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Exploring Wadsley and Loxley Common: Community Investigations as part of the Sheffield Lakeland Landscapes with Christopher Atkinson - Ep 46
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Christopher Atkinson - Exploring Wadsley and Loxley Common: Community Investigations as part of the Sheffield Lakeland Landscapes.
Archaeology & Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme.
This talk took place on Monday 27th March 2023 at The Red Deer, Pitt Street, Sheffield
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to Episode 46 of Archaeology and Ale, a free monthly public archaeology talk brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach programme from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology.
Sheffield Lakeland Landscape Partnership
00:00:42
Speaker
This month our guest speaker is Chris Atkinson talking about exploring Wadley and Loxley Common, community investigations as part of the Sheffield Lakeland landscapes.
00:01:05
Speaker
Thanks for joining me. It'd be a bit lonely otherwise. But yes, I'm going to talk to you about this project, basically, on Wadsley and Locksley Common.
00:01:22
Speaker
It forms part of the wider Sheffield Lakeland Landscape Partnership, which is a project run and managed by the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust and funded by the Heritage Lottery.
00:01:38
Speaker
And the Sheffield-Laitland Landscape Partnership, funded to the sum of $2.6 million, covering that huge area in there, so our area of interest for Wadsley and Locksley, somewhere down here.
00:01:57
Speaker
It was basically to do all sorts of things. Landscape restoration, improving habitats for wildlife, enhancing our understanding of the historic environment of that region as well. So there were a few investigations going on, not at least the excavation slash summer was it in Lodgemore of the World War I training area, not training area, POW camp.
00:02:26
Speaker
and of course the investigations here as well as investigations into historic routeways across the area too and kind of trying to promote them and ensure that they're included in I can't remember what it is but that
00:02:44
Speaker
make sure historic routeways are included in heritage assets and public rights away. By 2030 now I think the government's pushed the do free too, the deadline. Anyway, I digress. But the primary goal of all of this, enhancing landscapes, investigating the history and the archaeology and everything about it, is engaging the public.
Wadsley and Loxley Common Exploration
00:03:12
Speaker
in all manner of the works because of course a lot of the work going on here is about climate change and making our landscapes more resilient, the peatlands, improving our woodland coverage, having more wetlands for wildlife and if you have the public involved in that then you're going to have a greater buy-in and people will have a greater sense of purpose, belonging and care for that landscape as well.
00:03:44
Speaker
So I highlighted roughly, that's a terrible map, but there's Sheffield. And if you don't know, Wodsley and Locksley Common is just to the north and west up the hill from Hillsborough, really.
00:04:00
Speaker
And so all the, the Watsley and Loxley Common covers is owned in trust by Sheffield City Council. It's managed by them as well, along with Watsley and Loxley Commoners group. The area covers about 40 hectares. It's a local nature reserve. And within the southwest of the area down here, it does have an area of ancient semi-natural woodland. This is woodland that we can date back.
00:04:29
Speaker
to around about 1600 and the assumption being that if you've got a woodland surviving in that area at 1600 it was probably there a lot longer before then too. There is evidence on their pre-existing evidence before this investigation of prehistoric post-medieval and industrial activity and the geology is of a local is of the lower coal measures formation and loxley edge sandstone
Community Archaeological Involvement
00:05:00
Speaker
So the aims of the archaeological investigation were, as I say, involve the local community, a wider public in the processes of archaeological survey, develop a history of land use on the common. Prior to undertaking the surveys here, there had been an investigation in the 80s, I believe, which recorded about 38 monuments across the area of
00:05:26
Speaker
predominantly related to mineral extraction and the fields that are established on there. As it says identify previously unrecorded archaeological monuments and assess their condition. This is
00:05:44
Speaker
quite important because as well as just enhancing our knowledge and understanding of how much archaeology and how many monuments are out there and what it tells us about land use what we want to consider is how we look after these heritage assets in the future and so through the process of the investigations we were looking at if we said say we had the the the ruins of a structure
00:06:08
Speaker
then if there is sapling beach trees growing out of it, then we might want to consider removing those saplings, because in the long term, if those trees are left to grow, they will pull those ruins, pull those remains apart further.
