That year I returned to Toronto somewhat later than normal, because I was unable to arrange for over 20,000 pieces of pottery and probably half a tonne of animal bone to be transported across the Atlantic. Instead, we made arrangements with Peterborough Museum for space to store and study the finds. I took some key maps and plans with me, and several boxes of flints – tools and chippings – which I would study during the long, cold Canadian winter.
Back in my office at the Royal Ontario Museum, I started work on the complex plans of the Cat’s Water Iron Age village. We had discovered over fifty round houses and huge numbers of pits, wells and other features, including several Iron Age graves. I had been working through the plans for about a week when I found myself looking at the sketches and plans of ‘Dave’s hole’. At the time these looked far more inviting than the complexities of the later settlement, so I decided to work on them first.
My initial concern was simple: did the burial pit have any connection with the rectangular house we’d dug in that hot summer, back in 1972? There was only one way to find out for sure. I went to the shelves and pulled down the large-scale map of Fengate on which I had drawn the parallel droveway ditches of the fields that afternoon when lying on the sitting-room carpet surrounded by aerial photos. Subsequently I had added the rectangular house and anything else important. I suppose you could call it my Master Plan.
It took me a few minutes to measure everything in, but when I had finished I was rather disappointed: nothing seemed to line up. I rolled the Master Plan up and was about to throw it back on the shelf in frustration when I remembered two parallel ditches we had also found in 1972. By rights, these should also be included on the Master Plan. They were different from the ‘main’, Bronze Age parallel droveway ditches, being altogether smaller and shallower, and we found them over a kilometre ‘inland’ from the edge of the fen. Most importantly, they had produced no finds other than a fragment of a rare Neolithic polished axe made from Langdale stone.
I suppose I should have remembered to examine the alignment of these smaller ditches when I was proof-reading the First Fengate Report, but my jet-lagged brain failed me. This time I determined to do better, and rolled the Master Plan out on my drawing board for a second time. It took me a few minutes to plot the two shallow ditches accurately, but when I had finished it was quite apparent that their alignment was significantly different from that of the main Bronze Age system. I was pleased that this shift in orientation showed up so well, but for some reason I wasn’t exactly surprised.
Then something clicked. The two shallow ditches were pointing directly at both the Neolithic house and the multiple burial in ‘Dave’s hole’. It was so obvious, I could hardly believe it. We now had three quite separate sites on approximately the same general alignment, and this alignment was significantly different from that of the Bronze Age fields. My theory – that the pre-Bronze Age landscape was set out on a significantly different alignment – was beginning to gain support. But could I be certain that the two shallow ditches were in fact Neolithic?
Happily for me, the site notes and archive for 1972 were still in Toronto. I went down into the museum basement, and when I had got all the papers and finds bags before me I began to sort through them. In 1972 we had opened several trenches, and the one in question was at Vicarage Farm. It sounds a peaceful rural idyll, but in reality it lay next to a Gas Board storage depot and the largest diesel-engine factory in Europe. Peaceful it was not.
The air photos of Vicarage Farm showed cropmarks of several large pits which had been cut into an unusual outcrop of limestone. After removing the topsoil we found, as is usually the case, that the aerial photos only revealed a small proportion of the features that were actually present below the ground. When we dug them we found that the pits were wells, and around them were all sorts of other features belonging to a small Iron Age village of about 500 to 100 BC. Like most such settlements, the features at Vicarage Farm yielded large quantities of pottery, bone and other debris.
Now, the two shallow ditches ran across part of the Iron Age settlement, yet they did not produce so much as a scrap of pottery. I’m certain that this could not possibly have been the case if they had been open when the Iron Age settlement was occupied. There would simply have been too much debris lying around the place, and some of it was bound to have been kicked into an open ditch by someone. By the same token, the ditches were unlikely to have been later than the settlement, otherwise debris would have found its way into them as residual finds lying around in the topsoil. Even the modern drainage ditches around the edges of the factory had residual Iron Age pottery in them. It was everywhere, and hard to avoid.
As if to clinch the matter, the only find from either of the two ditches was the fragment of a Neolithic polished stone Langdale axe. In the New Stone Age (which is what ‘Neolithic’ means) stone was the most important material for making edge-tools, such as axes. Some stone was much better for this purpose than others, and became much prized. Like many things we humans touch and cherish, there was a fine balance between beauty and utility. And the most beautiful stone of all was quarried high in the mountains of the Lake District, at a place called Great Langdale.
Langdale stone is hard, fine-grained and a subtle greyish-green in colour. It looks even better when polished to a silky sheen – and Neolithic axes were almost always patiently polished to a fine, smooth finish. As well as Langdale there were other so-called ‘axe factor’ sites in Britain, in Wales, Cornwall and elsewhere, and they all exported their products to distant parts of the country. A large number of Langdale axes were sent to communities on the other side of the country. Fengate, for example, is 175 miles south-east of Langdale. There seemed little doubt that the two shallow ditches were Neolithic – and probably Earlier Neolithic, too. I would guess they were dug well before 3000 BC.
As I’ve already mentioned, the rectangular house had produced many finds, including some rather unusual pieces. One of these was a large flake that had been deliberately removed – with a sharp blow – from a polished Langdale axe. Another was a beautifully-made and highly-polished jet bead. This wasn’t a little bead – it was large enough to have just covered, say, the top joint of one’s thumb. Jet is a shiny, coal-like material whose nearest source is the beautiful Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby, some 130 miles to the north of Fengate. In addition to these rare finds there was a lot of fine pottery and a remarkable collection of flint implements, including a most unusual and beautifully-made sickle blade in lustrous blue-black flint.
I returned upstairs from the basement and spread some of the finds from the rectangular house on my desk. They really were beautiful. Could they, in all truthfulness, have been cast aside as debris – mere rubbish, the sweepings off the kitchen floor? As I handled the large flake of Langdale stone, my doubts vanished. I was now certain that the rectangular building was not merely a house. It had to be a special place.
I must now take the story temporarily forward a few years. I completed the Fengate project in 1978, and spent the next two years writing the final two reports, which were published in 1980 and 1984. Part of my background research included a detailed survey of all previous excavations in or near Fengate. The last excavation to have happened before our campaign began was in 1968, at a place called Site 11.
The site was first spotted on an air photo, as a cropmark, and it looked a bit strange. It consisted of a straight-sided rectangular enclosure, defined by a continuous single ditch, with sharp corners. It measured about fifty by thirty metres, but there was no sign on the air photos of an entrance of any sort. This made me sit up and take notice. The excavations produced decorated pottery and flint tools in the distinctive style of the Early Bronze Age Beaker ‘Culture’. In the brief report that appeared shortly after the dig, it was suggested that the enclosure and the pottery belonged together, and that the whole site was a small farmstead or settlement of some sort. This seemed a quite reasonable conclusion at the time, but when I came to reexamine the Site 11 report at the end of the Fengate project, I couldn’t reconcile it with what we had found. It simply didn’t fit in.
By now alignment and orientation were becoming something of an obsession with me. I checked the orientation of the Site 11 enclosure, and it bore no