Bleasdale Circle: Part Two

Where were we? Ah yes, the Bleasdale urns. All three of them were made from local boulder clay mixed with grit so that they’d keep their shape. In the words of Shadrach Jackson himself:

“They were very soft when found and were coated both inside and out with small rootlets.”

As we’ve mentioned before (in the previous half of this article to be exact) archaeology back in Victorian times was an extremely destructive, not to say hit and miss, science. As soon as the urns were exposed to the air the clay, unfortunately, began to harden, rapidly becoming brittle enough to warrant expert attention. So the urns were sent to Liverpool Museum for treatment and didn’t emerge again until 1970, only to be hauled back to the Harris in Preston where, as far as we know, they’re still in residence to this day.
Full of archaeological fever by now, good old Shadrach set about the rest of the inner henge, recording as he went that he’d found:

“...a circle of eleven oak logs placed upright on the inside of the log platform at the bottom of the ditch.”

The ditch, of course, surrounds the tumulus (well, I say ‘of course…I’m actually having a bit of difficulty following this lot myself) and measures five and a half feet across at the mouth, three feet six inches across at the bottom and three feet in depth. It was lined with birch poles.
Want to see a photograph of the birch poles? Well you can’t, because we haven’t got one. However, we did draw up the following illustration based on a photograph taken at the time, so that’ll have to do.


There are only a couple of these poles left in existence now. God knows what happened to the rest of them, but the Harris Museum is still holding onto a couple. The last we heard they were going to use some scientific analysis or other in an attempt to accurately date them or something, but we never heard the results so, presumably, the boffins never actually got round to doing it.
Somewhat annoyingly, those two poles are the only remains of Bleasdale Circle nowadays at all. After he’d completed his ‘excavation’, Shadrach Jackson then pulled off one of the most bizarre stunts in archaeological history. (At least he did as far as we’re concerned.) For reasons best left between him and his psychiatrist, he removed all the stumps from their nice moist moss (the only thing that had been keeping them stable and fresh for the previous several thousands years), left them all on the ground exposed to the elements (which, in effect meant that, within no time at all, they’d completely rotted away) and then set about planting the entire site with fir cones and rhododendron shrubs.
The net result – one totally knackered site, as the photograph below helps demonstrate.


All right, it’s been tidied up a bit since Shadrach Jackson came over all Gertrude Jekyll, and, yes I know, it’s not the greatest photograph ever, but it’ll have to do because I’m far too busy at the moment to cycle back up there for a clearer shot.
As you’ve probably gathered the missing posts nowadays have been replaced by replicas, otherwise visitors would be greeted by the extremely disappointing sight of just a hump in the ground.
The only other possibly significant artefacts noted by Jackson were:

“...a few broken slabs of sandstone which may have been used for crushing corn or for fire places.”

Varley didn’t bother mentioning them at all in his report, presumably dismissing them as insignificant. One slab in particular though caught our eye. We’ve drawn up the picture of it below to see what you reckon.


Jackson, himself, eventually dismissed his original idea, as clearly Bleasdale Circle wasn’t a place of habitation. To be honest, the slab looks like a small monolith to us -- one that’s fallen over, obviously. There was something similar I seem to recall on some episode of Time Team where they were digging a small henge in Scotland.
All of which preamble brings us to the question: “What exactly was Bleasdale Circle built for?”
And the answer is: “We haven’t got a clue.”
There are dozens of theories, of course. If you align the third post from the entrance anti-clockwise with a sheep in the field next door then it creates exactly the same alignment as John Lennon’s left foot did on the cover of Abbey Road in relation to the sun above the chimneystack. No doubt somebody will tell us their own particular hypothesis…and we’ll probably just ignore them because, the truth is, it’s all just guesswork regardless.
What we can tell you is that a number of books and documents have definitely got things wrong – not just the theories, but the facts upon which the theories were based. Jessica Lofthouse, for example, wrote in her 1946 book ‘Three Rivers’ that:

“...at Bleasdale there had been a Bronze Age strath, or stockaded village...Within the stockade were smaller huts of serfs, store huts and outside some of them had been found blackened circles denoting hearths for fires.”

Needless to say she was misinformed. According to Varley’s excavation report:

“The area between the outer palisade and the inner structure contained nothing whatsoever.”

