A decade of digs: the mysterious Shropshire field where our student archaeologists train

Each summer for the last decade, the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology's Field School has been taking students to a publicly inaccessible field in the depths of rural Shropshire to work on their excavation skills.

Known as The Berth, the 65-acre site is a patchwork of marshy peatland and open pasture, surrounding an isolated hill that rises at its centre, with a small lake at its base and two raised trackways that radiate towards you. An Iron Age hillfort, stone causeways and enclosure lie beneath the soil that are thought to date back to 400-100BC.

Yet the significance of the site and how it was used over the millennia are still being uncovered. When early 20th-century peat-cutters found a bronze cauldron submerged into the peat at the edge of the lake, little was known about who had made this object and why they had put it there.

Some early archaeological excavations were conducted by Peter Gelling, also of the University of Birmingham, but he passed away before these could be published leaving only a small collection of handwritten notes and sketches tantalisingly suggesting Iron Age metalworking. But there is no evidence of continuous habitation to justify the laboriously manmade causeways to the lake and fort, leading to speculation that the site must have some kind of cultural or ritualistic importance.

It's this mystery that Professor Henry Chapman and his co-directors of the Field School, Dr David Smith and Dr Theo Reeves, have been keen to help address with their repeated visits. “It’s an ongoing research project as well as training,” says Professor Chapman, who will soon be publishing a paper on The Berth. “The farmers here have owned the land for generations and are also really interested in what lies on their land and very supportive of us every year.”

Thanks to the combined efforts of the team and many cohorts of students over the past decade, the excavations have helped shed some light on this site and its long history. Further evidence of objects carefully deposited in the peat have been found, including a brooch and cleat, as well as new evidence for metalworking within the enclosure. “It paints a fascinating picture of exchange with the natural world” says Dr Reeves, “a place where metal is extracted from the bog, and finely crafted artefacts given back into the bog”.

Excavations have focused on the causeways, enclosure and peat – and nine fresh trenches this year are continuing to uncover new discoveries. Peatlands are unique for preserving biological material that can help them reconstruct ancient natural landscapes and their relationships with human activities. With the combined specialisms of Professor Chapman, Dr Smith and Dr Reeves in wetland archaeology, palaeoenvironmental science and prehistory though, the team is well equipped to tackle the complex relationship between the site and its long history of environmental change.

In one freshly dug, ten-metre trench, plastic groundsheets cover long forgotten tree stumps beneath the peat. “They’re terrestrialised birch trees, more than two thousand years old,” says Professor Chapman, “meaning they’re literally turning to earth in the peat”.

He explains that the recent dry weather has dramatically shrunk the peatland, revealing these ancient trees near the surface for the first time and how this area was ancient woodland long before the hillfort was built. Now the only trees among the cow-grazed fields are solitary oak trees, where the team takes breaks from digging under the welcome shade.

It’s not just about discoveries in the field though. Investigations behind the scenes have helped the team to understand the archaeology on site too. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the site was extensively quarried for gravel. The team have been careful to avoid the large scoops cut into the hillside which have destroyed any earlier archaeology. In the early 19th century, this gravel was used for construction of the local turnpikes. Upon construction of the Ellesmere Canal, the income of these turnpikes was threatened leading to demands for compensation.

Dr Smith, who has just completed rigorous research in the county’s archives, comments: “There is perhaps something to be said that John Bowman who owned the site at the time and supplied the gravel for the turnpikes, was also the Land Agent for one of the investors in the canal and simultaneously asking the committee (including themselves) for compensation”.

This year, the Field School is excavating the summit of the hillfort for the first time with four trenches dug carefully around the many openings of a disused badger sett. The first three held nothing, but the third shows evidence of some kind of ancient feature. After painstaking progress with a mattock and shovel, the feature is cleaned off with a trowel, to reveal the edges of a feature first dug hundreds of years ago. There is a flurry of excitement as the edges take shape to reveal a post-hole for a large Iron Age building and surrounding wall, together with fragments of pottery and small copper rings. After extending the trench further, it’s thought they could be the remains of a shrine.

For Professor Chapman, it’s just the latest example of how their decade of digs continue to help dramatically reinterpret the site. “The first big discovery was identifying that much of the architecture of the site was not Iron Age, as previously thought, but post-medieval associated with quarrying for the nearby toll road and canal,” he explains.

“We have since determined the correct Iron Age architecture, including the original approach, and how the site progressed. There was some farming, but people here were mostly smelting iron taken from the surrounding bog. We also know from fragments of pots used for transporting salt that they were trading with sites in Cheshire.”

This was the last year the Field School would be visiting The Berth. But with so many finds and samples to carefully analyse back in the lab it seems likely we may see new discoveries still emerge from these excavations. As for next year… we can’t wait to find out where the team will be heading next!

Explore an interactive 3D map of The Berth.