00:06:26
Speaker
So we developed a series of kind of management recommendations with everything we looked at in the field so that the landowner, in this case the council, has that in their data bank for whenever they want to go out there and manage the landscape. And of course enhance the historic environment record for the region as well.
00:06:52
Speaker
And the way we did this was undertake a level one reconnaissance survey slash level two survey, basically a rapid walkover of that landscape zigzagging back and forth across the common, recording all the lumps and bumps, the walls, the quarries, the platforms, the boundaries.
00:07:16
Speaker
absolutely every archaeological feature we could possibly come across including historic trees and we would record them and provide a written description so everyone was kind of armed with a simple
00:07:31
Speaker
one side of A4 sheet for each monument. On that they would record an Easting and Norving, so we'd have a grid reference for where that monument is. We'd have a tick box exercise here where they would simply take, is it a structure, a platform, a quarry, a track?
00:07:48
Speaker
whatever it might be, they tick there and then in here write a description about what that monument looks like. You'd also put a few measurements and additional information in there about the types of vegetation that's growing on the monument or around the monument and whether it's in a good fair or poor condition.
00:08:09
Speaker
And the way we did this was using Hanhao GPS, which is the cameras, ranging poles, the ranging poles
Survey Techniques and LIDAR Benefits
00:08:16
Speaker
being the scale poles down here. Each one of those is a meter long. So you'd always have that in a photo because it gives you an idea of how big the feature of archaeological interest is.
00:08:30
Speaker
As I say, we'd also be using historic maps in the field as well. So from 1840s all the way through to 1920s, I think we had the maps for Wadley and Locksley Commons so we could assess those. And it gave us an idea then if we were recording a boundary, it gave us a kind of chronological setting for when that feature was constructed. And of course, take measures and things like that.
00:08:58
Speaker
What we also used during the survey was the available LIDAR data. So if you don't know what LIDAR is, it stands for Light Detection and Ranging, and it's an airborne survey technique, which basically allows you to create a 3D model of the landscape.
00:09:19
Speaker
And the beauty of Lidar is that applying a particular algorithm to it, you can filter out tree cover, and in particular, the canopy of woodlands, which allows you to see what the ground or the lay of the land is beneath the tree cover. So for woodland archaeologists, it's quite, you know, it's revolutionized survey, if you like. Chris, sorry to stop you mid flow. Go.
00:09:48
Speaker
Is the projector as sharp as it could possibly be in terms of the focusing? No. Good question. I don't know the... Can it be sharper? Probably, yes.
00:10:06
Speaker
Dare I press a button? What are the features we can see there? Or maybe you're going to say that. Yeah, well, on this side, this is right on the eastern edge of what's Lee and Locksley common. The eastern. Yeah, the east side of it.
00:10:27
Speaker
Here's Wadsley and the features you're seeing in there is the site of Wadsley Quarry and the mines so you're looking at the the earthworks there where they were kind of digging in
00:10:49
Speaker
and around the area. The one on the right was me playing around and creating a 3D landscape of it. This is the whole common. So that area there is that little patch over there. So if you
00:11:07
Speaker
I assume you know the common, but you can park off long lane down here and walk along the top. So this edge there, that's Loxley edge, the rough sandstone edge heading down slope. And that's the very top. You can just about see some rectangular shapes in there.
Continued Discoveries During COVID-19
00:11:32
Speaker
possibly that represents the field systems that were constructed. Thanks Toby. I was thinking now, what's next? Oh no.
00:12:01
Speaker
Oh, no. Here we go. Oh, here we go. So I was talking about LiDAR. We use that because it helped us to not only identify features that perhaps we couldn't get to on the survey area on Wadsley and Loxley Common, because down this southern edge here,
00:12:23
Speaker
The ground conditions are terrible. Pits, rocks, and the vegetation is predominantly brambles as well. So for surveying purposes, it was not ideal, not very accessible. So this is where the lidar kind of helped us out a bit, where we could identify things in areas which we couldn't really access.
