Some archaeological discoveries are hiding in plain sight. Tucked away under a hedge on the east side of Baldock Bowls Club’s car park (owned by the council) on West Avenue in the town was what everyone thought was an old horse trough. It consisted of four sides of a roughly rectangular stone container filled with soil. Most users of the car park probably never even noticed it. One day in 2009, Steve Geach from North Hertfordshire District Council invited Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews (the writer of this post) to take a look at it as the Bowls Club wanted to get rid of it.

On seeing the ‘trough’, Keith’s first thought was ‘this is a Roman coffin’. Horse troughs tend to be much longer: in this case, the object was quite short (about a metre and a half). He suggested that when lifted, it would prove to have a hole, either in one side towards the bottom or somewhere in the base. He also asked if the Museum Service could have it.

On lifting, it did indeed have a hole in one side. This makes it impossible to use as a horse-trough (any water put inside it would drain away instantly), but ideal for a coffin, which needs to have somewhere for fluids to escape. Without going into too many gory details, bodies produce a lot of water when they decay (sometimes referred to as ‘coffin soup’ by archaeologists trying to be humorous), and it is important to let it seep out.

The coffin proved to weigh over half a tonne, despite being for a child. At 1.40 m long, 0.66 m wide and up to 0.62 m high, with an internal hollow of 1.03 × 0.41 × 0.33 m, it contains about 0.43 cubic metres of stone. We can calculate that this volume of limestone would weigh a minimum of 670 kg! The limestone in question is Totternhoe Stone, a relatively hard form of chalk, part of the Lower Chalk that formed between about 100,500,000 and 93,900,000 years ago during the Cenomanian phase of the Cretaceous era. It has been quarried since Roman times in the village of Totternhoe, although outcrops are found in other places along the foot of the Chiltern scarp.

Before arriving at the Bowls Club car park, it had been a garden feature in a nearby property in West Avenue. A photograph sent to the local newspaper in 2009 showed it being used as a planter during the 1960s. It seems that it had already been in the garden when the householder arrived, so the trail goes cold at that point. Given its weight, it is unlikely to have moved far, so it had probably been discovered nearby. Letchworth Museum records record a collection of Roman pottery from Norton Crescent, barely 100 metres away. The houses were built in the late 1930s, and this may be a context for finding the material. Although this is about 300 metres from where current thinking puts the western edge of the Roman town of Baldock, this area could have been part of suburban development.

Transporting such a heavy object from the quarry, almost 30 km away along the Icknield Way, would have been challenging. Using a cart pulled by oxen, the journey would have taken about three days; historians have calculated that the cost would be about 1 denarius per kilogram of freight. If correct, the cost would then be almost 700 denarii. A denarius was roughly a day’s pay for a soldier around AD 200, so the transport cost would be about two years’ salary; in the modern British army, a Private’s salary is £21,424, per year, putting the transport cost at about £40,000 in modern terms. Making comparisons of this sort is fraught with difficulties, but it gives a good impression of the sort of wealth needed to transport a coffin of this sort. Add on the cost of manufacture, and you can appreciate that whoever bought this sarcophagus for their child had a lot of disposable income.

We know that wealthy people lived in the hinterland of Baldock (there will be some spectacular evidence coming up in one of these posts in a few months), while finds from the town hint that it was a prosperous place. It is easy to imagine a large villa in the countryside beyond Baldock’s western fringes whose owners could afford an expensive stone sarcophagus for a treasured child. A child burial discovered in Icknield Way East in 1988, northeast of the town, had a wooden superstructure and its coffin contained an antique pipeclay goddess figurine. Although not as costly as a stone sarcophagus, the complexity of the grave and its superstructure shows that the child’s parents wanted to show off their wealth and status.

Roman burials had to be deposited outside the boundary of a town. An ancient Roman law, the first section of Part X of the Leges XII tabularum (‘Laws of the Twelve Tables’) states hominem mortuum in urbe ne sepelito neve urito (‘neither bury nor cremate a dead man in the city’). The law code was first published in 450 BC and remained the basis of Roman law throughout the empire until Justinian I reorganised and codified all laws in the 530s. Because the law about burial was so fundamental, we can assume that all the known cemeteries in Baldock lay outside its formal boundary. Outside towns, people could have burials on their own land, and many villa owners had private cemeteries for family members close to the main house.

An almost identical coffin with a similar history was found in a Wiltshire garden in 2015. Luke Irwin had been using a stone ‘planter’ for geraniums outside his kitchen for some years when work laying electrical cables uncovered a Roman mosaic floor. Excavations at his Deverill home by Wiltshire Archaeology and English Heritage uncovered the remains of an enormous Roman villa, built in the decades around 200 and occupied for more than two centuries thereafter. When archaeologist David Roberts from English Heritage saw the ‘planter’, he realised, like Keith, that this was originally a stone coffin for a Roman era child.

The Baldock coffin is on display in the Living in North Hertfordshire gallery in North Herts Museum, Hitchin.

Knebworth, in the south of the district, is a community with a complicated history. The medieval community worshipped in the twelfth-century Church of St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury, now in Knebworth Park. It remains the official parish church. The present park dates from about 1641, when Sir William Lytton created ornamental gardens around Knebworth House. The main medieval park lay between what we now call Old Knebworth (formerly Knebworth Green) and Gipsy Lane, around Park Lane. Another, the Little Park, lay between Old Knebworth and Knebworth House.

The name Knebworth Green, recorded since the time of King Edward VI (1547-1553), for what we now know as Old Knebworth is a sign that this was not the main settlement. The community recorded since the time of Domesday Book perhaps lay around St Mary and St Thomas’s church, as archaeologists saw slight earthworks here in 1989.

The railway arrived in 1850 and in 1884, the Lyttons of Knebworth House persuaded the railway company to build a new station 1.8 km (about 1¼ miles) east of Knebworth Green, just past Deard’s End. A new community was beginning to grow around it by the 1890s, in what had been the extreme southeastern corner of the parish. Known at first as Knebworth Station, it had simply become Knebworth by the 1930s. The boundary changed to incorporate Swangleys Farm and Roundwood Cottages, previously in Datchworth, into the parish.

The Church of England opened a Mission Room on Gun Lane in 1880, where the Royal British Legion Club now stands. As the community grew at Knebworth Station, it was not enough to meet the needs of the new village, so a new church was commissioned, to be designed by the famous architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944).

Lutyens had already worked in Knebworth, designing the Arts and Crafts style Homewood for his brother-in-law Victor, Lord Lytton in 1901, a new garden at Knebworth House and cottages in Knebworth Garden Village, an intended planned settlement around Knebworth Station, in 1904. Work began on the Garden Village in 1912 but it was interrupted by the First World War and foundered for good in the 1920s. In the meantime, Knebworth Station continued to grow, with an increasing need for a Church of England church there.

Lutyens designed what he originally called Christchurch in 1911, with a site in the intended Garden Village donated by Lord Lytton. A local builder, William Darby, won the contract for building it, and work started in April 1914. The outbreak of war slowed its construction, as it became harder to get hold of building materials and many labourers left to become soldiers. As a result, the plans had to be scaled back, with the nave reduced in length and the west end abruptly finished off with a plain brick wall. Edgar Jacob, Bishop of St Albans, consecrated the church on 12 November 1915. He chose the dedication to St Martin of Tours, as the saint’s day falls on 11 November.

William Darby followed Lutyen’s very specific instructions about the quality of materials he wanted for the church. The bricks and pantiles for the roof came from his own brickworks on Spinney Lane at Rabelyheath and he used Portland Stone for the columns, as Lutyens specified. The shortage of materials meant that the portico with steps intended for the west end – the entrance – was left until 1963. Sir Albert Richardson designed an extension to the nave (but without portico and steps), which includes the present cupola containing the 3½ tonne bell. Work on his alteration was finished in 1964, creating the church that can be seen today.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described St Martin’s Church as ‘one of Lutyens’s most remarkable churches’. Its location on a slight rise gives it an imposing presence, which is enhanced by the wide overhanging eaves. Inside, Lutyens’s attention to detail includes the organ with its pipes arranged in double spirals and a shallow apse at the east end, containing the altar.

Archaeologists are interested not just in the most ancient of remains, glittering ‘treasures’ or the pyramids of long-dead pharaohs. The remains of the recent past, even when they stand as complete buildings, are just as valid a subject for study. Often they can tell us so much more as they come with a richer background of documentary evidence, social context and living memory. St Martin’s Church is one of these special places.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

In early 1959, Jack Wilkerson, a farmer and amateur archaeologist in Barley, southeast of Royston, made a discovery on one his fields. The field’s name – Aldwick – is a clue that something ancient lies under the ground there: recorded since the time of Elizabeth 1 (1558-1603), it is from Old English old (’old’) and wic (‘habitation’). It lies on a gentle slope north of the village, west of Bakers Lane, on the north side of a shallow valley facing northeast towards the county boundary at Cumberton Bottom. Digging into darker circles in the field, Mr Wilkerson found that they were surface traces of infilled pits that contained animal bones and prehistoric pottery of Early Iron Age type (about 800-400 BC).

At this point, he contacted the University of Cambridge for advice. The Disney Professor of Archaeology, Grahame Clark (1907-1995), had just been elected President of the Prehistoric Society and arranged for a magnetometer survey of part of the field. It was a new, experimental technique that was first used archaeologically in 1956: no-one had previously tried it on a site with chalk bedrock. Although the results appear vague when compared with those we might expect to see today, the surveyor Martin Aitken (1922-2017) was pleased with them. They revealed a large, flattened horseshoe-shaped anomaly as well as groups of smaller potential features. A more detailed survey of the area around the horseshoe-shaped confirmed that the signal derived from something measuring about 13 m wide and 9 m deep.

Professor Clark then sent Mary Cra’ster (1928-2008) to excavate the site. She revealed 101 roughly circular pits and found that the horseshoe-shaped anomaly was caused by a buried ditch of the same shape. The ditch had a uniform fill and contained almost no finds, unlike the pits. Both ends were cut through earlier pits, and the ‘open’ end faced obliquely down the slope. Mrs Cra’ster thought that it was the drip-gully of a building but although postholes were found both inside and outside the area it enclosed, none could be made into a convincing roundhouse shape.

During the 1959 season, the archaeologists excavated 101 pits in an area 33.5 × 24.4 m (817.5 m2). In the following year, they found another 31, in 1961, a further 18 and in 1962, another two, making 152 in total. Aerial photographs show that this is just a small proportion of the total; they also indicate that the pits are grouped into more than a dozen clusters. Groups of pits like these are typical of Early Iron Age sites (including, locally, at Blackhorse Road in Letchworth Garden City and Jacks Hill in Graveley).

The pits at Aldwick vary greatly in size. The largest were a little over 3 m in diameter, while the smallest were only 0.75 m in diameter; their depths similarly varied between 1.4 and 0.15 m (remembering, of course that this was the depth cut into the chalk, not from the original ground level). Most had vertical sides and flat bases, although some were wider at the base than at the surface of the chalk (often described as bell-shaped) and a few had sides that sloped in towards the base. Sixteen pits were more irregular, and Mrs Cra’ster was unsure if they were deliberately left this way or if they were unfinished examples of the more regular types.

All the pits were deliberately backfilled, and none showed signs of silting. The material consisted of three types: pure chalk rubble, a mixture of chalk rubble and domestic rubbish, and pure domestic rubbish. It is unlikely that the pure chalk came from digging the pit it was found in: there would be little point in keeping it ready from backfilling. Instead, it perhaps came from a new pit being dug next to the one being filled in.

One of the largest pits contained a layer of ash in the bottom, evidently from a fire that had consumed material inside it. The ash contained cereal grains and other seeds, as well as a burnt plank, potsherds from a single, broken pot and a small iron sickle. Mrs Cra’ster suggested that it was an accidental spontaneous combustion of damp grain being stored in the pit, although it is difficult to account for the potsherds, as the pot they came from was already broken at the time of the fire. Perhaps it fell into the pit during the fire. On the other hand, it could have been the deliberate destruction of grain ruined by fungus or mice.

Why do we find so many pits on Early Iron Age sites? A hundred years ago, archaeologists interpreted them as houses (‘pit dwellings’) as they often contain domestic rubbish and traces of burning, which were thought to be hearths. Thanks to the work of Gerhard Bersu (1889-1964), a German archaeologist who fled Nazi persecution in the 1930s, who excavated at Little Woodbury (Wiltshire) in 1938-39, the idea of pit dwelling was discredited. His two trenches identified the postholes of a roundhouse, which he recognised as the main dwelling on the site, and numerous pits that he interpreted as being dug for grain storage.

During the 1960s, Collin Bowen (191-2011), P D Wood and Peter Reynolds (1939-2001) tested Bersu’s hypothesis. They found that so long as the bedrock is well-drained, the pits cut into it make excellent grain storage silos so long as the temperature inside them remains below 12° C and the contents are kept dry. Each pit needs to be filled to capacity for long-term storage to work, and the average pit will have contained more than a tonne of processed grain. This tells us a lot about the efficiency of agricultural production in the early first millennium BC. At the experimental farm at Butser (Hampshire), Peter Reynolds found that a single pit can remain viable for more than twenty years. The grain would form a protective skin where it was in contact with the bedrock, and some of the pits at Aldwick had evidence for it. Whether any pits were used for more than one season cannot be proven with existing archaeological data: it is possible that they were abandoned after just one year.

Archaeological thought and interpretations have moved on since the 1960s. We now know that not all pits were used for grain storage and we also know that those that were had an ‘afterlife’. Iron Age societies were very different from ours and people did not separate their religious beliefs from everyday activities. This distinction came about as recently as the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment tried to make rational thought the basis of everything we do. Our modern attitudes, which seem so natural to us, are unusual in the broad sweep of history.

Taking this into consideration, we can see how the people at Aldwick would have seen their pits as connected with the realm of Andumnos, the underworld. Unlike the Classical underworld, which was a place of gloom and mists, Andumnos was a paradise of eternal youth and plenty. Putting grain underground was perhaps seen as a way of preserving its ‘youth’ and ensuring that food would be plentiful in the coming year. When a pit fell out of use, people would need to make offerings to the gods who had taken care of their produce. During the 1990s, archaeologist J D Hill showed how they would place special pieces of pot, bone and even human remains into disused pits. They also placed rubbish that had been left out on open middens. This explains why the pits at Aldwick did not just silt up but were deliberately backfilled as soon as they were no longer needed. It also explains why sherds from the same pit could be found in different pits. Perhaps these vessels had developed a special significance while they were in use, making them valuable gifts to the underworld deities. A dog skeleton found in one of the pits was probably not simple ‘rubbish’, but the burial of a valued (non-human) member of the community, in the same way as an infant skeleton was placed in a couple of the pits.

Making a pit was hard work. If several people worked on one at the same time, it might take half a day to make a typical cylindrical pit. Bell-shaped pits are more difficult to dig, as the overhang carries a risk of collapse, so perhaps experienced pit-diggers worked on these, passing the skills on to younger workers. As we have seen the evidence of filling suggests that in some cases, the diggers made a pile of the chalk they removed or, perhaps, shovelled it straight into a nearby empty pit.

A large ‘working hollow’ on the west of the site was partly examined in 1961. The term covers a wide variety of functions. Some were where people mixed clay, dung and straw to make daub for house walls. Others were perhaps the bases of clamp kilns, effectively large turf-covered sunken bonfires for firing pottery. Some may have been areas where livestock gathered regularly and wore away the ground surface. On one edge of the hollow were burnt bones from a child aged 8 to 9 years old. As with the pits, the bones were perhaps offerings to the ruler of the underworld or aimed to send the child’s spirit to a happy afterlife in paradise..

As well as pits and a ‘working hollow’, there were groups of postholes. One group of four excavated in 1959 was a typical ‘four-poster’ structure, often thought to be above-ground granaries. These may have for grain that would be used in the near future rather than for long-term (over-winter) storage. The others, around the horseshoe-shaped ditch, do not make a pattern that suggests a building. Some of them can be joined to make straight lines, which may mean that they show the position of fences, but there are too few to be certain.
The Iron Age farm or hamlet must have been successful. Aerial photographs show that the pits spread across much of the field, with associated ditches perhaps defining areas that were farmed. There may even have been earlier activity on the site, as metal detectorists have found two broken fragments of a Middle Bronze Age (about 1550-1150 BC) rapier; one piece is the tip, the other from the middle of the shaft. Although found 7½ months apart, these two pieces were probably from the same weapon. The break may have been deliberate: North Hertfordshire Museum has on display a Middle Bronze Age sword from St Ippollitts broken into three pieces before being thrown into a pond.

The accompanying aerial photograph shows the site, with its huge density of pits in the centre and north of the field, with the ‘working hollows’ down to the south and one to the west. On the south-eastern side of the site are some ditches that may show where contemporary field were located. A pair of ditches widely separated runs from the south of the site towards the north-northwest. If they are part of a single feature, they might be part of a droveway for livestock. It is interesting to see that almost all the pits on the site lie to its northeast, while all the ‘working hollows’ lie to the southwest, a good indication that the ditches were in use at the same time as the rest of the site.

One mystery remains. How did the medieval peasants who named the field know that it was the site of an ‘old habitation’? Perhaps we underestimate how much people in the past recognised the traces of ancient pottery and metalwork as belonging to people even further back in time.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews