and iron ore. It had – or, rather, soon acquired – the labour, skills and engineering talent. It also had the means of distribution – canals, and later railways. It could even be argued that the Anthropocene – the recent epoch in which human activity has been the dominant factor in changing the world around us – began hereabouts. I touch upon this in the final chapter of my recent book Flint Country, where I write:

The precise date of its onset remains a matter of debate. James Lovecock, originator of the Gaia concept, claims that the Anthropocene started with the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century, the period in modern history when the use of fossil fuels for manufacturing and transport got fully underway. Fine-tuning this connection between the dominance of human influence and technological progress, it could even be said that the Anthropocene began with the invention of Thomas Newcomen’s steam-powered pump, a machine first used to remove water from a coal mine near Dudley in the English Black Country in 1712.

Next morning we made our way to Wren’s Nest, where I noticed that the suburban streets approaching the site had pleasingly apposite names like Silurian Mews and Fossil View. It was a grey, overcast, not-very-warm-for-August sort of day, and the site was fairly quiet apart from a couple of dog-walkers and kids on bikes. At the entrance, an information board gave us the lowdown on the site’s remarkable geological pedigree. Wren’s Nest is effectively a 428 million-year-old tropical seabed that was once covered by coral reefs and uplifted within the Much Wenlock limestone that gifted this region its industrial resources.

The prize fossil here is a species of trilobite, Calymene bumenbachii, known colloquially as the ‘Dudley Bug’, which looks like a scarily, super-sized woodlice, although it is more closely related to modern day crabs. To find one of these would have made me very happy but they proved to be elusive. What I did find after an hour and a half of turning over scree were several bits of coral and all manner of fossilised brachiopod shells. Best of all was a small flat piece of rock embedded with dozens of tiny shells: a fragment of ancient sea floor that revealed a microcosm of life 428 million years ago, a time when the existing continents were yet to separate and the territory of what would become the British Isles lay south of the Equator. To contemplate such scales of time and distance takes the breath away. William Blake wrote of seeing ‘the world in a grain of sand’. Here you could see a long-vanished world in a small piece of rock.

We left the car park and drove northeast through Tipton and Wednesbury to reach the M6 with its relentless parade of thundering traffic. It was a timely reminder that we were now firmly back in the age of man and machine, the Anthropocene. In comparison with the aeons that had passed since the fossils of Wren’s Nest were deposited at the bottom of a tropical ocean, the 19th-century heyday of the Industrial Revolution in the Black Country with its smoke, red-sky furnaces and metal-clanging workshops was as if just yesterday.

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Flint Country by FabFourBlog

My latest book Flint Country was published a couple of weeks ago. I would just like to share this generous blog post about it by Klausbernd Vollmar and Hanne Siebers. It also includes some of Hanne’s lovely images of Cley next the Sea on the North Norfolk coast.

Flint Country

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Of Whales and Ancestors: Ostend, Norfolk

The very mention of the village of Happisburgh in Norfolk brings to mind all manner of prehistoric associations and connections with long-extinct ancestors. The early years of this current century have revealed exciting local evidence of the presence of earliest hominins in northwest Europe: Homo antecessor (‘Pioneer Man’) – near million-year-old clues in the form of flint tools and muddy footprints. Early humans walked these shores in the early Pleistocene, except it wasn’t so much a shore then as a river estuary: the Thames in an earlier incarnation when it flowed further north than its current course. Political boundaries were yet to exist, 800,000 years ago; the land mass that was Britain was still connected to Eurasia.

Prehistory aside, Happisburgh (pronounced ‘Haze-bruh’ to those who know) is also well known for other reasons. Its fame precedes it, although notoriety might be a better term. Nowhere on this coastline is the menace of coastal erosion witnessed more emphatically, although the near-vanished village of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast, once a thriving medieval port, might come close. For Dunwich the damage wreaked by the ever-invading North Sea is the past; in Happisburgh it is the present and future. Continually losing territory to the North Sea, there is visible evidence of the dynamic shifting shoreline to be seen everywhere here. Cliffs can be witnessed crumbling on a regular basis. Houses that were once located comfortably inland now perch perilously close to cliff edges; some have already succumbed and their remains litter the beach. Roads and tracks can be seen dramatically truncated along the cliff edge – streets that have become roads to nowhere, roads that lead to oblivion.