00:12:45
Speaker
But in the end the volunteers, who were absolutely brilliant, recorded over 106 monuments on the common.
00:12:59
Speaker
and you've got a kind of taster there. So you've got linear features such as the old field systems on the top, which later became playing fields. The quarry, we just saw that in the LIDAR, but also all the other quarries that are scattered around highlighted with a shade of brown. Tramways relating to mineral extraction, running around here and up here.
00:13:27
Speaker
as well as the trackways as well. This trackway is probably tramway as well. Sites of the cottage and buildings up in here. This is an old cottage site. Addits, these yellow splodges representing the entrances into some of the mines. And we also... The mine is after. I'll come on to it, but there are... Yeah, Mixru, Coles, Sandstone and Gannister.
00:14:01
Speaker
So I'm going to kind of take a step from the earliest through and kind of summarize just some of the results of that walkover survey that the volunteers did. What I should say is that the volunteers were excellent because not only did
00:14:19
Speaker
Covid not stopped them because we did the bulk of the survey all the way up to March 2020 and we were all there's the last day and we all sort of stood there look at each other going hmm and knowing the news that cancellations were imminent but whilst
00:14:37
Speaker
you were allowed through lockdown rules to go and kind of explore your neighbourhood for an hour. They individually went out and enhanced the record and found multiple features and just kept emailing them across to me. So I could update the record. It was great.
00:14:57
Speaker
going through time, so we'll start with prehistory. So prior to the the investigation there was a single undated but well used flint blade that was found up on the common and there was this standing stone which my son is kind of helpfully being a scale for and although recorded as a
00:15:25
Speaker
potentially prehistoric, we're not sure. It's right on the edge of the Loxley edge escarpment and could be quite easily related to that. But there was kind of an investigation in 2012 of a potential stone circle site, which is not far from this, about
00:15:52
Speaker
probably about 50 meters or so away, not far at all. And you can see some of the results of the earlier 2012 markings of this concentration of stone in a potential circular arrangement there and loosely out there as well.
00:16:13
Speaker
But the local community, everybody was really quite keen and interested to find out, whoa, I forgot stone circle. I'm going to check it out. So of course we did with the help of the Department of Archaeology and the volunteers. So what we did was a collective survey where we undertook a tape and offset. So hopefully this is the baseline and we did tape and offset off that of
00:16:39
Speaker
a rough ring of stone in there. I'm sorry the colour doesn't quite work as a blue, it should have done a red or something but a rough circle there, outlying stones. That stone my son was sat on is that one there and this is one lying down next to it.
00:17:00
Speaker
And with the eye of faith, you could kind of go, yeah, maybe. I mean, the vegetation was pretty thick, full of bilberry and heather. But we did, or I say we, the royal we, students from the Department of Archaeology undertook a resistivity survey over the area. And you can see the results there, kind of highlighted underneath.
00:17:27
Speaker
and they don't really show much unfortunately. I think most of the anomalies that it's picking up here are relating to the natural bedrock that's quite close to the surface there. So I think for this site the jury is still currently out because the geophys doesn't necessarily support evidence of a bank or a ditch around a possible stone circle site.
Medieval Land Use and Historical Connections
00:17:54
Speaker
I did wonder initially whether it could be a ring can
00:17:57
Speaker
but even lack of supporting evidence. That's not to say it couldn't be a nice community investigation where you just test it and put a test pit in the middle and see what's there. So the jury's still out on that one, unfortunately, but it was a really nice day out.
00:18:23
Speaker
They kind of not really got much in regards to a reference for the common until you get into the medieval times where you can start to build more of a context around it. And so unsurprisingly, Doomsday Record 1086, we know the site was part of the Manor of Wadsley.
00:18:42
Speaker
and it was regarded as waste and that's not to say it was just wasteland as in not very useful it was just land that was perhaps not financially rich and so it would still be used and perhaps
00:19:03
Speaker
certain people in the local community would have a right to use that land as well, either for pasture, for feeding pigs, right to collect wood perhaps for construction and fuel.
