I’ve been quiet on the blogging front, chiefly because I spent August digging in Alderney. Running a dig is full-on, 7 days a week but I found time to sit back see the moon rise over Longis Bay, to watch the stars come out over Saye and enjoy plenty of Alderney hospitality. We’d swim at lunchtime or straight after work and it felt very ‘famous five’ at times. My phone thought I was in France (clearly visible 9 miles away).
Our team returned to Longis Common where we found a dozen Iron Age burials and traces or Roman buildings in an electric trench in 2017, followed up with a dig in 2018. The site overlooks the island’s natural harbour but was abandoned by islanders when the land was buried by up to 2m of sand during extensive sand-blows from the early Middle Ages. Since then it has largely been undisturbed by development.
This year’s dig reinforced our belief that Roman buildings spread for some 200m across the common, and confirmed that the Romans built on top of an earlier Iron Age Cemetery they may not even have been aware of. In the Paddock at the western, uphill, edge of the site, Trench 2 from 2018 was partly re-opened and then expanded under my colleague Dr Phil de Jersey. Parts of a large Roman building stood here with clay-bonded walls up to a metre high made of local sandstone. Large sandstone blocks were placed vertically to form parts of these walls and a courtyard of roughly hewn flat stones interleaved between two layers of clay stood between them. Extending the trench this year revealed another room or courtyard with a hearth, and a doorway framed by upright slabs. Very late-looking Pottery points to these buildings being in use in the third to fourth centuries, so still occupied at the same time as the late Roman small fort at the Nunnery nearby. They could have been part of a vicus outside the fort.
A gap in the paved courtyard enabled a very deep excavation to reach the Iron Age cemetery.
A third skeleton was buried close by, in a stone cist, with a small pot by its shoulder. These are ‘high status’ burials, and taken with earlier discoveries show that the Iron Age population of Alderney was affluent and had links with communities in France. We are pretty convinced that they had a role in controlling trade routes, as northbound ships hugging the Gallic coast carrying wine and Mediterranean luxuries would pass within sight of Longis, as would southbound ships carrying produce from the north. This importance carried through to the Roman period, explaining their interest in the small island.
Some 50m downhill, on the Common closer to the sea, geophysics showed a large sweeping shadow so Trench 4 was dug to investigate. Dubbed the ‘Punishment Trench’ large quantities of sand needed to be removed by hand, to be followed by disappointment when the shadow turned out to be a trackway with tyre-ruts probably dating to the German Occupation of WW2. Removing yet more sand however revealed a medieval wall, and still deeper was a metre-thick Roman wall. At the base of the site was a curious structure of roughly shaped granite cobbles that is still causing some head-scratching.
Within 50m of the Nunnery, I led a group of volunteer diggers to expand Trench 3 dug by school students in 2018. It has been my curse in recent years to dig sites criss-crossed by utilities and this was another. Avoiding two electric mains, a water main and an old sewer we put in a 13m long trench and a trio of companion trenches to reveal a building with three rooms (or three adjacent buildings). These again employed large upright slabs on their internal walls which stood just less than a metre high. A layer of clay appears to have been laid down to seal the earlier soils before building commenced. The central room is over five metres by five metres and the overall plan suggests a civilian building rather than military barracks. A vertical slab once formed one side of a doorway,
Given the similarity in building style and dating it is probable that the buildings in all the trenches were late Roman. All had earlier Roman pottery in layers running under the building showing there was earlier Roman activity on the site. The lack of large amounts of rubble suggests that the walls had been little higher in antiquity than they are now, with the upper parts of the buildings being timber-framed with wattle-and daub infill. The small amount of roof tile recovered suggests the buildings were roofed in perishable materials such as wooden shingles.
Late in the life of the building, when floors were no longer intact, the site was used for industrial activity including what looks like ironworking. A surprise find was made in one corner of the southern room of the Trench 3 building where part of a cobbled floor remained. Beside a crushed pot of post-Roman style was the base of a glass flask with a Christian symbol.
Frankish material is extremely rare in the Channel Islands, and opens a new chapter in the history of Alderney.