Even the village’s longstanding icons – the 15th-century St Mary’s church with its commandingly tall tower, the second highest in the county, and the equally imposing red-banded Trinity lighthouse built in 1790, Norfolk’s oldest – are both numbered in their days and probably won’t see this century out. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now – this northwest stretch of the Norfolk littoral is, after all, a fast-eroding coastline where such things can only be expected. Even so, the terrifying spectre of irreversible climate change does nothing but hasten the inevitable. Bold efforts have been made to ameliorate the threat: large chunks of alien geology have been transported here to be deposited on the beach – stone barriers to hold back the tide – yet somehow it feels like the wrong sort of folk tale: a village boy taking up a slingshot against a giant ogre, a near-futile King Cnut-like gesture.

So, there is plenty to say about Happisburgh but what of Ostend, its immediate neighbour to the north? Walking the coast here recently in preparation for a new book on short walks in Norfolk, I tried to find out more about the small settlement that shares its name with the better known Belgian resort. Information was elusive, other than it belonged to the parish of Walcott and was effectively an area of holiday properties appended to the south of that village. The name intrigued me, though, and I wondered whether there was a historical connection as there are several Waterloo farms scattered around Norfolk that commemorate the final victory over Napoleon close to the Belgian town of that name. Until 2001, when it was finally demolished, there used to be an early 17th century house in the village was called Ostend House. There may possibly be a connection here but was it always called Ostend House, or did the name come with the rebuild that took place in the 19th century?

Looking further for information, Wikipedia informed me that in June 2002 a rare Cuvier’s beaked whale was stranded on the beach here. This was the same species of whale that Kathleen Jamie describes being on display in Bergen’s Whale Museum. The Bergen whale was found choked by plastic bags that the unfortunate animal had probably mistakenly recognised as squid, its prime food source. As I had only just (twice) read Jamie’s latest book Cairn,which describes her return visit to the Norwegian museum, there was an immediate connection for me here, although it was nothing to do with the name of the place.

The whale was named by the French scientist Georges Cuvier (1769—1832)*, a polymath who was the first to coin the term ‘extinction’. In 1796 Cuvier presented a paper to the National Institute of Science and Arts in Paris, where he compared the anatomy of living and fossil elephants to prove that extinction was a fact and proposed that the now-extinct elephants had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events. Although a proponent of catastrophism in geology, Cuvier rejected the idea of organic evolution. As an essentialist he believed that plants and animals were created for particular roles and niches in the world environment and subsequently remained unchanged throughout their existence. In Cuvier’s thinking, as soon as one species became extinct as the result of geological upheaval, another would be divinely created to replace it. It would be Charles Darwin, of course, who would set the record straight some 65 years later with the publication of his On the Origin of Species. What Darwin would have made of the 21st-century discovery of evidence of a long-extinct ancestor, Homo antecessor, on a sea-battered English shoreline we can only imagine. Evolution to extinction: such a surprisingly short distance of time and space linking the two.

*[Alas, Cuvier’s name has also been linked with scientific racism, although we might excuse him for being, as the cliché goes, ‘a man of his time’. Of course, modern-day racists should not be forgiven in the same way – they are not men (or women) of their time. We might, I suppose, call them dinosaurs but to do that would be a disservice to palaeontology.]

