General

Had you been able, 140 million years ago, to stand where Studland, Worth Matravers or anywhere else in Purpeck now are, your surroundings would have been as terrifying as they were breathtakingly primeval. You would have been thrown back to the age of the Dinosaurs, but at a point approximately half-way along in their reign on earth, with almost as long again before the catastrophe in which they perished.

By the end of the much-publicised Jurassic period, south east Dorset was covered by a swampy lake in which the sediments now forming the Purbeck beds were deposited. Here the water margin was frequented by the great reptiles of the day, who left their multi-ton imprints in the soft mud, a substratum which periodically dried out, setting footfalls in what today is the solid rock of the Purbeck cliffs and promontories.

Because of this unfortunate accident of nature in remote antiquity, Purbeck today is not just the centre of a long tradition of aggregate extraction. The course of nature has made it simply one of the world’s premier dinosaur sites. It is a treasure house of prehistory, but one more noted for the traces of these monsters than for their bones. The Purbeck hills have yielded more sets of saurian footprints than any other area of Britain. And the bones which have been found – usually washed up by the sea – hint powerfully at the presence of a dinosaur graveyard somewhere beneath Swanage Bay.

Through excavation and quarrying activity however, it has become apparent that one formation above all others has preserved the great majority of the saurian traces discovered in the Purbeck Series. This is a scorious, pink sandy limestone packed with casts of numerous spire-shelled snails, called the Roach (or Pink) Bed. This bed lies only a few feet below the surface and is fissured horizontally and vertically. In 1962 Geologist J.B. Delair had noted the high frequency of reptilian prints in this bed, but such traces from any other Purbeck beds would not be proved until 1965.

Delair noted that the prints occurred along the bedding. Other clues suggested the saurians were in shallow water just deep enough to keep their tails buoyed up as they waded in deeper, for there are sets of tracks starting well-defined, but which become less distinct with immersion.

In all instances the prints show action: the reptiles were not simply standing or grazing passively. Some appeared to be running or changing direction. Six-inch prints exposed in a quarry near Acton have been attributed to a creature named Purbeckopus pentactylus . Two prints facing away from each other at 90 degrees were discovered in 1936 and another set forming an almost complete circle on the rock bed has also been found.

Delair noted, in a quarry between Worth Matravers and Acton, prints orientated in all directions around a saucer-like depression on a bedding plane. Although several dozen saurian prints in all have been found in Purbeck, barely a handful has been saved for posterity, and most of these have been erased or partly obscured by weather conditions. In 1961 at Herston a fine set of double tracks saw the light of day when E.W. Shuttle re-opened Mutton Hole Quarry. There were 26 prints, and a further trail was discovered here in 1962 which attracted much more attention from the scientific community. The prints were interpreted as those of a Megalosaurus, but no attempt was made to preserve them. The Natural History Unit of the British Museum excavated a further 70 prints from an undamaged section at Mutton Hole.

A quarry at Queensground, Lytchett Matravers, revealed prints of Tri-dactyls, one of which came not from the Roach Bed but a freestone bed four feet lower. This made it the first saurian footprint ever to be found in a bed other than Roach.

Upon the great extinction and geographical change which ushered in the Tertiary era, the dinosaur remains were engulfed in torrents of water bearing sediments which buried their carcasses and traces. But Purbeck’s fossil record bears witness to the next great evolutionary leap – the emergence of the mammals.  One of the earliest deposits of mammalian remains is in the cliffs at Durlston Bay. The remains are disarticulated bones and teeth of some of the earliest marsupials, heralding the scion of evolution that, 50 million years later, would result in the appearance of ourselves.

Perhaps it could almost be said that Dorset was made for sheep and shepherding. Indeed, a flock of these animals in a pasture appears at the top of the county council’s website homepage and four hundred years ago there would certainly have been more sheep than people in the county. Of course, from the time of the shepherds watching over their flocks on the night of Jesus’ birth to the updated methods of the present day, sheep have always needed a labourer class to manage them; to pen, breed, feed and shear them. In short, the shepherds job.

Of course, sheep and shepherds are not exclusive to Dorset, though “hill farmer” is the term generally applied to the shepherd up north. For the Dorset shepherd the bedrock for his animals and livelihood has always meant the Dorset Heights, the great tract of Chalk downland spreading through the west and north of the county that has given rise to a native breed of sheep. Today though, the sheep population is but a shadow of what it would have been 400 to 500 years ago, when the implosion of the human population caused by the Black Death created such a shortage of labour for arable farming that it was more economic for landlords to enclose their land for pasture and keep sheep instead. So was laid the foundation of the great woollen industry that lasted until the 19th century.

The earliest reference to shepherds in the county may be attributed to Augustine who, tradition has it, once visited Dorset perhaps early in the 7th century and asked some shepherds tending their flocks in a field whether they preferred drinking beer or water. When the abstemious shepherds replied “water” Augustine is supposed to have struck the ground with his staff crying out “Cerne El” whereupon water gushed forth. The historian William of Malmsbury records that after St Aldhelm had died “Dorset shepherds, from neighbouring pastures” used to use a timber church or oratory the Bishop had built, as a shelter from rainstorms.

Hardy, in his extensive essay ‘The Dorset Labourer’ described the shepherd as “a lonely man of which the battle of life had always been sharp with him.” He is also described as being small frame, bowed over by hard work and who would stand at a hiring fair. His wages would not have exceeded eleven shillings a week. Hardy’s best-known fictional shepherd is probably Gabriel Oak, the ultimate beneficiary of the plot of ‘Far From the Madding Crowd.’ He is hired at a hiring-fair by the heroine Bathsheba Everdene and spends long hours out in the pasture tending her flock day and night. One night Oak shoots his sheepdog dead for stampeding the flock over a cliff while he is asleep, and in another instance cures the flock of “the blasting” after they stray into a field of clover. It is not certain whether the inspiration for these scenarios came from incidents in real life that the author may have witnessed or heard about.

Typically the 18th and 19th century shepherds would have worn smock-frocks and gaiters, though those young or of middle age sometimes wore smocks of a blue material. Only occasionally would they have worn cord trousers. Then there is the standard tool for the job: the crook. These are still made today, lightweight and durable accessories usually with hooks of buffalo horn fitted to shanks made from hazel or blackthorn.

Shepherds have also traditionally lived in purpose-built huts – almost windowless wooden caravan-like cabins on wheels measuring about 8 by 10 feet that could be towed onto the pasture where they would be working in the lambing season. They would have, as Hardy put it “sheltered the shepherd in his enforced nightly attendance.” Shepherd hut-making is a specialist craft that happily has been kept alive mainly through the excellent work of Richard Lee and Jane Dennison, two former students of John Makepeace at Hooke Collage, the school of woodcrafts at Parnham Manor near Beaminster.

At their Plankbridge workshop Richard and Jane use high quality materials locally sourced. Douglas fir is used for the frame and chassis, and the huts are fully insulated with versatile additional space; they can be used for the garden, orchard or filed. Features such as desks, cupboards, beds, heating and wiring may further be added. Te huts are finished off with an exterior coat of green paint and a set of steps for the door at the end are also provided.

One example of a modern Dorset shepherd of the 20th century is Larry Skeats. During a lifetime of shepherding extending across 45 years he folded the flocks in his care over the chalk downland using only dogs and wattle hurdles. At work his home became a shepherd’s hut. His autobiography ‘A Shepherds Delight: Memories of a Downland Shepherd,’ is a celebration of a bygone way of life by one of the last of the traditional shepherds.

Similarly, Ted Riglar began work aged twelve in 1901 as a shepherd at East Farm, Bincombe. Just two years later he sheared his first sheep, then went on to win a first prize of £4 at a shearing competition during a Bath & West Show in Dorchester in 1908. He then went on to acquire his Instructor’s Certificate in 1918. Born in 1891 Ernest Lovell was another ‘shep’ who started at age thirteen and by the mid 20th century was tending a four-hundred strong Dorset Horn flock at South Farm, Spetisbury. Lovell also bred sheep specialising in breeding rams and for this work won ten prizes at agricultural shows.

On occasion shepherds formerly may have delegated the responsibility of tending a flock to a hireling. Many shepherds would have smoked clay pipes and piped out folk tunes on a long-blown flute to keep themselves occupied throughout their long uneventful hours in the pasture. Early in the 20th century sheep used to be sheared at Upwey, where shearers at work were photographed in 1909. The prevalence of pastureland in Dorset is attested to in place-names such as Shepherd’s Bottom on the Ashmore Estate, and the shepherd is immortalised in a statue now standing in Dorchester.

Mosaics can be traced as far back as the third millennium BC and were widely applied in Greek and Roman homes of the classical period. They are a pictorial form of enduring decorative ceramic for floors or walls, and demanded considerable skill in their assembling. Until the classical period only coarse pebbles were used, but in the 3rd century BC square, trapezoidal, or triangular glazed tiles or tesserae, varying from a few millimetres to 1 square centimetre in size were introduced.

When Britain became a province of its empire Roman techniques and designs were inevitably imported into the country through growing trade and commercial links with the continent. Mosaic floors were then laid in villas of the civil zone including in Dorset, and several examples of the art have come to light during the excavations of the residences of which they were once a part.

The mosaics found in the Dorset villas were not necessarily contemporary with the original building. A floor could have been laid after many generations of occupation, perhaps at a time of greater status attainment or affluence. Since the floors are usually the only part of the buildings to survive, the mosaics are often all that is known about a villa. But in any event the villas in Dorset seem to date mainly from later in the Roman occupation period, i.e. from the late 3rd century onwards. From the 1st century onwards there appeared a recognised Durnovarian school of mosaicists.

The Durnovarian school was based in Dorchester and at Illchester, now in Somerset but then well within the canton of the Durotriges (the native people of Wessex.) their style is characterised by fine-figured work of common themes and unusual reliefs which point towards a quite restricted cliché or school of expert artisans. The motifs employed are not so much geometric as concentric and were routinely framed by elaborate inter-twinning or guilloche.

While most of the floor would have been laid under the direction of a single mosaicist, there is at least one example of a villa floor in Dorset, which shows traces of completion by another worker of inferior skill to that of his master. There is also evidence to show that parts of some floors were repaired sometime after they were laid. Although more than half a dozen villas are known in Dorset, four in particular have yielded remains of mosaic pavements of sufficient extent to be worthy of conservation and description. These came from Frampton, Hinton St. Mary, Dewlish and Hemsworth.

The villa at Frampton was one of the earliest to be discovered and excavated, in 1796. It was found to have considerably large areas of well-preserved mosaic flooring laid around 350 AD, which were subsequently cleaned and drawn. Here dolphins are a prominent element in the designs, a motif also popular in Christian art. Hinton St. Mary is perhaps the most famous of the villa sites following its fortuitous discovery by the village blacksmith in 1963. As at Frampton virtually all that is known about the villa in through the mosaic, later bought by the British Museum.

But what is most interesting about the floors at both here and Frampton is that they include the earliest yet known icons of Christianity to be found in Britain as well as – and in tandem with – traditional pagan motifs. At both villas the mosaics featured the popular scene of the god Bellerophon slaying the monster Chimaera, as well as other hunting scenes and the popular inclusion of the wine god Bacchus. Yet at Frampton there is also the singular appearance of the Chi-Ro monogram – so called after the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek (a reverse “P” superimposed on an “X”.)

This monogram appears again in the Hinton flooring, but here it was taken a stage further by the inclusion beneath the symbol of a portrait, which is difficult to interpret as anything other than a likeness of Christ himself. This element of the design appeared to be accorded special status, for it was positioned within an apse or semi-circular embayment seemingly provided for the purpose.

The villa at Dewlish was discovered in the grounds of Dewlish house and found to have almost complete mosaic floors in several rooms. In the entrance passage was a Greek key pattern, while a floral motif bordered by a guilloche with vines adorned the dining room. A room (numbered 11) showed a leopard killing a gazelle. Users of the bath suite changing room would have stood on a design with Cupid, a ram, leopard, dolphin, and a sea creature procession or Theasos. These probably surrounded a centrepiece showing perhaps Neptune, though this detail was missing when excavated, presumed destroyed in antiquity. The leopard and Gazelle fragments were mounted for display in Dewlish House; some of the other pieces went to Dorchester Museum, but the remainder was re-buried.

Excavation of the villa at Hemsworth exposed a fine, complete rhomboidal mosaic laid for the plunge bath in the bath-house. This piece was lifted and presented to Dorchester Museum by the executors of Lord Allington in 1905. In the museum’s conservation section is a roundel of Neptune or Oceanus lifted from the centre of a pavement at Hemsworth in 1908 and presented by the Allington estate executors. This shows the head of a sea-god with crab legs and claws growing from the forehead.

Apart from villa floor sections the County Museum also displays a number of other mosaic fragments discovered during excavations of townhouses around Dorchester, or during the laying of foundations for new buildings. For example a townhouse found in the grounds of the former county hospital yielded a rich 13’x21’ geometric mosaic of rope and diamond patterns in black, white, red, grey, blue and yellow tesserae. This was re-laid in the entrance to a residential home on the site.

In the Victorian Gallery can be seen a fragment from Durngate Street lifted and re-laid in 1905. This shows typical Durnovarian work with crested serpents and leaves similar to a design in the Hinton mosaic in the British Museum. This Durngate piece however is one of the few to show a fruit and leaf motif signature. Also in the gallery is a mosaic unearthed at a site in Olga Rd in 1899. Alfred Pope presented the fragment, which shows a vessel with ornate handles similar to a motif on a Cirencester mosaic, to the museum.

Fordington High Street has yielded a polychromatic mosaic also similar to one at Cirencester, and possibly dating from the 2nd century AD. Found in 1927 it was set up in the temporary exhibition gallery and shows a repair carried out in antiquity to the 3-strand guilloche surrounding one of the circles containing a stylised flower. Six red tesserae of a figure once occupying the central octagon are also present.

A fragment of orange-brown guilloche with flowers can be seen in the Roman Section of the museum. The then Devon and Cornwall Bank (now Natwest) discovered the piece when laying foundations for the new bank. By the main staircase is a fragment of mosaic from near South Street found in 1894 – the first piece to be acquired for the museum by Alfred Pope. Halfway up the staircase a geometric mosaic from the prison burial ground is displayed. It was found in 1858 when a grave for an executed man was being dug and was re-laid in the Prison chapel until that was re-built in 1885, whence it was moved to the museum.

The museum’s entrance lobby is laid with a mosaic made up in 1908 with tesserae from a mosaic surround found behind 45, South Street in 1905. The floor of the Dorchester Townhouse conserved in Colliton Park remained under cover after its excavation between 1937 and 1939 until 1997, when the mosaics were re-exposed and conserved.

“Dreadful Effects of the Late Tempest”….The “Western Flying Post, Sherborne and Yeovil Mercury and General Advertiser for Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall” made much of its reports of the great storm of November 1824 and the associated tidal wave which swept far inland.

“We have rarely had a more melancholy duty to perform than the recital of the tremendous effects of the gale of Monday night last” began the account in the weekly newspaper of November 29th. “A tempest teeming with more frightful terrors is scarcely within the memory of man.” The storm beginning at 4 a.m. on November 22 appears to have come from the SSW direction and to have been accompanied at times by rain, lightning and thunder.

The pier at the entrance of Weymouth harbour was demolished by the sea, and the quays inundated. The esplanade was destroyed, and a stone bench carried over 200 yards. Lower apartments were filled with water and boats seen floating in all directions. Two smacks were lost and seamen were drowned. A 500-tonne vessel went down with all hands, and a Dutch galliot broke from her moorings and went ashore. Other vessels rode out the storm but were dismasted.

