Register here - as a registered user you get more features and fewer ads.
Martin Papworth writes about Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s book ‘Ancient Wiltshire’, begun in 1810 too late for his friend William Cunnington who had died a few months earlier. Richard laments the loss of his friend and fellow time traveller. The introduction and the conclusion to volume two ‘North Wiltshire’, written in 1821, states clearly these volumes would never have been possible without William’s inspiration.
As I turned the pages in that little room…written just a few feet from where I stood…it was the illustrations that particularly amazed me. At the bottom left of each .. was the name P. Crocker.
He was the other key individual in the archaeology team. Philip learnt his mapping skills from the newly formed Ordnance Survey. Was it William or Richard who first engaged him to make plans of the archaeological sites they were discovering?
Philip mapped and numbered groups of burial mounds and marked the routes of Roman Roads. His art included landscapes paintings, reconstruction drawings of monuments, most notably his drawings of Stonehenge and Avebury, and he also drew the artefacts discovered during the barrow excavations.
‘Ancient Wiltshire’ grapples with the problem of understanding the chronology of British prehistory at a time when there were no dating techniques. William and Richard noted the way roads and earthworks altered their course or cut or avoided one another demonstrating a sequence of events. They noted different types of finds and that burials with iron were always found above burials with bronze.. though they did not coin the terms Iron Age and Bronze Age. The Danish archaeologist Thomsen did that in 1836.
There are discovery stories in ‘Ancient Wiltshire’. Colt Hoare aimed for scientific enquiry though this was the time of gothic romance. The excavation of the Bush Barrow in 1808 within the Normanton Group of barrows south of Stonehenge is of particular significance. Here, Cunnington and the Parkers recorded the golden, bronze and stone grave goods surrounding the burial of an important man but it is the account of another excavation which captures the mood of the time.
This excavation was just across the border in Dorset. Here, a large barrow group was drawn by Crocker cut across by the later Ackling Dyke Roman Road. Digging into the large mound ‘9’ of the Oakley Down barrows they found a burial near the surface but below this a heap of flints. Sir Richard rightly surmised that the primary inhumation lay deeper.
They began to shift the rocks and a thunderstorm broke out across the exposed downland. Swept with intense rain, the team clustered for shelter in the burial pit leaving their iron tools on the mound summit above them. A clap of thunder and the tools drew a direct hit by a lightning bolt that sent a landslide of debris down upon them forcing them out into the storm. One of Sir Richard’s companions Rev William Bowles was so moved by the experience that he wrote a poem which is included in the book. It captures the romance of the time reminiscent of contemporary novels such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
More at:
https://archaeologynationaltrustsw.wordpress.com/2017/05/30/stourhead-and-sir-richards-archaeologists/
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road