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Journey to Avebury

A Journey to Avebury is the name of a short silent film made by Derek Jarman made in 1971. Shot in wobbly Super 8, and saturated with burnt orange hues, it has an otherworldly eldritch atmosphere that is hard to describe. Suffice to say it is hardly be the sort of thing that the then English Tourist Board might have chosen to promote the stone-encircled Wiltshire village. Too painterly and surreal by half for such considerations, the film is both beautiful and slightly disturbing, and has the feel of a psychedelic adventure about to go wrong. With wind-blown trees and shifting clouds against Martian skies, A Journey to Avebury evokes the strangeness of a landscape that is already inherently deeply weird. The weirdness owes much to the implacable monoliths that dominate the village, although Jarman’s focus on the rolling Wiltshire landscape that surrounds the village, with its bare fields and isolated clumps of trees, is equally suggestive of a territory that exists outside the usual constraints of time and space.

Avebury is undoubtedly an extraordinary place – a village that not only lies at the heart of a sacred Neolithic landscape but one that uniquely sits within the sweep of a stone circle. Not surprisingly it is a much visited location, especially in the summer months, as visitors that range from newly retired to New Age travellers come to walk the circle of stones and pay tribute to this ancient, stone-bound place. After several visits to the village myself, its megaliths and raised banks, pathways and lanes have become firmly imprinted in my mind. Some places fade quickly but Avebury is somewhere that etches itself on the memory.

Even in prehistoric, monument-rich Wiltshire, Avebury has a particular gravity. It feels as if it is at the centre of things, a focal point for the megalith-strewn landscape that surrounds it. Nearby are other, even older monuments that put the stone circle and avenues of Avebury into context: the destroyed stone and timber circle of The Sanctuary, the chambered West Kennet Long Barrow and, most remarkable of all, the man-made chalk Mount Fuji that is Silbury Hill. These are all connected, by footpaths, tracks and, as many believe, ley lines, although it is the monument of Avebury that gives the impression of lying at the beating heart of it all.

Visiting Avebury is like going to meet an old friend from the past. Last summer, I did just that: arranging to meet a friend whom I had not seen for decades at the village. We sat at a bench in the churchyard of and reminisced about shared memories from forty years ago. Time stretched and compressed obligingly – but perhaps the location helped.

Like Stonehenge, the megaliths of Avebury were likely associated with ritual and social gatherings. They may also have functioned as some sort of solar calendar. But if Avebury is a place of measured time, it is also a place that stands outside time. The past, present and future rest easy here, although in the right light the village with its New Age atmosphere can appear to be perpetually locked in the 1970s – perhaps 1971, the same year that Jarman came here to make his film.

A Journey to Avebury (1971) by Derek Jarman

Also, this excellent fantasy drama TV series for children, broadcast on ITV in 1977, was filmed almost entirely at Avebury. Children of the Stones by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray

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Rathlin Island

For one week this June this small island off the Antrim coast was a constant presence. The cottage we had rented stood high on a hill a couple of miles outside the resort of Ballycastle and the view to the north was an uninterrupted panorama of sea, sky and the long, low profile of Northern Ireland’s only inhabited island. The view depended on the weather, of course, which was something that changed constantly and wavered between overcast and mixed spells of sunshine and showers.

The L-shaped island that hugged the northern horizon was always visible, although in less clement weather it was sometimes little more than a hazy grey outline, a vague smudge that sat on the water. Sun or shine, two of the island’s three lighthouses were always in view, winking at intervals to alert shipping – the waters around Rathlin Island have a long history of shipwrecks and the remains of many unsuspecting vessels lie gathering barnacles at the bottom of the Atlantic close to its shore.

On sunnier days, more detail became evident and the island’s magpie cliffs of basalt and chalk could be clearly discerned, as could the houses and church of the village by the harbour. It was on these brighter days that other landforms also took shape on the horizon. Most days we could make out the southern end of the Scottish peninsula that is the Mull of Kintyre but now and then, far beyond the island, more distant places came into view – the hills of Islay and the unmistakable rise of the Paps of Jura.

From our perspective the island appeared to be at the edge of things. The most northerly point in Northern Ireland, it was the place where the island of Ireland gave way to the Atlantic. A small island that lay off the coast of another larger island, it seemed to be more an outlier than a stepping stone to anywhere else. But it was a place that had not always been so peripheral: long before today’s national divisions had come into play Rathlin had been central to the ancient Gaelic kingdom of Dal Riada, a political entity that included the coast of Argyll in western Scotland as well as part of what is now County Antrim in Northern Ireland.