Even Shadrach mentioned that:

“The only other human relic found within this (the inner) circle was a mass of charcoal four feet to the west of the group of urns.”

No mention in either excavation was ever made of ‘burnt areas’ situated in the larger circle or, indeed, any evidence of other buildings anywhere on the site. Bleasdale Circle wasn’t a village by any stretch of the imagination, consisting of only one possible building contained within a circular fence.
The only real clues to Bleasdale Circle’s original purpose seem to lie in its location, at the heart of a natural amphitheatre created by the fells. It’s an atmospheric place, all right, and well worth a visit.
To finish off, here’s a view of the view from the back door.


Again, the photograph’s a bit on the naff side, being rather blurred and shrunk in the wash, but it’ll have to do for now.

Bleasdale Circle: Part One

We’ve mentioned Bleasdale Circle a number of times in the past here at the Fylde and Wyre Antiquarian, but I’ve just had a check and, for some unknown reason, we’ve never actually written a proper article about what has to be Wyre’s most important (and possibly most secret) archaeological site itself.
All right, it’s not officially a secret, but whenever we’ve been to visit there’s been nobody around other than a few bored looking sheep.
This won’t do, so it’s time to remedy the situation.
Bleasdale Circle can be reached by public footpath, although a pair of stout Wellingtons is advisable. It’s been excavated twice -- firstly in 1899 by the brilliantly named Shadrach Jackson and secondly in 1935 by the rather more enigmatically named W.J. Varley.

Originally (during the Bronze Age that is) the site consisted of a large outer circle of posts surrounding an embankment (or vallum), which was slightly off-set, which in turn surrounded a ditch, which had a load of birch poles laid inside it, which in turn encircled a tumulus on the top of which stood a smaller circle of wooden columns, (with a splayed entrance) in the centre of which was a shallow grave containing three burial urns. Oh yes, and there was, apparently, a small burnt area in the inner circle.

Everybody get that? We didn’t think so, which is why we’ve produced the following diagram:

When it comes to the details, there are some variations between the two excavation reports -- hardly surprising really considering the unsubtle approach to archaeology at the time. The first of these concerns the posts of the ‘Outer Palisade’. For some reason old Shadrach counted thirty-six of them, whereas Varley only managed thirty-two.
Don’t ask, because I honestly don’t know. Let’s have a photograph up instead.


Right…that’s a picture of the vellum and ditch and one of the posts that constitute the ‘entrance’ to the inner circle. It might not make a lot of sense. The trouble is it’s impossible to photograph Bleasdale Circle all at once without some fir tree or rhododendron bush deliberately getting in the way of the camera.
The inner henge (for the train spotters amongst our readership) measures thirty-six feet across.
Inside this, at a depth of approximately twenty-two inches, Shadrach Jackson discovered two cremation urns and what’s generally referred to as a ‘pigmy urn’ (because it’s a diddy little thing, you see) in a rectangular grave.
According to Jackson the grave measured two feet by three feet and was filled with wood ash.
According to Varley, however, the grave measured two and a half feet by four feet.
You can’t help thinking that Varley was actually measuring the hole that Jackson had created.
Whatever the case, it produced a Papa urn:


A Mama urn:


And an iddy-biddy babba urn:


And there’s the problem, you see, because it’s easy to fall into the trap of automatically grouping these artefacts (and therefore their contents) as a ‘family’. If the truth were known, we’ve no idea whether this was the remains of one human being, three human beings, or a combination of human beings and animals…or whatever.
All we know with any certainty is that the two full sized urns were respectively eight inches tall and eight and half inches tall and both were filled with pieces of bone and charcoal. They also both had overhanging rims commonly associated with early Bronze Age burials, which is basically why everybody believes that Bleasdale Circle is Bronze Age despite the fact that no part of it whatsoever has, to the best of my knowledge, ever been scientifically dated. (Having said that, neither’s anything Wyre Archaeology’s ever dug. We just go off the aesthetics and whatever the experts tell us.)
What became of the bones and charcoal is anybody’s guess. Knowing the lackadaisical attitude of archaeologists back in Victorian times, Shadrack Jackson probably tamped the whole lot into his pipe and lit it.
Enjoying this so far? Good, because it’s time for a few days break before we continue with the next instalment.