00:19:19
Speaker
any of the wood that was there would have been heavily regulated and controlled. And the Doomsday Record does mention the presence of wood pasture in this area. It doesn't say exactly where it is, it just says it's one league. So a league in Norman Times is about 4.8 kilometres. So it's a one league by one league area of woodland somewhere within there.
00:19:50
Speaker
And it's quite possible that it is on the common, at least part of it. We certainly know that an area within the south east of the common, Bauer Plantation, is regarded as ancient semi-natural woodland. So there has been woodland around there for a long time.
00:20:08
Speaker
And what the doomsday record also mentions is that the woodland that is there is silver pastilis, which gives us an idea of how that woodland was being managed. It wasn't
00:20:21
Speaker
completely enclosed. It's wood pasture. Animals at certain time of the year, the tenant farmers were allowed to have their livestock graze within the woodland. That therefore gives you an idea of how perhaps the trees were being managed themselves. So I don't know if you all know what copsing and polarding is. No, you will.
00:20:52
Speaker
But coppering is where you cut a tree down to its base and allow fresh shoots to grow. Whereas pollarding is a bit like street trees where you cut them higher up and allow the shoots to grow straight up.
00:21:10
Speaker
the bonus of this is you get nice straight poles which depending on how long you leave that tree to grow and do its own thing you could use it for a broom handle when the time is right the size is right or you could use it for the post of the corner of a house you know it depends how long you want to let these things grow and have a nice straight pole but of course if you try to do that as a coppice where everything's growing from ground level up
00:21:34
Speaker
then your pigs and your cows as they come into graze of whatever time of year are more than likely going to damage or kill that tree. So a theory is that the trees would be managed as a pollard where things are people are harvesting from higher up the tree trunk. Also get a lot of place name.
00:22:04
Speaker
Yeah, so turberry, the right to cut turf or peat for fuel, the right to fish probably not happening here.
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah, and of course right to extract sand, gravel, stone and minerals. That may be a likely kind of right for what's Lee and Loxley common.
00:22:43
Speaker
Then we go into place name evidence. And again, this is coming predominantly from the medieval period. So it gives us an idea of how kind of wooded this landscape was. As is usually the case, the site you're interested in is right in the join of the map. But you've got Wadley, and so the common is somewhere in here, of course. But the place name suggests that this is a wooded landscape.
00:23:13
Speaker
Wadsley itself wades forest clearing. Locksley. Locks, forest glade. Stubbing, meaning coppice woodland. And hag, a place where trees were felled or cleared. The sites of low ash and yews, these small, likely late medieval enclosures up here. Again, the use of the word ash and yews indicates some of the tree cover that's actually growing there.
00:23:46
Speaker
And one of the things that we've seen notice on Wadsley and Loxey Common is there are trackways everywhere. And one of the volunteers was quite interested to see whether some of the tracks could potentially link up and represent a marker route really between Wadsley and High Bradfield and the churches. And so we did find this kind of carved
00:24:16
Speaker
stone on the edge of a well-established track and there was question whether is it a bit like the burly stone which marks the route from Eccersfield via Utterbridge to Bradfield and it might have a similar one here. It's Nick, yeah it's Nick isn't it? Yeah Nick's still investigating it so
00:24:45
Speaker
every now and then I get an email with additional pictures and new stones and stuff across the landscape but it is highly possible. When we're coming to the post medieval period then
00:25:03
Speaker
we're starting to get to the common actually being enclosed but just before then we do have a record from 1637 and John Harrison basically did a survey of the landscape as a whole and
00:25:23
Speaker
this is a terrible map but unfortunately the original has disappeared and this is the only copy left but if you kind of squint that splodge there is i think stubbings and then you've got ash what was the what are the names from the previous slide i've forgotten them low ash and yews they are represented by these enclosures up here so the common is
00:25:52
Speaker
in here. At a time known as Loxley Firth you've got Loxley wood in there as well and it's a it's a large area and John records it as including 1518 acres of common land in this area and the common is described as one great wood called Loxley the Herbage Common and consists of great oak timber.
