Ad Gefrin | Yeavering

Ad Gefrin museum and distillery in Wooler, opened March 2023. Life in the Northumbrian kingdoms 6th and 7th centuries. The nearby archaeological site of Yeavering. Importance of soil to archaeological insight. Fine example of local heritage and enterprise combined.

One of an occasional series on museums and botanic gardens.

It is always heartening (the editor writes) to find a local museum established and thriving. The Ad Gefrin museum and distillery at Wooler [1] in Northumberland, together with the archaeological site of Yeavering [2] are a fine example of what can be achieved away from the main centres. Yeavering takes its name from the Celtic Gefrin – the Hill of the Goats, so Ad Gefrin is By the Hill of the Goats [3]. The archaeological site lies several miles north of Wooler.

The museum and distillery opened in March 2023. Go through glass doors and immediately the stunning dome of the entrance hall rises above.  It was made in the shape of a whisky barrel. The dome is lined by many small, rectangular pieces of pine, sourced from wind-blown timber, each piece prepared and fixed in place by a local craftsman. 

The Great Hall

The museum aims to entertain and educate on the Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian dynasty that governed the region in the 6th and 7th centuries. They established Yeavering from their main base on the coast at Bamburgh. By 700, the site had been deserted, its precise location unknown until rediscovered in the mid-1900s.

The museum reproduces a central feature of the Yeavering site – a building called the Great Hall. From the museum’s entrance, a spiral stairway (visible in the photograph above) leads to a door into the replica. Visitors can walk around one half of the hall, its walls covered in tapestries and carvings, some shown on this page. The other half is virtual, viewed through a screen and letting the viewer appreciate the full length and interior design of the building. 

Linger for a few minutes and the virtual half comes alive as people appear, tell stories and sing of the kings and the life at that time. It’s an ingenious way of drawing peope in, making them feel almost as if they were there. 

The museum displays some of the objects found during archaeological digs at Yeavering and models of some of the buildings including the Great Hall and a tiered Grandstand.  

View from the real to the virtual half of the Hall (left) where actors and singers (right) tell stories of the life at the times of the Northumbrian kingdoms.

Yeavering archaeological site

The site was revealed through examination of crop marks on an aerial survey of the region in the dry summer of 1949. It was first excavated  from 1953 to 1962 and the results published 1977 in an authoritative report by Brian Hope-Taylor, available today as a free download [4]. The report and its author have been widely praised [5]. It remains an engaging and impressive read, and not only for archaeologists. Enquirers from any discipline will appreciate the logical approach and the analysis of uncertainty in reaching conclusions from limited data, especially on the structure and functioning of different buildings and enclosures. The report repeatedly stresses the importance of soil to archaeological method (see below).

The site lies on an area of flattish land, known as the whaleback, the northern side descending steeply to the River Glen and the southern rising to the hills of Yeavering Bell. The River Glen joins the River Till which then feeds into the Tweed. Much evidence of occupation and farming since the neolithic have been found in this area. A large Iron Age hill ‘fort’ and many dwellings were built at the top of Yeavering Bell and the lower land around the Rivers Glen, Till and Tweed is dense with pre-historic settlement and signs of farming.

Archaeological studies at the site have continued and were active in summer 2023, but by October the exposed surface had been recovered with soil to protect it over the winter.  

Soil – AgriculturE – food

The main agricultural land use around Yeavering today is grazing for livestock, both sheep and cattle. Grain has been grown in this area. One of the boards in the museum states that rye, barley, wheat and oats have always grown well in the Millfield Basin – an extensive area of fertile land to the east of the Yeavering site. And the crop marks that reveaed the outline of the buildings were first seen when oats covered the land in 1949. 

Of interest to Living Field readers may be the importance of soil condition, both in locating the structures initially and then photographing their exposed outlines. Cropmarks are ‘negative structures’ differing from the surrounding soil in the the type of soil that filled the space when the original structures rotted or were removed [4]. If topsoil fell into the spaces, it would probably have contained more organic matter than the surrounding subsoil, and hence have a greater capacity to hold water.

Plants growing in this deeper, more organic material may absorb and reflect a different amount or a different quality of incoming solar radiation. Especially in a dry year, plants here remain greener and unwithered for longer into the summer.

The excavations also reveal the extent to which human habitation and farming influence the erodability of soil, its movement across and out of the area, leading to variation in depth. ‘Centuries of ploughing’ had eroded topsoil from the crest of the site and repositioned it towards the edges. The archaeologists could even tell whether a sub-soil had been previously cultivated or not by its feel and sound when turned with a trowel [4]. 

LIVESTOCK

Many animal bones and bone-fragments were found at the site. Analysis by ES Higgs and M Jarman [4, 6] showed cattle were by far the predominant livestock rather than sheep, pig or goat. Yet it’s the age when the catttle were killed that tells us something of the pressures on livestock farming at that time, pressures not much different from what they are today. 

Livestock need to be fed through the winter to keep them alive. Living grass may prove insufficient, so the herd is sustained with stored hay or grain. Breeding cows that perpetuate the herd have to be prioritised to ensure they survive. But what of the general cattle if feed is likely to run out.

