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Sorting old personal paperwork can be a tedious, even depressing job. Old bank statements that should have been shredded years ago, records of political campaigns that would certainly have prevented The Mess We Are In Today if they had succeeded, letters from long-dead friends… But just occasionally you get a vivid reminder of a joyful moment that is still producing happiness decades later.

Among the yellowing heaps of documents I have been going through recently I came on some very old cuttings from a local newspaper, reporting a hunt for ‘medieval treasure'.  In the town of St Albans, where I spent my teenaged years, there is a medieval street with timber-framed houses, called “French Row”. Although they have been converted into shops, they are still very good examples of their type. If you are in the area, you might want to visit. And in the 1960s, that street did not back onto a shopping mall as it does today, it backed onto a sloping area of waste ground known as Gentle’s Yard. Which is where my life as an archaeologist began.

In 1966 there was no legal requirement for landowners to fund excavations if they wanted to build on land of suspected archaeological interest, and very little provision for  investigating threatened sites.  Paid posts for trained professional archaeologists were few and far between. ‘Rescue archaeology’ was largely carried out by amateurs, using whatever funds and equipment they could beg, borrow or otherwise scrounge. In St Albans that meant St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society. In 1966 they ran a training excavation on Gentles Yard, the training being given by society members who had served an apprenticeship over the years by working on other sites. The trainees were mostly young people from local schools. They were led by the museum’s conservation officer. There was not an archaeology degree among us.

My first day in my future learned profession came as something of a shock. It was spent hacking down the nettles which covered the waste ground with a sickle, while the experienced people surveyed the site and laid out the trench with wooden pegs and string. The next morning I was so stiff I could hardly move and the nettle stings were still prickling all over me but I staggered personfully back to the job, thereby sealing my fate in life.

The dim black and white photo of the dig in progress shows a long narrow trench somewhat crowded with people. This is hardly surprising, as it was five feet (slightly under 2m) wide, and divided into five foot sections. Every digger had a five foot square, the experienced ones alternating with the beginners. It was extremely difficult to work in such a small space without committing the cardinal sin of trampling on the bit you had just excavated. We were all instructed from day one that each different layer of soil, recognizable by its colour and texture, must be excavated separately and carefully recorded before we started on the next one. The sides of the trench (sections) were sacred: they must always be kept vertical and were never to be kicked, poked at or have things pulled out of them, because they were the vertical record of these soil layers and would be carefully drawn at the end of the dig. I never could learn to recognize the different soil layers reliably, which is why I ended up as a finds specialist. But that dig was where I learned the most basic things, like not trampling on the loose earth you had just excavated, not treading on the area you had just cleaned for photography, keeping all the finds from each layer in their own properly labelled bag. I loved every minute of it.

I also learned how to shift earth. The photo shows some people kneeling and scraping with trowels but a lot of the initial work was done with a pickaxe and shovel. Today in 2021, when Barbie Dolls and high-heeled shoes alternate with promotion of ‘strong women’ (usually unpleasant CEOs and politicians that no-one should take as a role model), I remember with great satisfaction that the girls were expected to shift earth with the boys and empty their own buckets and wheelbarrows as a matter of course. We were all taught how to do it without injuring ourselves: I can still remember the director’s voice saying “Let the pick do the work, dear”. Throughout the years when I worked in the field, women were not admired by their male colleagues for being physically incompetent and the only concession to weaker female muscles was in those tasks where sheer brute force was required, such as lifting millstones and sections of the site hut. When you consider the many cultures worldwide where women are the ones who cultivate the fields and fetch the water, this should be considered perfectly logical.