19th Century Land Changes and Mining
00:26:22
Speaker
So again, it gives us an idea of what this landscape is looking like. But then when we come to the parliamentary enclosure of 1784, which basically saw that landscape chopped up, and our earliest kind of awards map of 1789 is this one here. So there's Wadsley.
00:26:52
Speaker
And if you imagine the site today, the car park off Long Lane is roughly there.
00:26:59
Speaker
and the out skirt of the common as it is, is that area. And so when we undertook the survey we did come across in this rough area a boundary that didn't seem to match any of the later features that we had and it also looked a lot more kind of rough and tumble, a bit more ad hoc in its construction.
00:27:23
Speaker
And we can only assume that it relates to the original 1789 enclosure of the common and is that boundary there, which we assume segregates Loxley Common from Wodsley Common up here.
00:27:45
Speaker
is by the early 1800s that this landscape as it is, is then transfers hands from the Halliday family to the Payne family. And that's when the landscape that if you beat up there, it's where it all starts to kind of look as it does today. And so one of our early maps here of 18, this would be an 1890s one, but
00:28:14
Speaker
it's at this point that these fields are established. That boundary I previously mentioned is roughly in there, so it's still just about marks, but it's less important. And with the 1800s you have
00:28:34
Speaker
multiple fields established. You have a row of cottages or a set of cottages established up here as well as one down here known as Cave House.
00:28:50
Speaker
What was quite interesting too is that when the Payne family started to develop this landscape, they went to some great deal to try and gentrify it as well because we had quite interesting, quite ornate boundaries established in here where
00:29:11
Speaker
this point here there's the standing wall and you've got all this rubble behind it or the rubble is actually the remains of another standing wall that once stood there and so you had these kind of carriageways running in between these fields up to the cottages
00:29:32
Speaker
You also had the digging of wells on the common too. So there's one right in the middle there, which is this one, capped off with some old gate posts, and there was one just to the rear of the cottage sites up there too.
00:29:49
Speaker
And here's a shot of cave house as it once looked. This was constructed into the foot of Locksley Edge. So this is the escarpment here. This is built into it. And if you look at the bottom right corner,
00:30:08
Speaker
that cut into the escarpment is like a pantry and you can see all along the edges and in here you can see where they've cut into the natural bedrock that's there in order to put the floors of the house in and the site was there until the 1920s and 30s and there is something I've got to add if I can find my notebook
00:30:38
Speaker
I can't remember the names. But this is one of those sites that also has a degree of kind of legend and myth to it, where in a very cold and snowy New Year's Eve in 1812, this house which belonged to the gamekeeper for the Payne family and their land holding on the common.
00:31:01
Speaker
One Lomas Revel murdered his wife, Mary, and apparently the ghost of the white lady still walks the common today. I didn't see her.
00:31:22
Speaker
It was when the common came into ownership of the Payne family as well that they started to sell rights to mineral extraction. And there is an 1840s map that indicates that there was coal mining or coal extraction in the form of the excavation of bell pits within
00:31:43
Speaker
the western part of the common up here. That is a terrible photo, but believe it or not, there is a bell pit in there. Do you all know what a bell pit is? So a bell pit is a kind of one of the earlier ways of extracting coal was to sink a shaft into the ground, find your coal, start to hollow it out and extract it, pulling it up back through the shaft. And what you would be left with is this kind of cavern
00:32:12
Speaker
which would in section would look a bit like a bell shape and then once they've kind of gone as far as they can without the the mine or the pit falling in on them they would extract and then move along the seam somewhere else and sink another bell pit and repeat the process along.
00:32:39
Speaker
And so they were extracting coal. We don't think the coal was particularly good up there, because in later maps it seems like an afterthought industry. If they came across coal, well, they'd extract it whilst they were extracting their sandstone or their gangster.