Skulls Caps, Palstaves, Ötzi and Blackpool

As any archaeologist worth his weight in rubble would no doubt inform you, the main difference between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic period was that the hunter/gatherers of the former settled down into the farming communities of the latter. In order to accomplish this, the great forests that covered most of Britain (and in particular the Fylde and Wyre, of course) needed substantially reorganising.
William Thornber now takes up the story from a particularly Blackpool-centric perspective: "The trees…imbedded in the low carry grounds, bear the marks of the axe, and numbers of them are charred by fire."
Records from 1857 for the ‘Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society’ back up Thornber’s claim: “The chairman reminded the meeting that he had mentioned, on a former occasion, the circumstance of finding the mark of a forester’s axe on one of the trees of the submarine forest at Blackpool.”At Marton Mere (the mere being illustrated on our map above) we can even find evidence for the tools that were used to accomplish this wholesale deforestation, along with several other personal artefacts belonging to one of our industrious ancestors.
As Thornber again records: “The Reverend Mr. Buck of Edgecroft Hall, speaks of a singular skin cap or bag, without a seam, a battleaxe of brass…and either two or three coracles or canoes…framed of slight ribs of wood, covered with hydes (sic), which were found by a person of the name of E. Jolly, when cutting the main dyke of Marton Mere.”
The skin cap probably resembled the one in our illustration below (although, obviously, without the seams), which originally belonged to Ötzi the iceman discovered in the Ötztaler Alps between Switzerland and Italy in September 1991.
In ötzi’s case the ice had preserved his attire, the outfit, in full, consisting of a belt and pouch made from calfskin, a leather loincloth, leggings similar to modern day chaps, a coat of tanned goat hide, deerskin shoes, a bearskin cap and a cape of woven reeds.
Carbon dating placed his remains around 3,300 B.C.
The illustration below is based on a waxwork model of Ötzi, giving us some idea of how Marton’s own coracle builder would have dressed.
Let’s return to Thornber for his take on all this: “The demolition of the stately forest of Marton must have occurred long before the Roman era, if the Celtic axe found near Midgeland, and lying on the peat and one yard from the surface of the ground, and the same from the subsoil, and the canoes discovered in the mere, belonged to the aborigines of this section of the island.”
Just to set the record straight, the word ‘aborigines’ here simply refers to the ‘original natives of Britain’ and not the loincloth wearing tribes currently running round the Australian outback, although culturally there were probably more than a few similarities.
The Celtic axe, on the other hand, which Thornber ‘retained’ in his possession was: “…an alloy of copper and tin, rudely cast, and when found, had a handle of more than a yard in length, being nearly the thickness of a man’s wrist; at the side of the instrument is a loop, apparently for attaching it to the person.”
Fortunately for us Thornber also provided an illustration that, for reasons of potential copyright problems, we’ve redrawn below. Axes such as these were known as palstaves, an advancement on the Neolithic stone adze used for turning soil and hollowing logs. In our coracle builder’s case he no doubt used it for trimming the wooden ribs of his boats as well.
The fact that it was ‘an alloy of copper and tin’ allows us to approximately date it. Copper tools were often used during the first part of the Bronze Age. This period (roughly 3,000 B.C.) was known as the Chalcolithic Age, or as we prefer to call it for obvious reasons, the Copper Age, placing our coracle builder in the same time period as Ötzi, who, coincidentally, carried a similar implement.
The metal loop on the side of the palstave wasn’t used, as Thornber suggested, to attach the axe to ‘the person’ but was in fact bound tautly to the wooden handle, keeping it bent at a ninety-degree angle. This allowed the palstave to be swung between its user’s legs, in the fashion illustrated below, adding leverage and weight to its execution.Perhaps a word or two should also be added about coracles. The word ‘coracle’ is derived from the considerably more difficult to pronounce Welsh word ‘cwrwgl’. They were originally covered with animal skins although, nowadays, enthusiasts of these simple, keel-less boats prefer to use calico waterproofed with bitumastic paint instead.

The illustration above is based on a photograph downloaded from the Internet showing one such enthusiast proudly displaying his latest unfinished creation.
As for what became of Marton’s Copper Age coracle builder, and as for what forced him to abandon his belongings in such an extraordinary fashion, we’ll probably never know. It’s possible that his coracle wasn’t as waterproof as it should have been, and basically sank.
Whatever the case, Thornber informs us that: “…out of Mythorp Moss, under a bed of peat, (came) a perfect human skull, and many bones on Marton and on the Hawes, which had every appearance – so say the country people – of having belonged to the human race.”
In case you’re wondering, the ‘Hawes’ (otherwise known as Layton Hawes) once stretched from central Blackpool to St. Anne’s. It would be nice to believe that one of the skeletons found there was missing three coracles, a pair of animal skin boots, a copper palstave and a seamless hat.

Murder and Skulduggery in the Fylde & Wyre

We’re only one night after Halloween (well...we are at the time of writing this, and that's what counts) so we’ve decided to take this opportunity (mainly because John Steventon requested it in one of the comments boxes and we're always happy to oblige wherever possible) to include a small collection of grisly tales on this board.

And where better to start than with a severed head?
Anybody who knows anything about the Wyre’s ancient past (especially if they’ve read our ‘History of the Wyre from Harold the Elk to Cardinal Allen…excellent value at £9.95 and available from most of the outlets mentioned in the right-hand column of this board) will already be aware that in 1824 the skull of a young girl was unearthed at Pea Hall Wood in Pilling. It was wrapped in a piece of coarse woollen cloth along with a large amount of plaited auburn hair and two strings of jet beads.
In more recent times archaeologists discovered another skull at Briarfield Nurseries in Poulton, this time belonging to a thirty year old man. It was carbon-dated to the Bronze Age but, unlike the 1824 discovery, didn’t cause quite so much consternation amongst the locals. You see, the trouble with the skull at Pea Hall Wood was that it was discovered far too close for comfort to Bone Hill.
Bone Hill Baby Farm has to be one of the Wyre’s darkest historical secrets. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries well-to-do gentlemen (so it's reckoned) were known to journey here accompanied by their pregnant daughters and/or mistresses. For a fee any illegitimate off-springs would be discreetly ‘disposed of’.

As you’d expect, grim legends abounded, including ghostly lights that glowed around the house at night, blood stains being witnessed on the flagstones and the notion that it was impossible to dig in the orchard without uprooting any bones.
In the ‘Over Wyre Historical Journals’ our old colleague, the late-great Headlie Lawrenson relates the tale of how Miss A. Butler’s grandmother, the village midwife at the time, was awakened one night: “…by a stranger, who demanded she should accompany him to a difficult confinement. He took her to a lonely farm where, after the birth, the child was snatched from her and taken from the room. After she had attended the mother she wandered into the kitchen, where to her horror she surprised the man in the act of disposing of the child’s remains on the roaring peat fire.”
Sticking with the theme of decapitations, here’s a Fylde murder that you don’t often hear about. According to Kenneth Fields’ ‘Lancashire Magic and Mystery’ at St. Roberts church in Catforth, amongst other holy relics, is the severed head of a martyred priest. Unfortunately we don’t know anything about him or the nature of his death (other than that his head was chopped off, of course).
At Garstang in August 1664, another infamous murder took place, this time resulting in a ghost that still reputedly haunts Gubberford Bridge. (Naturally this makes the tale doubly fitting for our ‘Almost but not quite Halloween Edition’.)

It seems that, when Greenhalgh Castle (shown in the photograph above) was under siege from Cromwellian troops, one of their order, a certain Peter ‘Hallelujah’ Broughton (so called because of his God-praising battle-cry) was leaning on the parapet of the bridge when, to his surprise, he saw his estranged wife approaching. Five years previously she’d deserted him for another man but now seemed willing to patch-up their differences. Unfortunately, just as their passions were being rekindled, Captain Rupert Rowton (a cavalier, and therefore sworn enemy of Cromwell, living at Woodacre Hall) leapt out from the hedge and stabbed Mrs Broughton through the heart.
It soon transpired that, following the breakdown of her marriage, Mrs Broughton had fallen in love with Captain Rowton and had bigamously married him. Her desire for romance, however, still wasn’t satiated and, on the evening of her murder, she’d been planning to clandestinely meet with a third party, that being Captain Lord Alban.

