Bradford Kaims Wetland
This is the latest venture of Bamburgh Research Project, working with the local community, volunteers and Universities to investigate a truly remarkable preserved ancient wetland site, located just a few miles from Bamburgh, near the village of Lucker in Northumberland. The work has been supported by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and English Heritage.
Following on from two seasons of very promising trial trenching, our work at the ancient wetland of Newham bog at Bradford Kaims in Northumberland was greatly expanded by grants from English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund supporting a pilot study of the area, and outreach to involve local volunteers and schools throughout 2011-2012. The Heritage Lottery Fund awarded a grant of £35,300.00, towards the project through it's Your Heritage scheme, to enable a programme of community archaeology activities exploring the ancient wetland. Volunteers and schools worked with our archaeological team to locate and excavate archaeological sites and to learn media skills to enable them to put their experiences online. Lectures and seminars given to the local community were put online to share the project discoveries with a wider audience. The results of the research will be made available to local schools as a teaching aid so that future generations of children can also explore this fascinating historic landscape.
2011-2012 Work
We have been fortunate to collaborate with Richard Tipping of Stirling University, who has worked alongside our volunteers and students to conduct extensive peat core samples, that have made a major impact on our interpretation of the site.
Richard and his team have been able to identify pollen preserved in the peat cores to interpret the sequence of environmental and landscape changes that affected the formation of the bog since the retreat of glaciation around 12,000 years ago.
A promontory of raised ground sticks up from the wetland, and it is in this area that we have discovered a great deal of human activity, provisionally dated to the Bronze Age.
We were helped enormously by Horizon Aerial Photography, who are an Alnwick based company that specialises in low level aerial photography using remote controlled drones. The results of their surveys are remarkable, both for trench photography and the wider landscape, and it was their work that helped to really define the landscape for our team. We look forward to continued collaborations in the future.
We have worked with specialist geophysics team GSB, (Geophysical Services of Bradford), who were able to survey much of the promontory area. They have pinpointed several anomalies that could be the result of ancient human activity, and we were able to test this by excavation during the summer of 2012.
Excavations conducted by our students and local volunteers have uncovered at least two very large features that have been identified as Burnt Mounds.
These features have been found throughout the UK and Ireland and have been interpreted variously as 'sweat lodges', the results of large scale preservation of meat fish and hides by smoking, and even brewing.
Further work needs to be done on the present features on our site to establish the exact nature of the mounds. We plan to excavate extended trenches and target new test pits on anomalies identified by geophysics. We are very excited about the prospect of finding new features and finds, and we will also be looking more closely at the lake edge to identify any potential waterlogged features such as withies, weirs, fish traps or even jetties.
Volunteers
We welcome volunteers on many aspects of this project, and we will be providing training to local people, although this should not be confused with our regular field school. If you would like to take part as a volunteer, or if you would like to be kept informed or participate in social media with us, please email: Graeme Young
We welcome volunteers on many aspects of this project, and we will be providing training to local people, although this should not be confused with our regular field school. If you would like to take part as a volunteer, or if you would like to be kept informed or participate in social media with us, please email: Graeme Young
Keep an eye on our blog for the latest details. Local volunteers can also sign up for our newsletter for direct mail notification of fieldwork dates and activities.
Volunteers can participate in many aspects of practical archaeology, the bulk of which will be taking environmental data by peat coring, as well as some finds washing, fieldwalking, test-pitting, excavation and film making.
Our media team has been augmented by volunteers who have helped with the filming and production of edited videos about the project. Using new HD equipment, the videos have turned out to be a great asset in charting the ongoing work of the project, and volunteers who have helped have gained greater knowledge of the site by reviewing the footage.www.youtube.com/bamburghmedia
Project Background
In 2010, we began to explore the archaeological potential of an ancient wetland that has been preserved as a peat bog in an area known as the Bradford Kaims. The preserved wetland is located near the village of Lucker in North Northumberland, only a few miles from our Bamburgh Castle excavations. Survey of the area by coastal geo-morphologist, Dr Ian Boomer of Birmingham University had revealed peat deposits of considerable depth. The peat at this site preserves environmental evidence such as pollen, from ecosystems that developed after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. One of the most important aspects of our work here is to extend the deep core samples taken in the area, to develop an accurate model of the changing environment in North Northumberland over time.
The extensive wetland that formed here in the Late Glacial period was a large lake system throughout the Holocene. Many sites of archaeological interest are known in this area, from Mesolithic and Neolithic scatters, to Bronze Age cairns and votive deposits, Iron Age hillforts and Medieval villages.
In 2010, our initial exploration of the area was directed towards surveying the lake and locating potential archaeological sites. We were extremely pleased that among our first few test pits we were able to locate the ancient lake edge and features of human activity, and flint tools dating to the Neolithic.
The photo above shows the edge of the ancient peat. We were delighted to find actual features relating to ancient human activity such as this pit, below, filled with burned material, which was located near the large stone slabs of the first burnt mound we discovered.
This burnt mound featured a set of slabs that may have been a collapsed trough, which was covered and surrounded by a very large pile of ash and burnt stone.
Since the dig in 2010, we have had the deposits around the slabs sampled for Archaeo- Magnetometry dating, and these have produced dates of 4500BC. This is extremely exciting news, and we will be extending all of these excavation areas to look for related features and dating evidence.
