Fresh from the Trenches

Ello mates, I’m off on another adventure this weekend, but before I depart, I wanted to tell you this tail of my adventure last weekend.

Saturday 30 March 2013

9:10 AM

Just outside Appleton Tower, Edinburgh

A pack lunch and a bottle of coke were sitting in my union flag bag. We were waiting outside the shuttle van for any stragglers who were tagging along. I was with the Arch Soc group, and quite frankly it was too for me to have caught a bus into Edinburgh. So needless to say I wasn’t all the way awake yet. The sky was overcast, and the slightest flurry of snow drifted around us. If the weather were to up like this, today promised to be a long day. All the same I was excited; this would be my first real experience with archaeology.

We winded our way through Edinburgh, heading east into the East Lothian region. Our first stop was in the small village of Haddington. This wee hamlet seemed to me as if it had hardly changed over the last two hundred years. It was rather nice to see a village with this sort of classic appearance. I was in the UK after all; I figured I had to run into one of them sooner or later.

We were here to visit St. Mary’s Cathedral. This massive church reminded me in many ways of St. Magnus’s Cathedral in Kirkwall. Because it sits so close to the river Tyne it has often experienced flood damage. There are pocks in the outside walls from bullets during the siege of Haddington, and half of it was left without a roof for nearly 400 years. However, today an incredibly convincing fibreglass roof covers the side of the church which was once exposed to the elements.

Our mission here was to look for graffiti carved into the stones on the inside of the church. Now when I say graffiti, I don’t mean anything even remotely akin to the words and patterns one can find spray painted in today’s cities. We were instead looking for carved mason’s marks or really anything else of interest.

For those of you who don’t know, way back in the day, stone masons would sign their work with a somewhat simple symbol of their own design. Each mason’s mark was unique, and served as a way to prove what work each mason had actually done. In a way it was analogous to signing a painting, but it also served as way for the person funding the project to know how much each mason should be paid.

I loved this part of the day. In my mind it wasn’t really archaeology, but it was something that I was rather familiar with. If there was a way I could search through old buildings and look for graffiti for a living, I would drop archaeoastronomy in a heartbeat. This was quite simply fun. I was one of the first to find a mason’s mark, which looked like a mixture between a cross and an upside down capitol Y. I would later find a series of marks that resembled anchors, and it really was fun to follow them through the cathedral. It was as if I was following that mason as he worked.

When we were done at the cathedral, it was time to leave Haddington. Our next destination was Amisfield walled garden. Like virtually all old structures in Scotland, this walled garden has quite the checkered past, which we were told upon arrival. I’m going to spare you the details because they mean very little to the plot of this blog post, but if you’re curious do look them up. I found them to be rather amusing.

What I will tell you about Amisfield is that it is all for show. It is the second largest walled garden in Scotland. Walled gardens exist to block the interior from the wind. The wind is supposed to hit the wall, and go up and over the whole garden. Amisfield is so large that the wind doesn’t make it all the way over the whole garden, completely defeating the purpose of having a wall. The back portions of the wall, where guests would never be taken, was put together by some of the sloppiest masonry I have ever seen. The front portion of the garden, which was intended for visitors, was dressed to look as if it had been put together by some really high quality masonry. However, underneath this façade was some equally dodgy masonry.

So right now you might be wondering what would there be to show off in this fabulously fake Scottish garden. The answer may surprise you, because it certainly surprised me. They were growing pineapples. Yes you read that right, pineapples. As it would turn out back in the Victorian era, pineapples were worth their weight in gold. You didn’t eat them; you rented them for a centre piece. They were the ultimate status symbol.

Now I’m sure you’ve noticed the problem with this that I have. Gloomy, cold, and rainy a healthy pineapple it does not make. So what did our clever Victorians do? They built steam heated green houses, which originally used Roman technology. In the mid 19^th century they replaced the Roman style steam heating, with iron piping. However, for a time there was a Pineapple growing green house in Victorian Scotland, which worked because of Roman technology. So once upon a time, there were three such houses. The largest, in the centre, housed the prized pineapples, while the two smaller ones on either side held peach trees and melons.

When we arrived, the pineapple house had already been completely excavated, and the house on the left was well on its way. They believed the left house was used for peaches, due to the fact that it had ample space in the dodgy masonry for roots to spread. The house on the right was completely unexcavated.

There were three of us who had never participated in an archaeological dig before, and so we were taken to the site of the mystery house. Since we were virgin archaeologists and this was our first time getting down on our knees and dirty. They showed us the ropes. I apologize for that…   that’s a bit of bad archaeology humour. I’ve found that those who work in a trench tend to have their mind in the gutter.

Our first job was to decide where to put our trench. How do you pick something like that? Is there a right place to start digging? Truthfully there isn’t one right answer, and this part of archaeology more than anything else is largely guess work. The one bit of direction we were given on this subject was to always work from what is known out towards what is unknown.

On the site there was a stone slab sticking out that once was likely the exterior part of the foundation, and a bit of a metal pipe sticking out from the wall of the walled garden. That area was about as “known” as it would ever get when it comes to archaeology so that made a good place to start. Now that we had a starting location, we had to mark off our trench area with some highly sophisticated equipment – namely string, stakes, and a measuring tape.

We marked off a trench area of one metre by three metres, and then with our spades began to dig. Now when digging a trench it is important to remember two things. First never drive your spade directly down into the soil. The object is to slowly remove the dirt, not to drive the shovel through any artefacts that might be buried. Second, try your best to remove dirt at an even rate, maintaining a flat surface within the trench and striving for a sheer wall where the string was.

All three of us were very good for beginners. We were cleared down to the first hint of masonry within a half an hour, and then it was time to switch to trowels and dust pans. By this point, a second vertical pipe began to start poking out in my section. This was apparently very good, because the other house showed the masonry for this type of vertical pipe, but it had long since eroded away.

Archaeology is a slow process. For first timers we couldn’t have had a better starting point. We were digging in an area where we knew there would be something, and what we knew there would be would truthfully have very little consequence on the scientific and historical communities. When I say very little, I mean virtually none. So basically we were digging in an area which would provide instant gratification, where it wouldn’t matter if we screwed up.

All and all we dug for approximately four and a half hours, and I have to say I was impressed with our progress. The trench looked exactly like one would expect a trench to look, with sheer vertical walls and a flat bottom. There were artefacts that were beginning to come into shape, and their purpose and function would be understood after a wee bit more digging.