The Wolds Research Project

Implementation: Cowlam

The Early Medieval Site:

The overall research strategy for the Yorkshire Wolds Project identifies the Anglian / Anglo-Scandinavian settlement transition as a key area for examination, a period during which we should seek to "understand the development of economic and societal complexity in the early medieval period - specifically the transition from lordship to feudalism, the development of a market economy, and agricultural and industrial intensification."

This project, centred on Cowlam, will seek to take this agenda forward. Early medieval settlement in Yorkshire has been the subject of two major excavations at West Heslerton and Wharram Percy, both of which have elucidated chronology, settlement organisation and continuity. During the 1990s intensive prospection by metal detectorists led to the discovery of many new foci of Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian settlements, one of which, at Cottam, has been investigated by excavation. The discovery of corresponding early medieval metalwork at Cowlam, some 1.5km south-west, now provides an opportunity to examine a further site in a localised landscape which is becoming better understood.

Excavation revealed that the site at Cottam is not just one productive site but three, developing and shifting through time, each related to a trackway skirting the edge of a dry valley, whose origins may lie in the Iron Age. Cottam A began as a Romano-British ladder settlement, from which metal-detectorists also recovered a small number of early medieval stycas, strap-ends and dress-pins. Excavation showed that the main focus of activity here during the 9^th and 10^th centuries was a large quarry hole used as a watering hollow.

Cottam B yielded over sixty pieces of 8^th and 9^th century metal finds, and pottery and bone was recovered in field-walking. Plotting the former finds suggested two distinct foci of activity, the southern concentration coinciding with a crop mark enclosure which yielded excavated evidence of post-built structures in successive phases before abandonment in the late 9^th century At that stage settlement shifted to the north, where a magnetometer survey revealed a series of sub-rectangular farm enclosures, invisible form AP evidence, with a massive entrance-way with bank and ditch, and gatehouse. This Anglo-Scandinavian site was short-lived, perhaps abandoned when settlement shifted to the nearby medieval villages.

Background and Objectives:

The former village of Cowlam is situated on the Wolds 1.5km south-west of Cottam B, at the head of Cowlam Well Dale, a side arm of the dry valley known as Philip's Slack on which the Cottam sites lie. It is also connected to Cottam by the system of trackways. Parts of the medieval village earthworks were excavated by Brewster when threatened with destruction by ploughing in the early 1970s, aerial photographs taken after the ploughing revealing that it was a three-row, 'T-'shaped village suggestive of a planned layout, perhaps starting in the 10^th century and abandoned in the late 17^th century, in common with a number of Wolds villages.

In April 2002 detecting in the south-east corner of the field, adjacent to the trackway and valley head, recovered a concentration of finds of 8^th and 9^th century date, their density suggesting another settlement focus, broadly contemporary with the Anglian phase at Cottam and perhaps another farmstead which immediately precedes the establishment of the nucleated village.

Exploratory geophysical surveys indicate that the metal finds coincide with settlement features. Test pits have been dug around the apparent periphery of the site to give an outline idea of the depth of topsoil and character of underlying natural or cultural strata. Further excavation will be necessary to and to ascertain the nature of any early medieval activity on the site and to establish if the features are contemporary with the detectorists' finds. Cowlam provides an opportunity to examine another "productive" site and define its place in an emerging pattern of settlement evolution and economic development before it disappears completely under the plough.

In line with the overall Wolds research design for the early medieval period, the objectives of the evaluation at Cowlam are:

To establish the depth, extent and survival of archaeological deposits on the site;
To identify the extent of the eighth and ninth century activity and to determine the development of the site;
To establish the relationship of the metalwork finds and the geophysics features;
To collect environmental and artefactual samples;
To determine the nature of the eighth and ninth century activity on the site;
To explore the nature of sedimentation in the dry valley;
To examine the standing buildings of Church Farm, which lies adjacent to the ploughed-out village remains and incorporates the small 19^th century church of St Mary.

Methodology for Data Gathering and Processing:

In order to address the project aims a range of investigative techniques will be employed.

A trench measuring 8m by 10m, split into four even parts, will be excavated towards the centre of the site, laid out in an area where the depth of topsoil is minimal, and the geophysical surveys indicate a zone which is complex enough to be interesting yet simple enough to be understood in a trench of this limited size;
A series of bore holes will be undertaken from the excavation area and continuing down the side of the dry valley to assess the process of valley formation and sedimentation;
Recording of standing buildings of the present day farm;
Full processing, conservation and analysis of artefact assemblages will be undertaken;
Processing and evaluation of faunal, molluscan and macrobotanical assemblages derived from the excavated areas;
Processing and preliminary analysis of excavation and building records;
Production of interim summary and synthetic reports.

The Farmstead:

The overall research strategy for the Yorkshire Wolds Project identifies the fact that the economy of the Wolds area is changing in the 21^st century and the former network of owner-occupied/tenanted farmhouses is now largely redundant for its former purposes. Agribusinesses are agglomerating plant and resources into mega-farms and small farmers are being driven out business. Many farmhouses are now being re-used simply as residences with no agricultural purpose and their farm buildings are redundant. Often these are the subject of planning applications for alterations, which sometimes are so extensive as to alter their historic character fundamentally. Others are being abandoned and left to rot.

So this is a threatened class of structures. Our aim is not to reverse the threat, but to record both the special and the everyday within the farmsteads of the study area and to establish how far the built evidence can help us to understand changing farming practices over the past two hundred or so years. In so doing, we will be able to make comparisons with the neighbouring upland area of the North York Moors, whose farmsteads were investigated in the 1980s by the then Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England (now the survey teams of English Heritage) (RCHME 1987) and with other areas of England (Barnwell and Giles 1997). We will use our recording of individual buildings and farmsteads as a whole to try to identify the agricultural processses that have taken place there and to show how they have changed over the lifetime of the farming operations that occupied them. We will look at the impact of enclosure, the intensification of arable expoitation and of increased mechanisation on the layout of the farmstead.

Our first target is the farmstead at Cowlam itself. Bearing in mind the fact that Cowlam was once a thriving medieval village, we should not, perhaps, be entirely surprised to find a church in the middle of what is a large and complicated multi-phase complex. But we shall be concentrating on the farm buildings themselves, beginning with the chalk sheds near to the entrance to the yard. These are in a state of advancing decay and may not survive many more years. At present they are in use as pheasant sheds and this restricts our access to the inner courtyard (building recording often has to take place around and between the modern functions of the buildings under study). At the other end of the farmstead is a collection of old Nissen huts that were presumably bought at a knock-down price c.1947 and pressed into service as farm buildings. This is not 'high' archaeology - it doesn't even sit neatly within the currently trendy category of 20^th century military archaeology since it represents re-use. But it does illustrate a trend that was common in the middle of the 20^th century and that is about to be lost without trace unless we record the disposition of the buildings and try to establish the uses to which they were put.

The building recording will bring the story of the Wolds landscape right up to date and sensitise you to the fact that archaeology is in the making all the time. It is hoped that we may be able to gather some oral evidence about the farmstead over the last fifty years (our activities will become a part of the life the scattered settlement surrounding the site and perhaps some of the older residents will emerge from the woodwork - or in this case, the corrugated iron) as well as the documentary and map evidence for the use of the wartime buildings - where did they come from? What was the pattern of airfield distribution in the area in World War Two? Does any evidence survive within the buildings for their original use? Is there any surviving photographic evidence that might help us to piece together the history of the buildings?

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