Archaeology Tuesdays – The Mount, Sandon

About 700 m east of the village of Sandon lies a tree-covered mound, off Park Lane and north of Notley Green. According to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) in 1911, it is a ‘moated tumulus’. This is not a recognised term in archaeology and shows that the surveyor had difficulty recognising what it was. Indeed, there has long been speculation about its origins and purpose. It has been described as a prehistoric burial mound, an early medieval moot hill, a Norman motte, a medieval windmill mound or a combination of these.

It is almost circular, measuring about 26.2 m northwest to southeast, and 26.8 m northeast to southwest. The flat top of the mound measures 17.7 by 19.5 m and is raised a little over a metre above the surrounding ground level. A shallow ditch 4.3 m across surrounds the mound, with a gap of 4.9 m towards the northeast. Water collects in part of the ditch during wet weather. It was covered in trees by the time of the Tithe Award in May 1840; although trees are not shown here on Bryant’s map of 1822, he may have ignored small clumps in his survey.

The Mount lies in a field called Woodley Yards by 1910, although in 1840 it was called Knotley Field. A field east of it was known as Knotley Mill Field, to the south of which was Mill Field. Knotley is a variant of Notley, the name of the green south of the site, itself recorded as Knott Green in 1676. Mill Field is over a mile north of Mill End in the parish, so the names can hardly be connected.

The Hertfordshire folklorist William Blyth Gerish (1864-1921) recorded a gruesome story about The Mount. A house belonging to a wealthy man stood on the top of it and a local boy overheard some men plotting to burgle it. They spotted the boy, captured him, and threated to flay him (remove his skin) if he told anyone what he had overheard. The brave lad did tell the owners what he had heard, so they could defend their property. The attempted burglary was foiled, but the thieves caught the boy and carried out their threat. The boy survived the ordeal, saying that the most painful part of being flayed was having the skin removed from his fingertips and his toes. Letchworth Museum’s archives (now in North Hertfordshire Museum) have a typescript bearing the name of R J Kingsley of Nelson in New Zealand dated May 1904, which may be the source of Gerish’s published tale.

The East Hertfordshire Archaeological Society organised a trip to The Mount on 24 July 1929. The visit reignited interest in it. The headmaster of Sandon School, James W Sherlock (1898-?), suggested that it was a ‘Late Bronze, or Early Iron Age’ burial mound in 1932. He reported that the owner of the site, Joan Bowman of Sandon Bury, had given permission to excavate in the near future. As it is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, Percival Westell of Letchworth Museum got permission from the Ministry of Works to undertake investigations.

He organised a cross-shaped trench across the centre of the mound between April and September 1933. Local volunteers, including many residents of the village who had attended an adult education class run by Mr Sherlock, did the bulk of the work. Westell was rarely on site, and Mr Sherlock kept him informed of progress by letter. Around the time of the excavation, a schoolboy discovered a Romano-British melon bead from the field surface near The Mount, raising the possibility that it was of Roman date.

The excavators began by sinking a cross-shaped trench across the centre of The Mount, labelling each arm as a separate trench (1 to the north, 2 to the south, 3 to the east and 4 to the west). Each branch was three feet (0.9 m) wide and none went deeper than six feet six inches (2 m). Two extensions made later were labelled 5 and 6. At the centre of the mound, the deepest part, the top deposit was a layer of loamy topsoil, one foot (0.3 m) this. Beneath this was a layer of chalky clay two feet six inches (0.75 m) thick above a band of loamy clay-with-flints six inches (0.15 m) thick. The lowest two feet six inches (0.75 m) consisted of boulder clay containing glacial erratics. This was the underlying natural subsoil.

The first finds were made immediately beneath the topsoil, with those at the lower levels found in an area of 16 by 3 feet (4.9 by 0.9 m). The excavators found 757 potsherds, four small copper alloy objects, 200 iron nails, a knife blade, a key and other iron objects, animal bones (cattle and pig, including teeth) and oyster shells. On 27 April 1933, Mr Sherlock wrote to Westell mentioning the discovery of a coin. According to the Royston Crow of 21 April 1933, all the finds made by that time were made at depths of between six inches and five feet (0.15 to 1.5 m) but no deeper.

Six feet (1.8 m) down, the excavators discovered two wooden beams, arranged at right angles. They extended away from the sides of the trenches in which they were found (1 and 3) and numbered these extensions Trenches 5 and 6. The beams were made from oak, 16 feet (4.9 m) long and one foot (0.3 m) square and at each end, there were recesses to take angled uprights. The excavators correctly identified the beams as a cross-tree, the base elements of a wooden post mill, the earliest type of windmill. They lay at the bottom of a pit cut through the layers of the mound, apart from the topsoil, and into the underlying subsoil; it was the fill of this pit that contained all of the finds. The cross trees were no longer in their original positions, one lying on top of the other in such a way that they were disconnected at the mortices that originally held them together.

Although Percival Westell reported that all the finds went on loan to Letchworth Museum (accessioned as 1935.6922), there are only 13 potsherds in the collection. Perhaps the loaned material was returned (to Mr Sherlock or Mrs Bowman?) or it suffered from a ‘rationalisation’ of the archaeological collections in the early 1970s. However, the thinning out of archaeological material involved mainly disposing of unfeatured body sherds, yet only one of the ten handles, none of the twenty-five base sherds and none of the thirty-six glazed or decorated sherds remains in the collection.

However, Gerald Dunning of the British Museum examined the entire collection of pottery in the 1930s, after visiting the site. He identified about 75% of the material as being of thirteenth-century date, with some extending into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a few residual Romano-British sherds. He reported that the most common form was cooking pots, followed by bowls and jugs. In a letter to Westell dated 30 May 1933, he stated that ‘I see no reason for dating the mound earlier than 13th or even 14th century’.

Controversy arose from the identification of three potsherds from low down in the trenches. Fortunately, they survive in the museum’s collection. Gerald Dunning concluded that they were from a single vessel, which he dated to the seventh to ninth centuries. Westell seems not to have been satisfied with Dunning’s dating and he approached O G S Crawford, M O’Reilly, L A Curtis Edwards and Sir Cyril Fox for further opinions. Their estimates of the date of the pottery ranged from Pre-Roman Iron Age to High Medieval. Puzzled, but realising that the date of these sherds might throw some light on the date of the mound, Westell left a note with the sherds: ‘Please keep these 3 sherds separate & kindly date if possible. ?Iron Age or Romano-British? Found 6 ft down in Sandon Mount resting on undisturbed, original ground level. ?Urn containing cremated interment. ?Do these a/c for origination of the Mount? ?Tumulus.’.

Dunning’s published description of the sherds was wrong in several ways. Although he was correct to say that the outer surface of the sherds is black, the ware itself is a reddish-brown and the surface has been blackened by smoke action, suggesting that they are from a cooking vessel. His dating is also wrong. These sherds are identical to the Museum Service’s reference sherds of St Neots-type Ware, a fairly rough fabric tempered with fossiliferous shell and a slightly soapy feel to the surfaces. This ware was produced in the south and east Midlands, centring on the towns of Cambridge, St Neots, Bedford, Northampton and Oxford. Several kiln sites exist, including St Neots and Olney Hide. The date is firmly Saxo-Norman (AD 850-1200).

Westell also changed the stratigraphic position of the sherds between the original draft of the text and the publication. In the published version, Dunning states unequivocally that they came from ‘the old ground level below the mound’, presumably because this is what Westell had told him. However, the typescript contains the crossed-out phrase ‘found close to, if not upon, the original ground level’, suggesting that while they were indeed found at a considerable depth, they were nevertheless contained in the mound material.

The excavators found a coin towards the northern end of Trench 1, at a depth of three feet (0.9 m). Mr Sherlock sent it by post to Letchworth Museum on 27 April 1933. He described how it had been ‘encased in clay’ and ‘covered in a greenish deposit’. However, we do not know what the coin was as it is not mentioned in Westell’s report. There is a medieval coin from Sandon, donated by a Miss Field, which is an issue of Edward IV, dated 1464×70 and minted in London. Although it is possible that this is the one from The Mount, Miss Field’s two other donations of coins (a Roman coin of Antoninus Pius and a late medieval jeton) both came from Roe Green.

The excavation at the Mount shows that it was undoubtedly the site of a sunken post mill, the pottery suggesting that it was raised in the thirteenth century. Although Westell was determined to demonstrate that the mound pre-dated the mill, there is little reason to believe this to be the case. The pit dug through the mound down to the level of the cross-trees could have been dug after the mound to insert them or, perhaps more likely, to remove timbers at the time of its demolition. If the latter, the ceramic finds suggest that it happened in the fifteenth century at the earliest.

Westell angered Ruth Pym of The Settlement, who read his account of the excavation in The Times. In a letter of 12 November 1933, she said ‘I have seen the Times article & find it almost unconceivable that you should have let the Settlement down so completely – the “elder scholars” were in the Settlement Class, which gave you the opportunity of making the whole excavation – that is where you should have paid your debt to us & given us our due place – no wonder you did not show me the draft report.’ He was evidently taken aback by this and the published version of the report acknowledges ‘Miss Ruth Pym and members of Sandon Adult Educational Settlement Class’.

Westell did his best to create an air of mystery about The Mount by creating a ’manufactroversy’ around the three sherds found low down in the excavation. Having received an answer from Gerald Dunning that he did not like – that they were medieval – he sought the opinions of other experts and we no doubt he was delighted that they did not agree. It is fortunate that they remain in the museum collection, it is clear that they are contemporary with the other pottery found, albeit at the early end of the range.

Westell also tried to establish the mill on the mound as one of the earliest in England, if not the earliest. The earliest documented mill in England is from 1185 at the ‘lost’ village of Weedley in Yorkshire, but they were known in the Arab world before AD 800. The earliest types in this country are the post mill, as at Sandon, in which the entire body of the mill pivoted around a central post to allow the miller to catch the best wind direction. There is a documentary record of a mill in Sandon as early as 1222, on land belonging to the manor of Gannock. Whether this is the windmill at The Mount (which is close to Gannock Green) or the lost mill that gave its name to Mill End is uncertain. The mill at The Mount was probably known as Knotley Mill, to judge from the nearby field names.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews