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Purbeck

Aspects of Purbeck – The Roman-British Potteries

May 19th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Around the south shore of Poole Harbour there are saltings, mudflats across which the native marsh grass Spartina townsendii has well-established roots. The grass has been reclaiming the salt marsh since the early 1900’s, but has also been helping to re-conceal evidence of what was happening here almost nineteen centuries before: the highly significant vestiges of the pottery industry the Romano-Britons were engaged in at the time.

The Romans were quick to realise the exceptional quality of the Tertiary ball clay, which underlies much of Purbeck, and which ever since has played a major role in making the Isle one of the key sources of the raw material for ceramics now exported all over the world. Although the Durotriges, the Iron Age Celtic inhabitants of Dorset, were themselves producing pottery for local use using clay from seams in the London Clay, it was the Romans who effectively commandeered the industry, turning it to their advantage in the production of superior fine table and other wares for local, regional and even national and Empire markets.

In 1972 archaeologists were stunned to learn that cookware pottery unearthed during the excavations along Hadrians Wall had come from one of the Poole Harbour pottery sites. That the clay employed in their manufacture could only have come from Dorset was conclusively proved when David Peacock, a Southampton University geologist, conducted a heavy metal analysis of the clay in the pots. Until then, it had been assumed that the Hadrianic wares were locally produced; such a far-flung trade route had never been suspected. It was this revelation that bears witness to the efficiency of the Roman system of distribution and points to a centralised store or centre within Purbeck for supplying the Roman civil aristocracy and army.

Such dating evidence clearly points to these potteries having been worked by native Britons during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, but then were abandoned when the potters moved to the more lucrative environment of a larger and more sophisticated pottery industry then emerging in the upland valleys of the New Forest, an area centred on the present villages of Farnham, Verwood and Alice Holt. After the full emergence of this New Forest industry by the end of the 2nd century, the potteries in Purbeck virtually ceased production until their revival during the 18th century industrial revolution.

Clays were collected on the heath and taken to a string of workshops organised on cottage industry lines along the shore of Poole Harbour, where individual craftsmen potters had their wheels and kilns. Two such kilns have been relocated a short way south of Shipstal Point on the edge of the saltings and old shore, but a number of other archaeological excavations have thrown up others. Not far north of Nutcrack Lane near Redcliffe Farm the kiln sites of other potters using wheels have been found. The presence of discarded fragments of pots at this and other sites – sometimes in large quantities – were a sure sign of a kiln below ground. These were wasters: the substandard or misfired pots rejected by the potters and smashed on a heap, which was later scattered upon abandonment of the site. The remains of what was probably a potter’s hut have been excavated at Fitzworth Point on the Frome at Stoborough. Kilns have also been re-discovered on Fitzworth Heath and on Cleavel Point (the west spit of Newton Bay) beside safe harbour beaches. But the largest concentration of kilns – over thirty – has been discovered at Bestwells Farm, between Wareham and Poole Harbour.

In 1952 a walker in Nutcrack Lane near Stoborough noticed that a number of molehills along the wayside had numerous sherds of ancient-looking pottery scattered over their surfaces. Subsequent excavation of the site unearthed a vat of puddled chalk four feet in diameter by two feet deep, with a clay lining, a central plug-hole at the bottom and five other holes in the rim. A cindery residue at the bottom contained a considerable number of sherds, pointing to the feature being a 1st century potter’s pit for puddling clay. With extreme care archaeologists lifted the basin-shaped vessel and conveyed it to the County Museum in Dorchester, where it remained on indefinite display under glass for a number of years. Unfortunately the vessel broke up during an attempt to remove it to another part of the museum in 1970, the strain evidently proving too much for its fragility and advanced age!

The native pottery style produced by these potteries is what is known as Durotrigian or Dorset Black Burnished Ware. Typically the vessels are wide bowls, urns or other forms in a hard sandy or gritty fabric and a black or grey burnishing (polishing with a pebble before firing) to produce a highly reflective surface. The Iron Age pottery (known as BB1) was usually black all over, indicating heavy reduction during firing. A variety of clays may have been used, oxides being added to colour them. The pots may have an iron rich slip or slurry finish to cover the gritty fabric. The pre-Roman Durotrigian potters could produce highly competent hand-made wares fired in bonfires or clamps. Many vessel forms used by the Romans belonged to types used on prehistoric Dorset farms, but others show that the Purbeck potters imitated continental (Belgaic) styles brought to Britain by the new colonisers, who employed the natives to supply pottery for their army.

Pottery produced on the wheel, which the Romans introduced, typically left horizontal throwing grooves on the inner side, whereas the hand-made wares of the Durotrigians often show finger marks on the insides. One problem of the potters technique, which is not fully understood is how they obtained the marked colour contrast between black and the grey surfaces, and furthermore, how the black is always well-burnished, while the grey surfaces are a dull matt and often show tool-marks.