These were the days before computers, satellites, drones and the internet, so the equipment which is now standard on most archaeological sites did not exist. All records were made on paper, and the handwriting had to be legible and the records waterproof. Heights above sea level were measured with a thing called a Dumpy level, referring back to bench marks which were found all over the British Isles carved into church doorways, war memorials and other relatively permanent landmarks by the Ordnance Survey. Horizontal measurements for recording things like plans and individual finds were done by tape triangulation from the site grid, itself laid out with tapes and the largest-scale Ordnance Survey map available. Good thing that the only part of O-level maths I was any good at was geometry and trigonometry. As for photography, one of the images engraved in my mind from those days was that of the museum photographer, a rather large man, balanced precariously on top of a long stepladder. I can't imagine why he never fell off.

We spent the winter processing the finds and in theory, writing up the site records for publication, although that never happened (alas, a common problem in those dim and distant days). Two more press cuttings show the society members seated round a large table marked in squares, sorting pottery, and myself and two other youngsters displaying a 16^th century pipkin to the Town Clerk. My memories of the next two years, as I studied for my A-levels (school-leaving exams) are of frantically trying to get all my homework done on weekday evenings so I could spend the weekends digging and working on the finds. I loved it all, and the Roman cemetery, the Roman road, the Saxon coin hoard and the Iron Age chieftain burial seem so much more important than the Twist, the mini-skirt, the Beatles or the dreaded ‘teenage parties’ of the 1960s.

We found no ‘treasure’ on that excavation. But although most of the finds were 18^th century or later, there was sufficient evidence of medieval occupation for a much more extensive excavation to be carried out by the field archaeology department of the museum fifteen years later immediately before the shopping mall was built. This recovered valuable evidence about medieval St Albans. I took part in that excavation as well, as on-site finds officer. By then I had a degree in archaeology and another 10 years experience in various parts of the world. I went on to study and publish some of the medieval pottery from Gentles Yard, now renamed Christopher Place, and eventually became part of the museum staff myself.

I did find treasure on that dig. I found the profession I wanted to spend my life in, and which today, still fascinates me more than anything else.

What exactly is “wild camping”? Let us consider the following two scenarios…

1. It is the year 1960. The population of the UK is around 52 million. Two students take the train to the Highlands of Scotland and go on a walking holiday. They climb up a mountain, meeting only a forester, two other hikers and a deer, and pitch the small tents they are carrying on their backs in a forest glade. They cook their supper over a small fire in a ring of stones. They get their water from a mountain stream, which at this date is still unpolluted. The next morning they bury their organic waste (apple cores and human faeces) in a hole. Nobody visits that glade for another three months so there is plenty of time for it to biodegrade. They take their other rubbish with them when they move on. This is the sort of camping which I myself did as a young woman, sleeping under the stars on a hillside in the wilds of Greece at the time when you could do so without meeting anything except a few sheep and an occasional shepherd.

2. It is the year 2021. The population of the UK is around 68 million. A ferry docks at a small Scottish island and ten large camper vans drive off it, carrying in most cases a single elderly retired couple. We will follow one of them. They drive along the two-lane road in a convoy mixed with tractors and supermarket delivery lorries, emitting diesel fumes as they admire the lichen growing in the unpolluted air. Every time they meet a hill, the convoy is slowed by cyclists with loaded panniers and scarlet faces struggling up the slope. It takes time for the line of vehicles to overtake them, because of the hills, bends, and lack of a fast lane.

The camper van couple eat their lunch in the parking space at a local beauty spot, along with two other camper vans, thus taking up all of the six spaces intended for cars. They do not seem to realise that their vans may not have a logo painted on the side but they are exactly the same size and shape as a delivery van and detract just as much as commercial traffic from the beauty of the view. That night, they park their van in a layby in full view of several houses. Although the population density of the island is low in comparison to a large city, there are no places nowadays that you can reach in a motor vehicle which are not overlooked by one or two houses. They dispose of their rubbish in the roadside bin, to be dealt with by the local council at the tax-payer’s expense.

There is nothing wild about the camping in the second scenario. What is romantic about spending the night at the edge of a road and sharing your view of the sea or the woodland with all the local home owners and anyone driving down that road to get to work? What we are talking about here is free camping.