Despite their political differences, Captain Broughton and Captain Rowton agreed to keep ‘schtum’ about the whole affair, burying Mrs Broughton/Rowton secretly on the bank of the Wyre where her flirtatious antics had been so abruptly curtailed. Only on his death bed did Peter Broughton reveal the whole sorry tale. Nowadays, at least according to George Mould’s ‘Lancashire’s Unknown River’: “In August each year it is said that the ghost of Peter Broughton’s errant bride comes to the neighbourhood of Gubberford Bridge and to the river bank to look for him.”
It might also be worth mentioning at this point that Greenhalgh Lane itself is apparently haunted, by a ghostly coffin that floats across the road at midnight and ends up in the ditch.
And there’s another murdered female said to haunt Garstang. Let’s return to Kenneth Fields’ ‘Lancashire Magic and Mystery’ for the story: “In picturesque Garstang lives the Boggart of the Brook, which is associated with the spirit of a murdered woman. She would beg a lift from any passing horseman, then when mounted behind him would unwrap her cloak and hood to reveal she was a skeleton. The shock of feeling her bony fingers would cause so much terror that the horseman would fall and inevitably die.” (All of which raises the conundrum of how he managed to relate the event to anybody afterwards…)

Again we’ve no idea who the woman was, or where she’s buried. However, in this instance, as with Mrs Broughton’s missing corpse, it’s probably a case of archaeology that you’d be better off not digging up.

The Legacy of Nateby

Okay...this one's for John as requested over at the forum. (Yes...the link's still there in the right hand column and you still don't need to register to leave a comment, start a subject, post a response or ask a question etc. Well...I'm nothing if not optimistic.)

Anyway...few residents of the Fylde and Wyre (despite our best efforts to inform them otherwise) realise that Nateby is sitting on top of an archaeological goldmine. But it is, and examples of our ancient history beneath this village can be found in banjo-shaped earthworks (most likely Iron Age settlements), a Romano/British road, a henge ten times the size of Stonehenge and even a rare prehistoric construction known as a pile settlement. (We’ve even produced a slideshow of some of the more prominent earthworks that can be found on the right hand side bar of this website, but somehow we get the feeling that nobody’s bothered to look yet.)
Let’s start with the road.
In 1995 several sections of it were excavated by John Salisbury and Neil Thompson of the Pilling Historical Society. It was eighteen feet wide, cambered and surfaced with cobblestones. True to the construction of Roman roads everywhere it had a ditch running along either side. In October 2003 two denarii, a silver ‘Tiberius’ and a bronze ‘Claudius’, were discovered on its surface thus confirming its antiquity.

The road originally ran from Garstang, through Nateby and Out Rawcliffe towards Hambleton before reaching an old ford across the Wyre that once connected Wardley’s Creek to Stanah.
Because it’s underground, of course, it’s difficult to spot.
The henge, on the other hand, is plainly on view. Or at least, part of it is. In the field to the east of Nateby Lodge on the corner of Hoole Lane is an embankment, approximately six hundred and fifty feet in diameter. This earthwork loops around the lodge, creates a dip in Rawcliffe Road and then continues back on itself in a perfect circle.
Hopefully the aerial photograph below should help explain matters.

In February 1996 P. Johnson of the University of London Archaeological Unit took a look, and recorded it as a henge, estimating its age as roughly 2,500 BC.
Also in 1996 a team of excavators, once again under the guidance of the Pilling Historical Society, dug into another suspicious mound close to Humblescough Farm. About two feet below the surface they unearthed a large amount of timber, as can be seen in the photograph below.

What they’d discovered (at least in Neil Thompson’s view) was a pile settlement that had once stood at end of a stretch of water known as Ainspool Lake. (Personally we’re more inclined to believe that it was lakeside settlement similar to Star Carr, but that's a debate that'll no doubt run forever.)
It seemed that our local tribe had felled the trees around the lake and placed them on the bed in rectangular sections. Once their artificial island had been constructed, they threw up a bank of earth for additional defence. Still visible in this embankment today are three entrances that the Celts left open to accommodate wooden causeways.Later that same year Pilling Historical Society conducted a second excavation. This time post holes belonging to a round house were discovered.

It was estimated that the pile settlement could have held up to twenty such buildings. This was obviously either a sizable village or the home of an important chieftain.Numerous other discoveries have been made around Nateby, from Roman brooches to Celtic Axes, mediaeval signet rings and Neolithic hammers. And no doubt there are hundreds more still waiting to be excavated. So next time you’re driving home please try to remember that that annoying bump in the road that keeps damaging your exhaust might have been put there thousands of years ago, and wasn’t designed to annoy you personally.