At Portland, in the village of Chisel 80 houses were swept away by the sea and 30 people died, while the ferry passage-house was almost demolished and the ferryman drowned. Along the coast to the west, a ship was wrecked in West Bay and 17 men from her were picked up and buried at Portland. To date 25 bodies had been picked up on the Isle of Portland. The fishermen had lost all their boats and nets.

Among the wrecks was that of a West Indiaman laden with rum and cotton, which foundered opposite Fleet, the whole of the crew perishing. The water swept over the barrier of Chesil Beach and inland to the village of Fleet, where it demolished the church only leaving the chancel or east end. Later the church was to be replaced by another nearby. Many houses were destroyed.

Although well inland, Dorchester did not escape. “The devastating effects of the storm were felt in every quarter of the town,” says the newspaper report. Here a heavy chimney stack fell on the home of the Rev. H.J. Richman, rector of Holy Trinity church, crushing him to death.

At Poole a roaring wind broke windows; trees were torn up by the roots and blown down, together with around 50 chimneys. The tide flooded the quays and craft were at the mercy of the wind and waves, and the town was surrounded on all sides. Some captains sank their own vessels to avoid them being damaged. Some £7,000 of damage was estimated to have been sustained before the tide retreated.

The Cobb at Lyme Regis was damaged, and a large number of houses were carried away at Bridport and sheep drowned. Damage there estimated at £20,000. And the effects of the storm were felt in Southampton and Portsmouth and even inland as far as Salisbury.

In purely archaeological terms the Prehistoric constitutes the period un-represented by any written record, from when the country was first occupied by man right up to the Roman invasion. Dorset is especially well endowed in this regard. It is as if its topography, climate and geographical position were most highly coveted by the earliest settlers of southern England, and the concentration of their activities and monuments here attains a density unparalleled anywhere in the country. This understandably makes the workload of the county’s archaeology department particularly challenging, for most fieldwork today is salvage or “rescue” archaeology in the vanguard of development.

As elsewhere the prehistoric in Dorset had been organised into five distinct periods on the basis of the type of monument, pottery and other artefacts. Chronologically there were the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age, collectively spanning the period from before 500 thousand years ago to 43 AD. Of these the first two periods alone covered approximately 496 thousand years, or 99% of the time Britain has been inhabited. These were illiterate periods of hard and short hunter-gatherer living almost entirely represented today by flint tools, bones, or cave art. One site in Dorset above all others, which has yielded evidence of flint working, has been Hengistbury Head.

About 4000 BC a possible dissemination of ideas and practices through contact with the continent brought agriculture to the inhabitants of Britain. This brought with it a more settled way of life, which in turn led to the first appearance of earthworks to define the areas of places established for religion, trade, tribal meeting or even settlement. Several distinct kinds of earthwork make their appearance in Dorset, namely Causewayed Enclosures, Long Barrows and Henges.

Causewayed enclosures are circular or irregularly oval areas defined by up to three ring-ditches accompanied by low banks or ramparts built up using spoil from the ditches. The banks are discontinuous in one or more places to allow access into the enclosure. The ditches have yielded most of the period’s flint tools, bones and sherds of the earliest pottery to be made in England, clearly indicating that the people were habitually using ditches as middens for the refuse from their settlements, whether these were situated within the enclosures or outside them. Elsewhere excavation of some ditches has yielded only human remains, suggesting that at these enclosures only funeral rites were practised.

Causewayed enclosures are mainly distributed on the hilltops of the chalk downland, though some may have been constructed in the wider valleys. Two notable examples are at Dorchester: Flagstones was a causewayed enclosure partly destroyed by the construction of the town’s bypass; the remainder actually lies beneath Maxgate, the home of Thomas Hardy. This site revealed the marks of the antler picks used to dig it, and some burials took place in and around the enclosure. The hillforts of Maiden Castle near Dorchester and Hambledon Hill began their prehistoric record as causewayed enclosures before these were abandoned or superseded by later earthworks.