In the past, people in much of Scotland earned their living farming, game-keeping or foresting. Those occupations are more or less obsolete except for a very small number of people. The tourist trade has stepped in to fill the vacuum, and local authorities do everything they can to attract tourists to their area to provide employment. You can hardly blame them. But the exercise is self-defeating, if the product you are advertising is the opportunity to Be at One with Nature. By attracting ever-growing numbers of people from the big cities, themselves now massively over-populated, you destroy the silence, the peace, and the solitude which many of your visitors seek. There is no longer any nature to be at one with. There is no ‘wild’.

Smells are very important for memory. What is the fragrance which evokes the most vivid memories of your student days? Stale beer? Other less legal party smells? Mould from damp walls? Unwashed underpants? One smell which I shall never forget, although I shall probably never encounter it again, is the smell of the chemicals used for developing and fixing photographic film, in the days before computers and digital cameras. The chemicals had a distinctive, acrid odour which takes me straight back to the days of my youth. 

I got my first set of darkroom equipment when I was about six years old and was given my first Box Brownie camera for a birthday present. My father was a keen photographer, and taught me the basics in our blacked-out bathroom. Photographs in those days were recorded on rolls of paper or celluloid coated with light-sensitive chemicals and sealed inside a metal capsule which fitted inside your camera. When you had exposed a whole roll, you had to take it to a darkened room with a dim red light (the chemicals were not sensitive to this one wavelength), take them out of the camera and immerse the film in a bath of ‘developer’. Magically, the images would appear on your strip of paper, in reverse i.e. the dark areas of the picture would come out light and the light areas dark. The paper had to be rinsed and immersed in a bath of ‘fixative’ to stop the remaining chemicals reacting to light. It then had to be rinsed again for an hour or so and pinned up to dry. The strip of celluloid was then threaded into an ‘enlarger’ with an arrangement of lenses and each image projected at a larger size and printed onto sheets of light-sensitive paper. These also had to be ‘developed’ and ‘fixed’ in the darkroom. This was all black and white, of course. Colour films had to be sent away for processing and were extremely expensive. 

I was still using this kind of equipment as an undergraduate, taking my compulsory course in photography for archaeologists, in the late 1960s. The archaeology students had to spend two hours every Wednesday afternoon for our first two years, learning how to take photographs of sites and objects. After all, we might someday be working in the wilds of Mesopotamia and not have access to a professional photographer. See Agatha Christie’s charming little book, “Come Tell Me How You Live”, describing pre-war surveys and excavations in the Middle East with her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. I particularly like her description of developing photographic plates in a “darkroom” so small that she had to work kneeling down in suffocating heat.

For some reason, instead of training us on the single-lens reflex cameras with rolls of film that were used on sites everywhere by that time, we had our basic training on a magnificent set of brass and mahogany cameras of the sort used in Victorian times (or by Agatha Christie). These museum pieces had to be set up on a large and sturdy tripod, they couldn’t be held in the hand. Instead of a viewfinder, they had a focussing screen. To see the screen properly, you had to drape yourself in a large black cloth and use a separate magnifying glass. Once you had focussed your camera (manually), you had to remove the screen and replace it with a 4-inch square glass slide enclosed in light-excluding packaging that then also had to be removed. This was nearly impossible to do without jiggling the camera and disturbing the focus. You then guessed the correct exposure, which I remember as being always around 20 seconds. How any of our shots escaped being totally blurred I do not know. Most of them were not exactly sharp.

The whole process looked extremely dramatic, and as we were sent out to practise in pairs in places like the Victoria and Albert museum, it was often carried out in public. Little did I know it then, as elderly couples respectfully walked round the apparatus, that this was the beginning of my career in what one might describe as archaeological showmanship (there will be a later post on this).

We would then return to base and spend hours in semi-darkness in the warm smelly photo lab, immersing our negatives in the chemicals, earnestly rubbing extra developer onto any under-exposed corners, and then making the prints from them. Days later we would go and ask old Mrs C, the photography tutor, how our prints had turned out.  I can still hear her voice saying apologetically “Well, they’re not too good.” I cannot remember an occasion when they were any good. But we all passed our exam, and were let loose on the archaeological world.

They glowed in brilliant colours in the dim and dusty store, deep blue and red, yellow and pale turquoise, grass green, picked out with gold and silver bands and edgings. Some had exquisite paintings of shepherdesses and country scenes done by hand, or sprays of flowers, or blue and white Chinese scenes of willows and pagodas. The cups were all sorts of shapes and sizes, with handles or without them, with or without saucers. There was imported Chinese porcelain, there were clumsy 17^th century attempts at making tin-glazed earthenware look like Chinese porcelain and European attempts at making porcelain. There were silver lustre teapots and red stoneware teapots and earthenware teapots shaped like cabbages with moulded green leaves.

In twenty years or more at the museum, I had never had any idea that they were there. I only discovered them because I had recently been promoted to a job which meant I had responsibility for keeping the collection records for the whole museum up to date and accurate. I had hitherto spent most of my time working on the archaeology collection, so I thought I ought to spend some time on the social history collection as well. Since I specialised in medieval pottery, it seemed a natural progression to check the post-medieval pottery next.

These tea cups and pots were not found on excavations. A few had probably been donated to the museum by the daughters and grand-daughters and nieces of local people of historical interest. Most of them had been bought at auctions, car boot sales, or market stalls. They were chipped and cracked, and some had been very badly mended with a glue which had a tendency to yellow with age, so their financial value was virtually nil. I assumed they had been bought as a reference collection, to help identify small sherds found on site, or for occasional inclusion in a display of a period room. Or because the long-retired curator whom I suspected of having collected them just liked that kind of pottery.

But they were beautiful, even the damaged ones, with their jewel-bright colours and gilding. And the whole history of tea drinking in Britain was there. Tea was introduced into Europe from the Far East by the Dutch and Portuguese in the early 17^th century, reaching England by the mid-17^th century. It is said to have been popularised by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. Tea grew to enormous importance in British diet, trade, and social rituals. Think about all the references to tea drinking in Jane Austen’s novels: Jane Bennet making tea in the drawing room after dinner, Catherine Morland and her chaperone taking tea in the interval at a ball. Think about William Cobbett’s fiery condemnation of tea-drinking among the labouring classes in his “Cottage Economy”: “I view the tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age”. Oh dear!  In his opinion they should have stuck to nutritious home-brewed ale and he blamed the tax on malt. The production of the equipment needed for preparing and drinking tea, both metal and ceramic, was a major spin-off.  Think Royal Worcester, Crown Derby, Bow, Lowestoft, Liverpool, Chelsea and other major manufacturers.

You might say that that small collection of quite common tea and coffee wares, in poor condition, wasn’t really worth keeping. If it has been discarded since I retired I wouldn’t complain. But it gave me great pleasure at the time. And it allows me to show off a bit if I’m watching the Antiques Roadshow with friends!

When I was a schoolgirl studying the history of Britain, about 50% of what I had to learn by heart was the names and dates of battles. After about 1750 it was the names and dates of Acts of Parliament. Very dry stuff. Some of the battles had a long-term effect on the development of the British political system, language and culture in general, such as the battle in 43CE which led to the lasting legacy of the Romans in Britain, or the Battle of Hastings in 1066CE which introduced a significant modification of the language and political organisation in much of Britain. But most of them were just attempts at empire-building or rearranging medieval political boundaries in ways that really didn’t matter in the long run.

And of course, when I was at school, all of them were looked at from the perspective of England, even before the date at which England became the dominant partner in the United Kingdom. Since moving to Orkney, I have found it very interesting to change perspective and look at the battles of British history from north to south rather than from south to north.

Until the late 15^th century, England, Scotland and Orkney were three different countries. Until 1468 Orkney was part of the kingdom of Norway (or Norway+Denmark+Sweden). Scotland and England were two separate kingdoms until 1707 and the Act of Union, even though after 1603 the same man was king of both of them. Unless they were fighting each other, which they often were, any battles between one of those countries and anyone else were usually of no concern to the other two, unless there was a way in which they could gain a political advantage while the enemy was distracted..

For most of the medieval period, Scotland was concerned with fighting the English and the Norwegians. England wanted to take over Scotland as it had taken over Wales, and Scotland wanted to take over the bits of modern-day Scotland which were then ruled by Norway. Orkney was part of Norway until 1468 (made official in 1471 by an Act of Annexation), and was therefore concerned with fighting the Scots. Scotland and Orkney, unlike England, were never at war with Wales or France.

The Battles of Agincourt and Crecy, for example, were nothing to do with either Scotland or Orkney. They are no more to do with the history of ‘Britain' than the Battle of Largs, which I had never heard of until I moved north.

The Wars of Independence took place between 1296 and 1328 when Edward I of England made a determined attempt to add Scotland to his kingdom. Peace and Scottish independence were restored only after a very nasty set of wars, with all the usual horrible medieval accompaniments of assassination, treachery, torture, excommunication etc. on both sides. They included plenty of battles, including the famous battle of Bannockburn. You probably have heard of that one. Most people have heard of the Scottish leader and eventual king, Robert the Bruce (something to do with spiders, wasn’t he?) and William Wallace (sanitised version in the 1995 film “Braveheart” played by Mel Gibson). The Declaration of Arbroath, an appeal to the pope for his support, does have some very good bits in it, especially the bit where they stated that they would get rid of any king who submitted to English rule, thus claiming the right to choose their king themselves rather than having to put up with the nearest male relative of the previous one. Just as good as Magna Carta, which introduced the revolutionary idea that the king should not be above the law.

Orkney had no more to do with the Scottish Wars of Independence than they had with the English Wars of the Roses. They were still part of a different kingdom. The only battles of any importance to Orkney between 1000AD and 1700 were the battles of Clontarf, Florvaug, Largs and Summerdale.

The battle of Clontarf took place in 1014 in Ireland just outside Dublin. Brian Boru, high king of Ireland, was fighting for Irish independence against the Dublin Vikings and their allies, who included the Irish king of Leinster, and Sigurd the Stout, the Norwegian earl of Orkney. Legend has it that Sigurd died after picking up a specially cursed banner prepared by his mother, a witch, which was supposed to guarantee his victory, so long as somebody else carried it. Whoever carried the banner was fated to be killed. When his men began to notice that whoever carried the banner didn't last very long they refused to pick it up and he lost his temper and picked it up himself. He got killed. The Vikings lost.

The battle of Florvaug was in 1194, when the Orkneymen and Shetlanders, rudely nicknamed the “island-beardies” from their unfashionable habit of wearing beards, joined in a rebellion against the king of Norway during a dynastic struggle for the Norwegian throne. They lost.

The battle of Largs in Ayrshire in 1263, was part of an on-going struggle between Scotland and Norway over control of the Western Isles. The Norwegian king sailed round to Largs on the Firth of Clyde and there was a battle. The Norwegians lost. The king struggled back to Kirkwall with the remains of his fleet, intending to winter there and have another try next year, but was taken ill and died in Orkney. Three years later his successor signed the Western Isles over to Scotland.

The battle of Summerdale in 1529 was part of a feud between the Caithness Sinclairs and the Orkney Sinclairs. The Orkney forces won. Comprehensively – the Caithness side had only one survivor.

As a pacifist, I am not much into the glorification of war or the celebration of battles. But as a person with an interest in history, if we must go on about battles, let’s get some proper perspective on them.