An Upland Biography
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An Upland Biography

Landscape and Prehistory on Gardom's Edge, Derbyshire

John Barnatt, Bill Bevan, Mark Edmonds

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eBook - ePub

An Upland Biography

Landscape and Prehistory on Gardom's Edge, Derbyshire

John Barnatt, Bill Bevan, Mark Edmonds

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Gardom's Edge is an area of gritstone upland situated on the Eastern Moors of the Derbyshire Peak District. Like other parts of the Eastern Moors, Gardom's Edge has long been renowned for the wealth of prehistoric field systems, cairns and other structures which can still be traced across the surface. Drawing on the results of original survey and excavation, An Upland Biography documents prehistoric activity across this area, exploring the changing character of occupation from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age. It also tacks back and forth between local detail and regional patterns, to better understand the broader social worlds in which Gardom's Edge was set.

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Year
2017
ISBN
9781911188162

CHAPTER ONE

Biographies of Landscape

The uplands of Britain hold a prominent place in the archaeological imagination. Walk across elevated terrain in many regions and you’ll encounter upstanding cairns, boundaries, enclosures, standing stones and other monuments, many of them prehistoric in origin. Revealed by low sunlight or by your feet as you stumble through heather and bracken, these features survive largely as a consequence of historic patterns of ownership and land-use. Set apart from areas where improvement and the plough have bitten more deeply, these stretches of more elevated country often retain the surface signature of human engagements with land that stretch back more than five thousand years.
These patterns of survival have caught our attention for over two centuries. The simple fact that so much can still be traced across the surface has given these landscapes a quality of accessibility for those with an interest; from antiquarians fixated upon the dead, to archaeologists interested in process, from walkers with a passing curiosity to others dedicated to mapping their ‘own square mile’. Of course, appearances can be deceptive. These landscapes have also been inaccessible, claimed and contested in many ways, most recently in campaigns for access and the right to roam. Informed by arguments initiated in the late 18th century, these more recent ways of seeing uplands stress their value as places of escape and improvement; a change of gear and air for predominantly urban populations. Rather ironically, this has fostered a popular misconception of these areas as somehow constant and stable, set apart from the drive and din of modernity.
Disciplines such as Archaeology and Landscape History have played their own small part in tinting these romantic images. But over the past thirty years or so, projects across the country have begun to dismantle the popular vision of moors and fells as largely natural and unchanging (e.g. Butler 1994; 1997; Fleming 1998/2008; Geddes & Hale 2010; Herring et al 2008; Johnson & Rose 1994; Oswald et al 2005; 2006; Silvester 2011). Beyond everything else, such work has made it clear that the term ‘upland’ is no more than shorthand, a catch-all for landscapes that vary considerably in their elevation and form, in their ecology and their history. It is also wholly relative, a counterpoint to more low-lying terrain, commonly delimited by the ecotones across which patterns of land holding and land-use have often tended to break. The history of upland research also reveals common concerns; issues of approach and interpretation arising from conditions encountered in the field. Indeed, it is arguable that current landscape perspectives in prehistoric archaeology, at least in Britain, owe much to the forms of enquiry that working with these kinds of terrain encourage. Fieldwork is usually extensive, the mapping and characterization of surface remains often, though not always, linked to small-scale excavation and palaeoenvironmental sampling. Inevitably, this has encouraged a gravitation towards periods which have left significant surface remains. But it has also fostered a particular sense of perspective. Long before it became important or fashionable to do so, researchers working in these areas have looked beyond individual sites, following patterns and asking questions across the landscape as a whole.
It is perhaps because of this that the uplands are prominent in work on the inhabitation of landscape, research that sees a powerful link between practical engagements with land and the constitution of identity (Barnatt 2000; 2008; Barrett 1994; Bender et al 2008; Bruck 2008; Edmonds 2004; Johnston 2005; Tilley 2010). Such work is often pitched at scales which relate, however loosely, to the scales at which people’s lives unfolded in the past. From this has come a renewed interest in exploring how the character of activities created the conditions for different forms of social identification (Bender 2006). Working at a landscape scale has also brought home how much more there is to time than chronology. A focus on inhabitation has fostered interest in the temporality of people’s lives and, by extension, the past in the past; the sense of the world that people make through the time-laden palimpsests they inhabit (Barrett 1999; Bradley 2002). And this, in turn, has also led us to explore how people in the past sometimes blurred the sharp lines we often draw between history and nature (Bradley 1996; 2000; Tilley 2010). These interests have also brought us back to older matters of history and social geography; questions of time depth and scale, contingency and environmental affordance. Why do some areas have high densities of features while others appear, on the surface at least, to be more sparsely populated? Were certain cairnfields or boundary systems rapidly realized, or did they develop in a more piecemeal fashion? How were they worked and reworked over time and how were they articulated with activities on more low-lying ground? Questions such as these have encouraged a tacking back and forth between the intimate details of occupation on a particular ‘patch’ and broader regional patterns, allowing insights on the social constitution of settlements, the scale of neighbourhoods and their articulation in broader regions (Barnatt 2008; Chadwick 2008; Fleming 2008; Johnston 2008).
These developments have been important. However, it often remains difficult to grasp precisely how land was occupied and used, nor how the specifics of people’s lives related to broader processes. There are many reasons for this. Sometimes it is a problem of focus, especially when past engagements with land are reduced to the experience of a solitary observer treading an essentially Picturesque path (Bruck 2007; Edmonds 2006). But it is also a matter of preservation. To begin with, the evidence is notoriously patchy. Upland soils and sediments are often heavily leached and detrimental to the survival of materials like unburnt bone, pollen and plant macrofossils. This can make it difficult to address basic questions about the nature of economic activity, let alone more complex issues, such as seasonality or the duration of occupation. As if that was not enough, structures that seem simple on the surface often reveal complex sequences when excavated, adding further uncertainty to arguments about the nature, scale and history of developments (Fleming 2008; Johnston 2005). Artefact assemblages can also be relatively impoverished, particularly when compared with inventories from the chalk or from lowland valleys. No doubt survival and the scale of intervention has some bearing on this (Bradley 2007; Cooper & Edmonds 2007). That said, there can be genuine differences in the size and composition of assemblages between these settings, something which poses questions in its own right.
Beyond these problems lie others. We often tend to play down variety in our syntheses, assuming similarities in the character and chronology of occupation from one region to another. And we still sometimes evaluate the past potential of land by extrapolation, imposing an historic concept of marginality onto terrain that was actually very different in prehistory. Although it varies depending on where and how elevated you are, the thin acidic podzols we commonly encounter today only began to form during the latter part of the prehistoric sequence, and have only fully developed in the millennia since then. Our failure to recognize the actual character and potential of these landscapes during prehistory is also compounded by a common tendency to equate recent economic marginality with social subordination, pushing prehistoric occupants of the higher ground to the borders of our narratives (Bradley & Hart 1983). Indeed, we sometimes take this so far that today’s moors and fells can still become a kind of terra nullius, set apart from the flow of history. The contour-driven prejudices that coloured Cyril Fox’s The Personality of Britain (1932) have proved remarkably difficult to shift. What Fox and many since his time have missed is just how diverse these landscapes are. Grazing is certainly a commonplace, responsible for the open, close-cropped views dominated by grasses or heather that many visitors mistake as natural, and which we now conserve to maintain ‘landscape value’, effectively an economy of appearances. But the same land to which sheep and cattle heft have seen many kinds of occupation and a wealth of extractive and other industries. And many possess a pays-like quality that has been fundamental to the ways that people live and work and to how they recognize themselves (Everitt 1985). These more recent ways of belonging to country may be historically specific. But they remind us that people in prehistory probably identified themselves with and through the landscape in ways that were just as complex, if rather different in their content and expression.
These concerns provide a context for the work presented here. They require us to think carefully about the scales at which interpretations are pitched, finding ways to harness a creative tension between local and broader scales of enquiry. The biographies of specific upland landscapes remain central. But the study of any one small stretch of moorland cannot be pursued in isolation. Throughout Prehistory, the flow of people’s lives would have carried them beyond the limits of any one particular ‘patch’, articulating them in broader social geographies. Life may have often been small-scale, but it was also extensive, the playing out of relationships resolved at regional and still broader scales. However close and detailed work in the field may be, we need to keep one eye on the horizon. Our work on Gardom’s Edge documents the changing character of prehistoric activity on one small part of the Eastern Moors of the Derbyshire Peak District. It describes features specific to this tract of land as well as others which find close parallels elsewhere. In what follows, we tack back and forth between some of the details of our evidence and what is currently known about the changing character of the region over time. Avowedly close in its focus, the story of this one small stretch of open moorland provides a vantage from which to consider those broader patterns.
Image
Gardom’s Edge from Birchen Edge
Running up from the south, the drystone walls of Moorside Farm mark the junction between improved land and rough grazing, a cultivated green giving way to the mottled colours of the moor. Coarse grass and heather dominate, the latter more or less the signature cover of the Eastern Moors. There’s plenty of birches too; after a fire in 1959 the trees were quick to get a toe-hold, a first step on the path to woodland succession. Left to themselves, the birches would extend their colonization, others following behind, rowan, oak and alder. But as elsewhere on the Moors, grazing levels are high enough to keep the new growth down. Trees are thinned to keep the landscape open and the heather is managed by periodic burning. Once fired to foster cover for grouse shooting, the heather is now maintained to conserve a valued ecology, to sustain what’s known as landscape value. This is not the landscape’s dynamic. It is a choice we make.

CHAPTER TWO

Contexts

Settings
The Peak District lies at the southernmost tip of the Pennines, an area of hills extending to the Cheshire Plain in the west, the Trent Valley in the south and the Coal Measure foothills to the east (FIG. 1). In broad terms, the region is characterised by three distinct topographic areas; a central limestone plateau all but contained within a ‘horseshoe’ of gritstone moorlands, with shale valleys separating the two dominant geologies (Anderson & Shinwell 1981; Barnatt & Smith 2004; Edmonds & Seaborne 2001). The limestone plateau is a series of rolling ridges that rise from shallow upland basins. Numerous deep valleys, many of which are now dry, cut the plateau. There are shelves above the rivers which contain relatively deep soils and numerous spring-lines. The north west part of the plateau is highest, where it reaches above 450m OD. The Eastern Moors are part of the gritstone horseshoe, a north-south oriented ridge running along the Peak District’s eastern side. The moors form an undulating landscape which in places rises to 400m OD, with numerous shelves and upper moors situated between 200 and 400m OD. Their western flank comprises a series of gritstone scarps overlooking the Derwent Valley. The Eastern Moors dip to the east and south to run into the lower coal measures hills of north-east Derbyshire, which in turn give way to the magnesian limestone and Trent Valley gravels. As the ridge runs north, it rises to the steep-sided moorlands of the High Peak, where Bleaklow and Kinder Scout reach over 600m OD. Here there are few lower altitude terraces, with more level land generally situated at c.400m and higher. To the west of the limestone lie the Staffordshire Moorlands, another north-south band of gritstone, with deep river valleys dividing it from the High Peak.
Prehistoric evidence varies in character and density depending on where you are. On the limestone, survival is largely governed by the intensity of medieval and later cultivation, particularly the enclosures and improvements of the 18th and 19th centuries. Only the more substantial sites, or those restricted to patches of thin, rocky soils, survive within the wider enclosed landscape. The Neolithic survives on the surface in distributions of barrows, such as Pea Low, Gib Hill and Long Low, chambered cairns such as Minninglow and Five Wells, and henges such as Arbor Low and the Bull Ring (Barnatt 1990; 1996; Barnatt & Smith 2004; Edmonds & Seaborne 2001). There is little evidence for prehistoric occupation beyond the flint scatters identified in a number of surveys (Radley & Cooper 1968; Barnatt & Edmonds 2015), though development has led to the discovery of in-situ material, most notably at Lismore Fields, in the Wye Valley bottom, now within modern Buxton (Garton 1991). For the Bronze Age and Iron Age, the situation is broadly similar. The most prominent features of the former are numerous barrows and funerary cairns (Barnatt & Collis 1996), while the latter is evidenced in a small number of enclosures and hints of earlier features beneath several farmsteads conventionally dated to the Romano-British period (Bevan 1999; 2000). On the Eastern Moors, the situation is rather different. Although industry and the plough have taken their toll, they have done so in a more piecemeal fashion, with the result that many features can still be seen on the surface. Prehistoric sites are most common along a c.20km band above the western edge of the ...

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