Some days we could make out the ferry, Spirit of Rathlin, plying its way between Ballycastle and the island. On a day that promised to be calmer and sunnier than most we made the journey ourselves. As we drew closer to the harbour at Rathlin an increasing number of seabirds could be seen bobbing about on the water – a taste of what we would soon be seeing on the island itself. These were mostly guillemots but there were also small parties of gannets flying low over the waves, identifiable even at distance with their butter-coloured necks and long ink-dipped wings.

At Rathlin harbour, a bus – the ‘Puffin Express’ – was waiting to drive passengers across the island to the RSPB bird reserve at its western point. Here, steps led down to a viewing platform opposite the cliffs and stacks where the seabirds nested. The malodorous smell of guano grew increasingly strong as we descended – observing seabirds up close is undoubtedly one of the least glamorous aspects of bird watching. From the viewing platform vast numbers of seabirds could be seen at their nests opposite on the rocks – as closely packed as an urban high-rise but with distinctly separate enclaves of guillemot and razorbill, kittiwake and puffin. Closer to the viewing platform, a few fulmars, contemptuous of the excitable human presence and unperturbed by the relentless glint of expensive optics, had made their nests in the grass just beyond the barrier.

Driving back to the village, past fields of sheep and grazing cattle, our driver stopped the bus briefly to point out a cave to our left. It was the entrance, he said, to the stone axe mine that had existed on the island in Neolithic times.

In Belfast, a few days earlier, I had gone to see the so-called Malone Hoard at the Ulster Museum. The hoard was a collection of 19 beautifully polished stone axes that had been discovered on Malone Road close to the museum. The axes were around 6,000 years old and clearly ceremonial objects of some kind: not only were they too large to be of practical use for chopping trees but when they were discovered some of the stones had been found aligned vertically in the ground. Even behind glass, they were undeniably beautiful objects and had a curvy heft about them that seemed to invite handling. Given the understandable restrictions imposed by museums, this, of course, was not possible.

The axes had been identified as being made from a rock called porcellanite, a hard, dense impure variety of chert so-named because of its physical similarity to unglazed porcelain. Unlike flint, porcellanite does not flake easily and has a texture that accepts a fine polish and keen edge. There were only two possible sources of this scarce rock in Northern Ireland. Both were in Antrim. One was at Tievebulliagh, a 402-metre mountain in the Glens of Antrim; the other was on Rathlin Island. Both sources yielded rock of exactly the same physical and chemical makeup so it was impossible to tell which had been used for the Malone Road axes. For reasons of romance rather than anything more scientific, I preferred to think that these precious objects had originated here on the island.

Back off the bus, we sat on the beach at Mill Bay listening to the piping of oystercatchers and watching grey seals as they made forays through the rafts of seaweed that lay just offshore. Seaweed was once a profitable business here. A little further on towards the harbour, an abandoned kelp barn stood roofless next to the shore. It was built of blocks of the same Cretaceous chalk that make up the white cliffs we could see from our rental cottage on the mainland.

After an unproductive listen for corncrakes in a field we had been told about by an RSPB warden we made our way to the jetty to wait for the ferry back to Ballycastle. Notwithstanding the lack of corncrakes, it had been a satisfying few hours. We were by now brim-full with all the wonders that Rathlin Island had to offer: the seabirds – the smell, the noise, the frantic flying about; the wider natural history of the place – the seals, the kelp, the garden flowers that had gone feral and colonised the island’s dry stone walls. Then there was the geology – the Cretaceous chalk and Tertiary basalt of the cliffs, the flints on the beach, the cave with its supply of elusive porcellanite. It would have been nice to have taken a peek inside the cave where the stone axe mine had been but it did not really matter. Prehistory, myth and memory are all intertwined and we make our own emotional truths. Whatever the true archaeological facts of it, in my mind at least the Malone Hoard axes would always be associated with this place on the edge of things.