Digging up the Past....and a 'Roman' Carrot!

I grew up in a little Dorset village on Cranborne Chase… a part of King John’s old hunting grounds. In the centre of the village stood an old ruined manor house surrounded by woods. Private of course…. but childhood curiosity meant that many of us would sneak in regularly to explore. Multiple French doors made up part of the façade, and the glass had long been broken leaving holes just big enough for a then seven year old to climb through! White dustsheets covered furniture, and old paintings still hung on walls. I was mesmerised by the whole thing, and rushed home to ask my father about it. After the scolding and subsequent grounding I received for trespassing on someone else’s property, he told me that one of the owner’s ancestors had fought at Trafalgar, and was buried in the local churchyard. Once my grounding period had been served, I went off to the churchyard to find the tomb. Leaning over the black railings that surrounded it, and pulling back the ivy, my eyes strained to read the lichen encrusted Romanesque script that told of bravery and heroism.

Outside the church, builders were working on the central heating system, and in a trench they were digging outside the church door I spotted some bones….not unusual in view of the location! Too shy to approach the builders at such a tender age, I went back later to study the bones in more detail….not touching…just looking. I trotted off to the rectory and told the Vicar what I had found. We went together, and he said it was OK to lift them carefully out…he had bought a box, and two pairs of his wife’s Marigolds! I remember how my pair were so big that they dangled off the end of my fingers, and made the task very hard! Today of course there would be huge ethical issues about such an event, and legislated ways to deal with it. Back in those days however, and in a little country village, folk tended to deal with things more simply….and in the way they thought best. There was a special church service for the remains a few days later, and the bones were duly re-interred. I pointed out to the vicar at the time that further skeletons beginning to appear in the trench had their legs partly under the church walls. I also noticed that in one adult grave there was a very small skull…a childs. I visited the building works regularly after that....fascinated by the discoveries…curious to see what else might appear. It did in fact turn out that the burials had pre-dated the church.

When I was eight I used to help my father in his vegetable plot. One spring when we were digging over the ground…getting ready for planting, I dug up an old carrot that had no doubt been missed during the previous years harvest. “That’s a Roman carrot” he said…joking of course…because I had been reading a book on Roman Britain for the last week. I only picked the book because I’d spotted pictures of skeletons in it and considered myself a bit of an expert on the subject by now!

Well, the carrot was a Eureka moment for me. After that, at every possible opportunity, I would pack my battered old school duffle bag….battered from previous duffle bag fights with the boys in the school playground! A strange ritual that seemed to erupt outside our infants classroom most mornings as we waited to go in for registration! For my archaeological expeditions I would pack a cheese or peanut butter sandwich wrapped in a neat greaseproof paper parcel, and placed in an old brown Tupperware. I’d also take a drink, spare pair of socks, a note book, map, binoculars, pencil and for some unknown reason a photograph of our pet Golden Labrador Trudy! Hoisting the lot onto my shoulders I’d head off over the style at the bottom of our garden and hike out across the stubbly flint strewn fields in search of dead Romans!! Friends laughed at my new hobby, and also at the little museum I had laid out in our front porch at home. I charged a threepenny entrance fee, and gave half of the proceeds to the Salisbury Cathedral Restorations Fund, and the other half to the Biafran Baby Appeal!

Amongst my prestigious collection (well I thought it was prestigious) were animal bones and teeth, heart urchins, flint arrowheads, fossilised shells, buttons, pottery, glass, iron pyrites and a rusty old horseshoe! All had been carefully labelled and laid out on green baize covered card tables!

When I was nine, my mother would occasionally help out on a friend’s farm. In the summer holidays I would accompany her. Well, imagine my joy when one day the farmer took me to see the contents of an old creosoted granary that stood on staddle stones. Their farmland (we discovered years later when parts of it were excavated), did indeed contain dead Romans…as well as many other things. The granary was packed to the gunwales with the most amazing objects….artefacts that the plough had turned up over the years. The farmer now had such a good eye for anything unusual, colourful or shiny which the ploughshares pulled up from the chalky soil that he rarely came home for his lunch empty handed. Oh so many pleasurable hours I spent just sitting and staring wide eyed at those beautiful things, trying to imagine what life would have been like when they were in use. In hindsight I now realise that there was gold, semi-precious gems, amber, Roman brooches, an exquisite intaglio….and many other amazing and important finds in that granary!

That was well over forty years ago now, and recently whilst taking students on a trip to that same area in Dorset, I tried to find out what had happened to the ‘Granary Collection’, but alas no-one knows. The farmer and his wife have passed away, and there have been several new owners at the farm since those days.

On that same field trip, I sat on the old familiar style near my childhood home, and watched as the students accompanied an old farming friend across a field. Occasionally, he or they would bend down to examine remnants of a Roman temple that is now known to have stood there.

It was quite an emotional moment for me…returning over forty years later to my beloved Cranborne Chase…but this time armed with enough knowledge to know a fake ‘Roman carrot’ when I saw one!

This blog might give the impression that my childhood interests were all about macabre voyeurism and treasure hunting…and I suppose at that young age there may have been an element of that. Today however I DO work in archaeology, and those two topics are hotly debated and controversial subjects, as we try to control looting, treasure hunting and unofficial excavation all over the world!

Dear Dad…you don’t know what you started that day in the vegetable garden…and it just goes to show how the effects of a small throw away comment can last a lifetime!