After the site was abandoned it was buried by wind-blown sand, the walls themselves probably encouraging it to accumulate. Work is still to continuing on the finds, but this year’s excavation proved that the Iron Age cemetery is extensive, and that its occupants were of high status. Exactly where those people once lived is an open question for the future. Our team has investigated perhaps 1% of the later Roman structures of the settlement at Longis, and we have not seen any traces of earlier Roman buildings or an earlier fort, so there is enormous potential for investigating this pristine site for years to come.
A big thanks to all my friends and colleagues who made this possible including Guernsey Museum staff, local and Guernsey volunteers, and our trio of students. It wouldn’t have been possible without support from the Alderney Society, Alderney Electricity, the States of Alderney, our many friends in the island and kind permission of the landowners.
To find out more about the Nunnery and Longis Common digs, follow the facebook page ‘Alderney Nunnery’. We’ll be working on the finds and reviewing the evidence during the winter, and with luck will return again next year.
The curator is not writing ‘a book on a wall’ – this mistake is often made by small museums run by enthusiasts. Few people have the time or patience to read more than a couple of hundred words whilst standing in a museum gallery, and want to get to the punchline as soon as possible.
Museums address this by using ‘three level text’. First comes the title on the text board, enough for people in a rush or those who don’t speak very good English to learn roughly what they are looking at. Next comes a paragraph of the key information for those who want a little more detail. The third level offers additional paragraphs to satisfy the more curious, although in reality we are only talking another 2 to 300 words.
January is a hectic time at Guernsey Museum, as we turn around all the temporary exhibition spaces in three weeks. For me it means checking and proofing all the wall text, and numerous press releases. New Year’s Day is also when I like to pitch into the new book – NRT in the case of 2017
Writing from a small island comes with its own challenges; 100 miles of water separates me from the mainland’s literary conventions, book fairs and library readings. In 2017 I took as many opportunities I could to combine a trip to the UK with a little literary interaction. September offered a chance to drop into the small but perfectly formed ‘Morecambe and Vice’ (“bring me some crime”).
big October highlight was of course the CWA Daggers Awards Dinner, the Oscars of the crime-writing world. It was lovely sitting on the ‘New Blood’ table meeting the hopeful nominees and the eventual winner; I imagine we’ll hear more from all of them.
, the final polish to Draft 7 being hammered out on my mother’s dining room table when I should have been socialising. Having discussed the idea the previous Christmas with London agent Annette Crossland. I sent off the manuscript and in a hectic couple of weeks I was signed up with A for Authors agency. Here we are celebrating at the CWA Christmas party. A pretty good end to 2017.
We have now had two carbon-14 dates obtained from the burial ground. The cremation I dug out literally using my hands had been in a later Iron Age pot, but its C-14 date range was 198-47 BC, so most probably second century BC. The first skull found on the site has been confirmed to belong to the otherwise headless ‘skeleton 3’. It worried us at first that this was at right angles to the other burials and appeared to have been in a coffin rather than a stone cist. However the C-14 date again pointed to the late Iron Age; 174-19 BC. So the burial was probably later than the cremation and could indeed have taken place in that transition period when the Romans were asserting their control of the region after 56 BC. This is the period in which I initially placed the fine ‘Belgic’ pedestal urn we extracted from a collapsing cist further uphill from the skeleton.
More fun has followed. A keen-eyed local chap brought in a clutch of three bracelets, two of which were made of shale (imagine grinding a bracelet out of shiny black shale!). The third was of copper bronze and in a fragile condition. It was taken to Jersey Heritage’s conservator, who initially thought it might have been silvered.
As he cleaned off the corrosion products he noticed a criss-cross lattice on the inside of the bracelet. Moreover, this seemed to contain metal threads. The provisional conclusion is that this is an impression of a fine material the deceased was wearing, or at least was wrapped around the bracelet. Textile preservation is rare in archaeology, but a fine material containing metal threads would be a pretty unique find for Iron Age Britain.
Common. Half a dozen graves were already known and this summer’s rescue dig revealed a dozen more. In addition there were traces of at least one building and suggestions of more, in a style suggestive of the Romans. The 50kg of finds have now been washed and includes Roman pottery. Overlooked by the Iron Age settlement of Les Hougettes, and running down towards the late Roman fort at the Nunnery, the electric trench suggests there is over 200m of archaeology in a west/east direction and we suspect this extends at least 100m to north and south.