Higgs and Jarman propose that cattle were killed early in their growth cycle, well before they reached full size. The collection of bones indicate age at death had two peaks – 6-11 months and 24-30 months. The first group, born in late spring and early summer, were killed over the following winter, presumably to leave enough feed for the rest of the herd. The second group were fed through the first winter, then a second, before being killed. The relatively short life-span of the cattle points to the pressure on farming to balance size of the herd, winter feed and the need for food.

Today, overwintering cattle, whether kept indoors or on grass, have their food supplemented by grain or silage, possible with concentrates, sourceable from a range of local and international supply chains. At Yeavering, they had only what they could produce and save from local fields. 

The future

The Yeavering / Ad Gefrin site is now managed by the Gefrin Trust [2]. The following is extracted from their web site – “In 2002 Ad Gefrin, the physical site and the ongoing story, passed into the hands of The Gefrin Trust. Our aim is to preserve, investigate and recount the history and impact of this important site in the north Cheviot hills, from prehistory right up to the latest investigations and finds.” The Trust’s web offers several free downloadable publications on the region’s history and archaeology.

Archaeological studies continue at the site [8].

Sources | Links

[1] Ad Gefrin Museum and distillery, Wooler: https://adgefrin.co.uk/

[2] Yeavering archaeological site: The Gefrin Trust describes the continuing excavations  and offers several free downloadable publications on the history and archaeology of the region. See also Canmore – Excavations at Yeavering Bell.

[3] The goats in the name have been around for millenia. They were once farmed, then went feral and now form a wild landrace of the British Primitive Goat. They are declining and under threat of extinction: Northumberland National Park; British Primitive Goat Research Group.

[4] Hope-Taylor, B (1977) Yeavering – an Anglo-British centre of early Northumbria. English Heritage. Report with many figures and plates downloadable at the Archaeology Data Service; and the Gefrin Trust.

[5] More on Hope-Taylor at: Thomas, S (2013) Public Archaeology 12, 101-116; Bamburgh Research Project 2011 The legacy of Dr Brian Hope Taylor

[6] ES Higgs and M Jarman: the report [4] gives no information on the people who analysed the animal bones from Yeavering. Higgs and Jarman were well-known archaeological pioneers and scholars who made major contributions to studies of the past e.g., Higgs, E. S. and Jarman, M. (1975) Palaeoeconomy. In E. S. Higgs and M. Jarman (eds.) Palaeoeconomy, 1-7. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

[7] For more on the analysis and meaning of animal bones in archaeology, see this online publication: Baker P, Worley F (2019) Animal Bones and Archaeology – Recovery to Archive. Historic England Handbooks for Archaeology. 

[8] Durham University: Yeavering | A palace in its landscape | Research Agenda 2020.

Feeding the Romans

Thoughts on a visit to the exhibition Roman Empire – Power and People McManus Dundee, on 14 March 2015.

This fine, informative display gave evidence of the Roman presence north of the Antonine Wall (between Forth and Clyde) around 2000 years ago. They set up marching camps and lines of communication, patrolled a long and complicated frontier, built great fortresses, then retreated. Yet few things remain to tell of their everyday life.

One was scale armour, known as lorica squamata [1], fragments found at the site of the fort at Carpow, near the junction of the rivers Tay and Earn in Perthshire. These small samples, linen cloth as backing, sown with 1-2 cm wide sheet-bronze scales, are stated to be the best preserved of this type of army gear in north-west Roman europe. They are rare intact because the linen cloth usually rots and disappears. Someone might have worn this armour to help protect them from a thrown stone or spear or a body blow from wood or metal. It is not known whether the fibre plant flax Linum usitatissimum used to make the linen was grown locally or even whether the cloth was made here [2]. There was a trade in linen throughout the empire.

Another was an amphora (a clay pot), reconstructed from pieces found at Carlungie, Angus, lying in one of the dwellings adjoining an earth-house or souterrain, used as an underground storage chamber. Amphora such as this were used to move wine, oil and other essentials round the empire. A note by the exhibit told the amphora was from Gaul (France) and contained French wine. Who brought it here is not known, but you can imagine the party.

The Tay from the bank opposite the site of the Roman legionary fortress of Inchtuthil looking west, a landscape probably little changed (Squire/Living Field)

Forts and fortresses along the northern frontier

These exhibits were some of the few fragments remaining in this area from the massive resourcing of the empire’s northern frontier. The Romans made Britain a province in 43 AD and by the 70s AD had established fortified lines and supply routes through (what are now) Perthshire, Angus, Aberdeenshire and Moray. They patrolled well north of the Antonine Wall, which itself is more than an hour’s car-drive north of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England.

They built and manned forts close to transport routes by land and water from the south and east, as at Carpow, and camps and signal towers along the Gask line that ran north of Stirling and continued north east along fertile Strathmore as far as the east coast near Stracathro, and from there, dog-legging north and north west across Aberdeenshire to Moray. A long way to march. A long way from home.

Surprising is the size of some of the garrisons. The one at Carpow, close to the Tay estuary and not far from the North Sea, and thought to be occupied between 180 and 220, was designed to hold 2000-3000 people. The massive base at Inchtuthil – a legionary fortress – by the Tay river west of Meigle (image above), commanded the way north from Perth and was estimated from its dimensions and excavated buildings to house 20,000 to 50,000. A small town! To do its job today, it would need to be sited a few miles farther west to command the A9 and railway from Perth to Inverness.

Roman Inchtuthil existed only for a few years in the AD 80s before it was purposely abandoned. Even if not fully occupied, these garrisons must have held thousands to tens of thousands of people, many of whom were soldiers with big appetites.

Across the Tay to the site of the Roman legionary fortress at Inchtuthil on the raised ground beyond the tall trees (Squire/Living Field)

How to feed thousands of soldiers

They all had to be fed. They would have brought and tended some of their own livestock and perhaps grown some crops and vegetables nearby, but the staple food would have been grain – wheat, barley or oat. (There was no maize, potato or turnips then.) Just think how many packets of porridge oats would be needed to feed all those men every morning [3], and that grain would have had to be transported over long distances from the south or else stolen or coerced as tribute, or tax, from local people.

The SCRAN entry states: “The Roman army was adept at self-sufficiency. At Inchtuthil the legionaries exploited local resources of wood, stone, gravel, and clay to build their fortress. They manufactured their own lime, bricks, and pottery on the spot. Food and other raw materials such as leather would have been obtained from the natives, probably in the form of tax. The massive granaries at Inchtuthil hint at the scale of such levies.” And these granaries, or grain stores, were big, as shown by the diagrams and aerial images made during archaeological digs (online references below).

The exhibition says that when the Romans came the area was populated by farming communities of native tribes, scattered and based around fortified hill tops. This was the late Iron Age, so agriculture would have been widespread, but even so it would have been very hard pressed to support tens of thousands of soldiers in addition to the existing people. Imagine working hard all year to grow crops and then when they were harvested, you had to give away a lot of the grain for the privilege of having the Romans living nearby. The invaders can’t have been popular and presumably that is why they had to build these lines of communication and massive fortresses.

Coppiced birch, last cut 20-30 years ago, near the site of a Roman signal tower in Strathmore (Squire/Living Field)

In conclusion

The Romans did not stay long. They arrived (in what is now Scotland) in the 70s (AD), which is about one thousand nine hundred and fifty years ago, but they were gone in less than 150 years. Their leaving is said to be the result of things happening elsewhere in the empire. Rome was too stretched – but (you have to ask) – was it the midge!

The iron age skills of growing crops and tending stock continued to the present time. So did working hard all year and giving away the harvest to those wealthier or more powerful. The Romans had no monopoly on oppression. It became endemic to northern agriculture.

Notes

[1] Squamata is the scientific name now given to reptiles that have scaly skin, the lizards and snakes.

[2] Flax is one of the oldest fibres plants, grown in Britain for several thousand years, see the Living Field’s page on Fibres.

[3] A packet of porridge oats weighing one kilogram contains 25 servings. To make 1000 servings would take 40 packets, and 10,000 servings 400 packets; and that would be just for one breakfast.

Ploughed land, line of trees through to stubble fields, near the site of the Roman fort of Cardean, Strathmore (Living Field)
Ploughed land, line of trees through to stubble fields, near the site of the Roman fort of Cardean, Strathmore (Living Field)

Sources and references

Introduction including material for schools

BBC Primary History http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/romans/romans_in_scotland/

SCRAN Trust: information on the fortress at Inchtuthil and on   grain stores http://www.scran.ac.uk/packs/exhibitions/learning_materials/webs/56/Inch.htm http://www.scran.ac.uk/packs/exhibitions/learning_materials/webs/56/Garrison.htm#granary

See also links to SCRAN for Carpow and Gask Frontier from the above pages.

Looking south-east across arable and grazing land from the site of a Roman signal tower, Strathmore (Squire/Living Field)
Looking south-east across arable and grazing land from the site of a Roman signal tower, Strathmore (Squire/Living Field)

Books and articles

Jones, RH. 2012. Roman camps in Britain. Amberley Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK. Available as ebook via Google Books.

Hoffmann, B. 2013.The Roman invasion of Britain – archaeology versus history. Pen and Sword Archaeology, Barnsley, UK.

Wolliscroft DJ, Hoffman B. 2006. Rome’s first frontier: the Flavian occupation of Northern Scotland. Tempus publishing.

Archaeological investigations and records (RCAHMS)

Carpow: http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/30081/details/carpow/

Inchtuthil: http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/28592/details/inchtuthil/

Contact

geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk

Photographs on this page taken early April 2015.

Towards the site of a Roman signal tower, now occupied by planted Scots Pine, bulb field in the foreground (Squire/Living Field)
Towards the site of a Roman signal tower, now occupied by planted Scots Pine, bulb field in the foreground (Squire/Living Field)