Long Barrows were or are the earthen prehistoric equivalent to mausolea for communal burial. They can be over 90 metres (300 feet) long, and usually taper towards the end, both in plan and elevation. The majority had a wooden mortuary enclosure and ditches usually flanked the sides. They are generally a feature of the chalk uplands, with two major groupings around and to the west of Dorchester. There are also groups on Pimperne and Thickthorn Downs near Cranbourne, close to the south west end of the special contemporary earthwork known as the Dorset Cursus. The Hell Stone near Portesham is the stone cairn of a long barrow now worn away.

A special class of barrow (and one found nowhere else outside Dorset) is the Bank Barrow, a much elongated variant of the long barrow, but which did not usually enclose a burial. There are three of these earthworks: at Maiden Castle and Came Down near Dorchester and at Martins Down near Long Bredy.

The Dorset Cursus itself was a linear enclosure almost 7 miles long, defined by two sets of parallel banks and ditches. It runs from Thickthorn Down to Pentridge, though only at the later does any part of the earthwork survive today. Its function is a matter of some controversy, though the monument probably reflects an aspect of tribal ritual. Associated long barrows cut the cursus at two points, showing that the burials were later, from a time when the cursus had passed out of use.

The transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age was not a sudden event, but a slow process of social and demographic change, which went on roughly between 2,500 and 1,500 BC. Over this period the causewayed camps were abandoned and the long barrows were sealed. During this phase also, the exclusively British innovation of the Henge makes its appearance.

Henges differed from the causewayed enclosures in usually having only one bank with entrances and the ditch usually, though not invariably, on the inside. The interiors were often left without other structures, though some had pits, posts, or standing stones. Mount Pleasant and Maumbury Rings near Dorchester and Eggardon Hill near Winterbourne Abbas being the best examples. Mount Pleasant was 400 metres (450 yards) across and was a major tribal centre with rings of timber uprights inside, though today it is only visible as an earth mark in the chalk soil. Henges usually occur singularly, but at Knowlton near Gussage St. Michael there is a cluster of three or four in close association.

Close to the henges in time were un-enclosed Stone Circles, which may reflect on a smaller scale the function of the more complex monument. There are two examples of these in Dorset, at Kingston Russell near Abbotsbury and Nine Stones near Winterbourne Abbas.

By far the most prolific (and most important) source of the information and artefacts of the Bronze Age Beaker and Wessex Cultures are the Round Barrows. There were six variants on the basic plan, Bell and Bowl Barrows being the most common. Wessex was the heartland of barrow building and there are still some 400 surviving examples to be seen along the South Dorset Ridgeway. They were graves of a rich chiefdom society and have yielded rich hoards of pottery, brooches, and gold and bronze objects, as at Clandon near Martinstown. There are large cemeteries at Oakley Down near Sixpenny Handley and at Poor Lot near Winterbourne Abbas. Further clusters occur around the Dorset Cursus, in Came Wood and around the Knowlton henges.

After 1000 BC there were permanent fields and settlement sites. Around 700 BC the Iron Age in Britain began, when population pressure and increasing inter-tribal warfare may have been the impetus for the appearance of the great revetted and defended hillforts. The earliest in Dorset may be Chalbury near Weymouth (c.600 BC.) Between 200 and 100 BC many of these forts were much enlarged, as at Maiden Castle, Eggardon Hill, Hod Hill, Hambledon Hill, Badbury Rings, Abbotsbury Castle, Pilsden Pen and Rawlesbury.

But the present distribution of these monuments can be misleading as to the pattern of settlement in prehistoric Dorset. Because the monuments and settlements are today found only on the uplands it has been thought that the people of the time only settled and farmed here. But later people have not used the higher ground intensively. It has now been realised that the valleys were settled in prehistoric times also, but here the evidence of activity has largely been destroyed by post-Roman settlement and farming.