The sites of the pits from which the clay was dug are often betrayed by mounds and depressions of extraction, small-blackened depressions indicating the former position of kilns. The kilns near the harbour shore in Purbeck were purposely sited so that the finished wares could easily be shipped from the production site without the need for any overland transportation. They are now over one hundred yards from the high water mark, but in Roman times were evidently much closer to the tidal margin of the harbour. At that time the sea level was higher or the land lower, but the tidal regression from the harbour has left behind the salt marsh we see today.

Then the mud flats were reclaimed by the Spartina grass and one of the country’s oldest industries was lost to history for centuries to come.

Purbeck – Into the Quarries

Feb 7th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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“Carved by time out of a single stone” was how Thomas Hardy described Portland. Yet all of Purbeck can be regarded as a geologist’s bonanza, a chronicle of millions of years of the earth’s history set in stone. Small wonder then, that this “county within a county” should have become one of the country’s major centres for the quarrying and mining of aggregate and building stone.

The stone industry of Purbeck has been the economic mainstay of the ‘Isle’ for over 500 years. For Britain, and for the Empire through export, it has been a font of supply for several kinds of rock belonging to the Portland and Purbeck Beds. All these are part of the two uppermost-and youngest-formations of the Jurassic period, deposited between about 150 and 135 million years ago, when Dorset was sub-equatorial. The Portlandian was laid down in shallow, warm sea, which then regressed to leave a lagoon environment in which the Purbeck beds were then formed.

Although prehistoric man probably carried out very local quarrying for the stone, it was the Romans, particularly favouring the use of the decorative Purbeck Marble for their villas and tomb slabs, who first began quarrying on any significant scale. In ‘modern’ times the industry really took off during the Middle Ages; in the 17th century, too, stone was shipped from Swanage to London, where Wren employed it in re-building the capital after the Great Fire in 1666.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the Purbeck quarries reached their peak in manpower and production. It was at this time when a variety of stone used to build many of Dorset’s older cottages and homes was extracted from small local quarries now long since abandoned and overgrown. Sine transporting the stone overland was difficult and costly, the major quarries and mines were concentrated upon the coastal outcrops, where the stone could be transported away by sea.

As a focus for quarrying, nowhere else in Purbeck was more central or important than Swanage. This town became a centre for the mediaeval trade in limestone, where serious quarrying began in about 1700 and continued until the mid 19th century. This was the heyday of great stone barons, the businessmen who made their fortunes from the industry, George Burt, and John Mowlem being probably the prime movers. Swanage was built from stone in more ways than one; exports from the quarries secured its location and the prosperity of the Burt and Mowlem families. It was during this period too, that the quarry platforms in the cliff outcrops at Tilly Whim, Dancing Ledge, Winspit and Seacombe were cut.

Tilly Whim, Dancing Ledge and Winspit are all coastal quarry sites for Purbeck stone which has been used in a number of Buildings including Durlston Castle, Lulworth Castle and Swanage Town Hall.  The Tilly Whim Caves at Anvil Point are the most easterly of the coastal quarries and are thought to have originally been open-cast working which later shifted towards adit or drift-mining from galleries cut into the cliffside. A capping rock was blasted away so that the high-grade building stone, the Under Freestone, could be quarried out using wedges called “gads.” Galleries of about 3 metres by 8 metres were cut into the hillside, sometimes as far as 60 metres. To support the roof, quarrymen left pillars in the in-situ limestone or else built pillars from stone wasters. Blocks were lowered from the caves using timber derricks (whims) that loaded the stone onto lighters or barges which then trans-shipped the stone to an offshore cargo vessel in calm weather.

Similarly at Dancing Ledge Quarry, the stone was lowered to a large sloping ledge, and carried to a shipment point at the very edge. Here the trammels or ruts made by the carts or wagons, which moved the stone, can still be seen. Quarrying at Dancing Ledge ceased in 1914. Winspit is an area just below Worth Matravers on the south coast where large cliffside quarries have been opened on both sides of the valley. Stone working at Winspit began in 1719. The west quarry has a very large underground gallery, which was worked until 1953; the east quarry has square cut holes for crane positions still to be seen on the cliff top.

Seacombe is a large quarry excavated where Seacombe Bottom meets the coast. This was worked from the 18th century until 1923-31, when much investment in mechanisation took place. Stone was shipped from below the west end, and the foundations of the steam-derrick remain. Other quarries were opened between Durlstone Head and St. Aldhelm’s Head, from where the stone for the harbour walling at Ramsgate was shipped. At Durlstone, deeper beds were worked from underground “quarrs,” the stone being brought to the surface by a horse drawn capstan. There are also shallow quarrs in the country-park. In 1897 197 men were working in 58 quarrs. The last timber derrick to survive anywhere in Dorset can be seen at St. Aldhelm’s Quarry.

Away from the coast there have been extensive quarries in other Purbeck Beds outcropping over the high ground between Swanage and Worth Matravers, though Lychett Matravers to Acton. Purbeck Limestone is worked for aggregate in Swanworth Quarry (due for imminent closure) and Purbeck stone is still quarried in the Acton area west of Swanage, where the rock was formerly mined from underground shafts. Today good decorative stone is being extracted at Acton from open cast pits down to 10 metres. Corfe was formerly the centre for the quarrying of Purbeck Marble (which is not true marble but shelly limestone able to take a hard polish), but the trade no longer exists today.

While the stone native to the mainland has been of considerable commercial value, Portland’s limestone has probably been even more so, and not wholly for its infra-structural applications. This oolithic limestone has encased the gargantuan shells of Titanities, the largest ammonite to have inhabited British Jurassic waters, and which today is to be seen displayed in many of Portland’s garden walls. For centuries, man and nature have contributed to the island’s landscape, and there are features marking where the original landscape once stood.

Wren used Portland stone in the re-building of London, notably the new St. Paul’s, but it has also been applied in the re-construction of the capital after the destruction left by the last war. The old quarry gangs and their methods have almost entirely disappeared. The piers and jetties of the old quarries, from where stone has been shipped around the world, also have largely vanished, and some of the excavations have been infield; no derrick or crane now remains in the Portland Quarry. In Jordan Quarry the succession in the Portland Beds can be traced up to the overlying Purbeck in a sequence which the geologist can read like a book, and which reveals the climatic changes in the region 150 million years ago.

But today some of the Portland quarries have been given a new lease of life. Through a 1983 initiative begun by the specially formed Portland Sculpture Quarry Trust (PSQT) artists and sculptors have been coming to Portland to work creatively in response to the quarry environment. The Trust aims to forge links between the artists and the lives of the masons working in stone, enabling them to share and exchange knowledge and skills, rather than undertaking public commissions for works. This project has fostered much working collaboration over the years, including the creation of Britain’s first Sculpture Quarry in the now regenerated Tout Quarry. Works produced here include Anthony Gormley’s ‘Still Falling.’ and ‘Falling Fossil’ by Stephen Marsden. PSQT is further extending access through workshops. Since 1983 the experience of the Trust has been as appreciation of the importance of the personal aspects of people’s lives and their relationship to the landscape.

Happily, after decades of decline in Portland and Purbeck, something of the old landscape is making a comeback. Abandoned quarries and older sites are being restored to their pre-extractive agricultural state, often with no trace of the former activity in evidence. While the industrial landscape on Portland is being revitalised, in Purbeck nature is re-claiming the traces of an industry, which ranged from prehistoric bell-pits, through opencast excavations and thence gallery mining, to mechanisation and decline.

Purbeck Mysteries and Strange Burials

Aug 2nd, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Before we can delve into some of its secrets, even the name Purbeck is of obscure and uncertain origin. The earliest reference is in 948 AD, where it appears as Purbicinga, later as Purbic in many medieval documents. But other place name authorities variously suggest the Old English pur (a bittern), and the element becc, a point or headland or becca, a pickaxe or mattock.

Besides the uncertain origin of its name, Purbeck is an island of unresolved riddles and ritualised dead. As good a place as any to start would be at the Promontory on the south side of Poole harbour known as the Goat Horn Peninsula. Near to its base are the foundations of a ruined church, with other settlement remains in a shallow valley of what today is oak woodland just west of the Goat Horn railway at or near a place called Newton. But nothing of Newton survives as a viable settlement today. It is a place vanished from the face of Purbeck, yet Newton was to have been the fulfilment of Edward I’s vision for an entire new town and port on Poole harbour.

Oddly, the foundations of the church building were never recorded by surveyors of the Royal Commission for Historic Monuments, suggesting the foundations are not those of a medieval building. Furthermore, the oaks in woodland have been dated to the earlier 16th century, and are therefore too late to have been planted as part of Edward’s planned town. Yet Newton is clearly indicated as a settlement on a map of 1597, suggesting something was built here once – and in any case, how is it that the name Newton has survived?

There exists a document of 1286 stating Richard de Bosco was appointed to lay out a new town “with sufficient streets and lanes and adequate sites for a market and church and plots for merchants…” in a place called Gowtowre (Goat Horn?) Super Mare. But it is generally thought the silting of the harbour and the unfavourable situation of the site detached from the Dorset mainland probably killed the scheme.

What became of the road, which must once have connected the Roman ports and industries in Purbeck with Durovaria (Dorchester)? The question has been exercising the minds of archaeologists for some time, for no trace of a Roman road has yet been found. The explanation, which is common currency at the moment, holds that, as the communication was merely local rather than arterial (as roads emanating from London were). The Purbeck road was simply a flat metalled track, which the Romans did not bother to provide with a cambered hardcore foundation (agger), or with drainage ditches. There was no earthwork, and so the superficiality of the structure would understandably make it less inclined to leave traces after two millennia. Furthermore, the development of the Purbeck industries came mainly after the building of the main Roman road network.

Even more mysterious and perplexing for archaeologists is a discovery on heathland west of the South Haven Peninsula. Concentrated in an area between Redhorn Quay and Jerry’s Point are no fewer than 71 earthen ring-banks ranging from 45 to 150 feet in diameter. Although the banks are about 20 feet across, they are only about one foot high. Another six circles lie just to the south near Brand’s Ford, and 50 (once about 100) more cover the ground south west of Squirrel Cottage at East Holme.

The interiors of the circles are typically flat or slightly concave, hinting that one of two may have been ponds storing rainwater for short |periods, but the function of the others remains completely unknown. Of some significance however, has been the observation that trees established in some of the circles have grown larger than those of the same species elsewhere have. Two circles excavated in the 1960’s were found to contain burnt furze, which may point to a feeble explanation for the enhanced tree-growth but little else. No artefacts, which could have conclusively dated the structures, have ever been found, and the best estimate has been that they are not earlier than the Iron Age or later than 1700 AD. The lower end of the range is based on the finding that one or two of the rings impinge upon Bronze Age barrows and are therefore assumed to be later.

But associated with the northern group of circles are thirteen low sandy mounds, and an alignment of five evenly-spaced stones with a sixth lying off-centre at the north end occupy the centre of the South Haven Peninsula. Some of these stones have fallen, but like the circles and the tumuli they have so far defied explanation.

The 19th century antiquary Charles Warne describes another curious rock of Purbeck, this time entirely natural. This is the Agglestone near Studland, a great anvil-shaped 400 ton boulder which for thousands of years sat perched on a sandy hill (it eventually toppled over in 1970), It is now known that the Agglestone is an example of the outlier or lens of more indurated gritstone weathered out from its enclosing Bagshot Beds, but traditionally it has been accounted for in more prosaic, folklorish terms as thrown or placed by the Devil, prehistoric man, or brought by a glacier. The name may have its roots in the Old English word for hailstone, suggesting that the Agglestone fell from the sky.

While the Agglestone holds only a folklore tradition with no mystery attached, the same cannot be said for Harpstone. The Harpstone is no natural erratic but a seven-foot limestone menhir set up by prehistoric men beside a stream and a coppice in the Corfe Valley south east of Steeple. Isolated standing stones are rare in Dorset (although there are circles and rows) and were it not in Purbeck the Hartpstone’s environment would argue against prehistoric origin. Instead, its presence may indicate early Bronze Age penetration and clearance of the Corfe valley. Yet the “stone” part of the name does not appear in a document until 1340 (as Herpston); if it could be proved the stone part of the name is older, we would have evidence of greater antiquity.

Then there is the gravedigger at Studland Parish Church who in January 1951 struck a stone cist while digging a grave. Lifting the lid, he found the sarcophagus contained a skeleton with its skull detached and the lower jaw placed behind it. The cist, which had been constructed of Purbeck marble slabs, was more than long enough to contain the body fully extended. The decapitation therefore, was not for want of space. In his pathology report Professor John Cameron determined that the skeleton was of a woman in her thirties. A Kimmeridge shale spindle and a number of cockle shells had been buried with her, initially suggesting a Romano-British date, as J.B. Calkin, who had excavated the Studland cist burial, had also excavated a 3rd century grave at Kimmeridge containing a woman buried with her head placed at her feet and with the jaw removed.

But the Rev J.H. Austen had excavated crouched burials in Bronze Age barrows with the jaw placed behind the skull, presenting the possibility that the Studland sexton had stumbled upon a Bronze Age cist burial older than first reckoned. In the DNHAS Proceedings for 1952, Calkin wrote that the Bronze Age people of Purbeck might have had “..a very lively fear of being haunted by the dead” and so had practised the mutilation of corpses to prevent the dead from walking and talking.

On the ridge between Creech and East Lulworth, at the boundary of Tyneham and Steeple parishes, there is an ancient crossroads long known as Maiden’s Grave Gate. This ominous name preserves the memory of an 18th century girl who killed herself and consequently was denied a Christian burial. Indeed, as the law then required she was buried at the crossroads – buried, it was believed, with a stake driven through her heart! At this place too, there stands an oak, into the trunk of, which has been carved two coffins. It seems that only three hundred year ago superstition extended to taking measures to prevent the appearances of ghosts.