00:33:03
Speaker
And one of the main organizations on here at the time was the Utterbridge Silica Firebrick Company, and they were particularly interested in the Gannister, which is a fine-grained, salacious rock used for making fire and heat-resistant bricks suitable for furnaces, which was a big industry at the time in Sheffield.
00:33:31
Speaker
And evidence of that activity is all over the place. So I already touched on with the Lidar stuff earlier where you had, where it was highlighting tramways. So we've got this bridleway now, still a tramway, was a tramway. And it's this one, this line running down from the Wadley Garester Works site, turning left, up,
00:33:58
Speaker
into an adit and as it turns up there you can still see the sleepers within the water course that is actually coming out of this adit preserved in the way there and this is a view looking up into one of those adits so originally there would have been an entrance into the mine at that far end with a tram system running up and on the common you've got gangster extraction going on down here
00:34:28
Speaker
up here, all along here, all along here and presumably it's going on here as well as sandstone extraction.
00:34:41
Speaker
And this is a map from the coal authority and all of the red crosses represent an entrance into one of the mines, into a known mine on that common. So the common is roughly in here. So as you can see, there's an awful lot of activity going on on the common from the 1800s all the way through to 1920s.
Military Trenches Discovery and Excavation
00:35:10
Speaker
And we get to the 20th century. And it's at this point that most of the industry for coal mining and extraction comes to an end. The fields themselves are converted to playing fields. The cottages are gone. The house is gone down here, a cave house that is. Okay. And break time.
00:35:40
Speaker
That shouldn't be there. But look at all those smiley faces. That's a break time for me. Excuse me. And it says we go into the 20th century that we came across evidence which we weren't really expecting was military related. So volunteers,
00:36:03
Speaker
Alan Smith and Alan Bailey came across a couple of newspaper articles. This one was the first one that kind of whet our appetite from the Sheffield Daily Telegraph from March 27th 1916 which recorded the 2nd Battalion Sheffield Volunteer Defence Corps undertaking field operations on Wadsworth Common.
00:36:25
Speaker
And this involved C company defending whilst A, B and D attacked. And I'm not sure if you can make out, but obviously there's some officers playing with a phone and looking, you know, important. And then you've got the foot of Locksley edge in the background, this escarpment with the, with the infantry dug in with a pretend Vickers machine gun there.
00:36:54
Speaker
and so that got us sort of hunting whilst we were undertaking the survey going well if they're dug in is there any evidence for them on there and lo and behold we found these features that didn't seem to match any evidence relating to the quarries so hopefully you can see this sort of slight zigzag effect
00:37:16
Speaker
ditch in here with a raise on this edge and the assumption is is this is our fire trench with a parapet on the downward slope the same here curving around and in and another parapet and this one zigzagging a slight crenylation form to it with a parapet on the downward slope
00:37:42
Speaker
A closer inspection of this one in particular found it's not the best photo but hopefully you can see just about see some stones arranged in there, one large stone there, one large stone there. And we assume that these represent loopholes somewhere where an infanteer could
00:38:06
Speaker
lean into, use it as an elbow rest, but also under cover, be able to view through that gap at the end, through this gap here, be able to look left, right, and also have some degree of cover if they had to open fire as well.
00:38:23
Speaker
And this comes straight out of a 1911 field manual. And here's one of the volunteers, Alan Smith, demonstrating with his toy gun, looking through one of these loopholes. And what we found with this particular monument, there was a loophole here, then it curved in, went out, there was another one, and another one, and another one. So it definitely kind of, some military to us.
00:38:54
Speaker
And when we look to the LIDAR, we have them standing out, these are the black lines marking them, but one there, one there, one there, there, a more kind of extensive network there, and another two just down here.
00:39:17
Speaker
What we decided to do was have a look at this one, which is the one which had the loopholes in. So if you're interested in visiting the site, this is where the car park is at the top. And what you simply do is just drop down the side of the hill and we're next to this old holly tree.
00:39:34
Speaker
if that helps. But what we decided was we'd return and undertake a community excavation, and this was undertaken in May last year. What we wanted to do was test the theory, are these monuments that we uncovered military? Do they relate to that activity in the First World War that we saw in 1916?
00:39:55
Speaker
Again, involving the local community and the Watson and Loxley commoners group, training them in all manner of kind of techniques of archaeological excavation from simply digging to recording, planning, photography, everything.
00:40:15
Speaker
We wanted to find out if it was a fire trench from the First World War, what did it look like when it was first constructed? And also we wanted to work out how long was it in use and was there any kind of datable material in there to actually prove that it was from 1916? So the first area, this on the right is just a bird's eye view or a plan of the trench. So this is down slope.
00:40:45
Speaker
This is upslope.
00:40:47
Speaker
This area in here is where the trench is. And then this area here is the parapet with these two arranged stones on top, which represent the loophole. So hopefully you can see that triangular shape there, where you'd have a soldier stood in the saddle, kneeling in there, leaning into this position to fire and observe out in this direction.
00:41:15
Speaker
And so on kind of initial clearance and excavation this is what it looked like. So here's the trench, this is downhill, this is the parapet and this thing was kind of constructed set into the top of the parapet.
00:41:32
Speaker
We then looked at the parapet itself to get an idea of what that was constructed of and unsurprisingly we found that it was constructed of the material that had been excavated out of the trench which is back here so this is a cross section through the parapet. The stones at the bottom there they represent the original ground surface when the soldiers created or constructed
00:41:57
Speaker
the trench. So all this material on top is the remains of the parapet and you hopefully see the stone on the top there which is the loophole.
00:42:11
Speaker
And then we went into the trench itself, so this big bit in the middle. We found that the fire trench measured about 1.2 metres deep and up to around 2.5 metres wide, so 2.5 metres from the back to the front down here.
00:42:31
Speaker
and from that back edge all the way down about 1.25 meters. And the edges of it were, you know, pretty vertical, which you would expect from a trench system. And on investigation, we found three distinct features at the bottom of the trench. One of them was
00:42:57
Speaker
the firing position in here. So there's the loophole. That's the shelf or the elbow rest that they would lean into. This is the dip of the primary firing position. And then we have this raised ledge or walkway on the back. Hopefully you can see it there. So from here, it rises up onto this ledge, which is there.
00:43:25
Speaker
That's the firing position again with the loophole. And then we had a compartment to the rear, which is here. If we go to the next photo.
00:43:35
Speaker
compartment is that space in there. I do apologize because the trench was like so narrow. It was actually quite narrow and long. It was a pain to try and get the right photo from the right angle. But we had two distinct positions there and we're still not quite sure what the rear position is other than an area where somebody could just rest their kit, be out of the way of anybody in the firing position at the front.
00:44:05
Speaker
and the ledge being somewhere which is doctrine within the engineer field manuals to provide a raised clear space for stretcher bearers and individuals that just need to pass through the trench back and forth. So that may be what that kind of ledge represents.
00:44:33
Speaker
And what we found with the trench, this is a cross section now, so showing you all the different layers of soil that went into it. That dark line coming down represents the rear of the trench with that back compartment floor nice and flat. Then you have the ledge going down into the firing position and then up onto the parapet. And the gray there represents the loophole.
00:45:01
Speaker
But what we found whilst excavating was that this monument wasn't in use for a long time. It sealed up very quickly. We did have a very thin layer of stone at the bottom here that did have a very organic soil matrix kind of mixed up in it which did seem possibly a trample.
00:45:23
Speaker
And I did query the idea whether they'd put stone right at the bottom of the fire position, perhaps as a way to prevent themselves getting too wet if the weather was poor. Then you had a form of drainage there where they could kneel and stand above the pooling water.
00:45:43
Speaker
but at the rear of the trench you've got this massive deposit full of stone which if I go back you can see it in the section coming down there all that stone and the soil within there was deposited in one go and beneath it was no evidence of any accumulation of organic
00:46:03
Speaker
material, any hill wash material as well. If this had been open for a long time or an extended amount of time, then you'd expect to find sandy materials and organic materials washed in at the foot of the trench, but we didn't find that. And so I'm tempted to kind of say this may have just been open for a day or two, possibly an extended weekend before it was filled in.
