Archaeologists work regularly on Fylingdales Moor uncovering prehistoric sites that lay hidden until a massive wildfire destroyed the protective vegetation in September 2003. The blaze lasted for five days and swept across 230 hectares (now known as the Fylingdales Fire Site), burning several inches down into the peat. It was a natural disaster, but it revealed signs of human occupation that were previously unknown.
While the moorland vegetation is recovering well, thanks to the restoration project co-ordinated by the National Park Authority, archaeologists have been taking advantage of their new-found knowledge to discover even more.
Tanya Eyre of the Hawk and Owl Trust spent a day with volunteers digging with archaeologist Steve Sherlock and project director Blaise Vyner (pictured above on the left). Here is her account:
I was fascinated to join in the digging for a day.
Under the guidance of regular volunteers Barbara and Paul Brown, I helped peel away a rock at a time from a bronze age burial cairn. Similar structures in previous years have revealed charcoal more than 3000 year old, dated at 1300 BC.
I was wary at first of which rocks to clear and which to leave, and how to do it without interfering with the resulting layout. However, it was satisfying to see the cairn slowly revealed as the day progressed.
At one point a volunteer showed me a flint: "Feel how light it is, you can see how the edge has been worked. It would have been used to clean deer hides or...."
After lunch I wandered over to a nearby iron age house excavation and was astonished to see the beautifully preserved stone hearth revealed and the marks where the poles of the house would have been.
At the start of the day, to my untrained eye, it had been just a line in the grassland. Here, only a few hours later, was the layout of an iron age house. Archaeologist Steve Sherlock and his team had theories of how the circular roof would have been, and from the gully they had excavated in the ground they could infer how the water might have drained off.
Steve described how similar structures are known to have had stone walls surmounted by wattle and daub.
"We found some pottery," Steve said. Hearing about artefact finds made my heart beat faster.
Then he placed the pottery in my palm and I have to say I wouldn't have given it a second glance. It looked like a piece of rock. Apparently the light weight gives it away!
Pieces of charcoal found in the hearth are sent off for carbon dating. Last year charcoal extracted from some mystery structures in a gully were dated to the iron age (65BC), contradicting one theory that they had been World War II tent marks.
One of the mystery structures was close to the excavated roundhouse and a more likely theory now is they were some sort of animal pen.