00:46:28
Speaker
because you have this filling moment, you have a layer just on top of that which does seem more like your natural colluvial, a hill wash being washed down slowly into the foot of the trench and then the green represents your natural kind of leaf litter and your topsoil.
00:46:50
Speaker
One of the things we also looked for was a parados, a bank or a defensive feature at the back of the trench which we didn't find at all in the end. But that dark soil layer there represents the original ground surface at the time of the fire trench's construction and then it reappears down here
00:47:16
Speaker
going through. So you could gain a picture of what the lay of the land was before this trench was constructed. And on the next slide it just gives you a kind of stripped back version to show you a cross section of the monument when it was first constructed. That's what it would have looked like. So all of the material from in here
00:47:38
Speaker
that space is represented in the parapet that's constructed there with the large loophole on the top. But of course, we've got no datable evidence, which was a bit of a pain, but our sleuth kind of volunteers,
00:48:00
Speaker
got on the case. And we also had help from a military archaeologist, Chris Colonco, who happened to have a copy of the 1908 Royal Engineers Field Manual, which was really useful. And he sent this picture across, which showed a kind of crenellated pattern, a fire trench. It even says it there, look, a fire trench. And you can see the soldiers there leaning into it.
00:48:29
Speaker
And here's a kind of stripped back plan of it, leaning into those loophole positions. And again, from the same manual, there's the loophole positions. And so what's quite interesting is
00:48:46
Speaker
If we were going to say this was a 1916 operation and it was constructed in 1916, then they were using the 1908 manual or the 1911 manual as their guidance. Does that mean that their kind of NCOs or their commanding officers are
00:49:09
Speaker
they didn't serve on the front line in the First World War. They're looking back to their old manuals from when they were pre-war and using those as a guide and just giving the soldiers a sense of kind of, this is what it's like. So yeah, we're going to build it like a pre-war fashion. But of course, when you get to the Western Front or wherever you're going, the trenches are probably already going to be made anyway. But if you got to make them, then someone there will tell you how to make them.
00:49:39
Speaker
Or at least that was our initial thought until some further sleuth detective work found some more newspaper articles from the Sheffield Telegraph and such. So we had evidence of military activity on the common from 1864 with the Hallamshire Rifles deploying up there.
00:50:02
Speaker
under the command of a Captain Vickers for four hours. And they undertook, as it says there, battalion scale maneuvers, including volume, fire, firing and skirmishing. But in that article, it doesn't say anything about
00:50:17
Speaker
entrenchments or constructing trench systems. What it does say though is they had lots of beer and lots of sandwiches provided by the locals and had a really nice time before marching back down to West Street. And then in April 1906 we have the Royal Engineers and Hallamshire volunteers back up there tasked with defending Sheffield and there was this massive exercise where
00:50:44
Speaker
the Royal Artillery, Royal Horse Artillery, some other infantry unit, light infantry unit, were doing mock battles and were going to capture a bridgehead in Sheffield and they were coming from the west. And so the Royal Engineers and Hallamshers were the blue team and tasked with defending Sheffield.
00:51:06
Speaker
And there is an account there where they do withdraw from Loash after defending that position to Loxley Common, to entrenchments dug within the area of quarries. And I think that's it. I think that's our kind of best candidate for when these monuments were constructed rather than 1916. I would imagine in 1916 they reused them.
00:51:35
Speaker
But because there's still quite significant kind of features, there's significant earthworks that you could still practice in. But I have a feeling that a more 1906 date for these features being constructed is what we're looking at there.
00:51:57
Speaker
It's just a shame they don't really say anything else. They withdrew to the common but then by that stage over a thousand spectators had rocked up and they thought we better cancel this.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:52:08
Speaker
It's getting a bit out of hand.
00:52:14
Speaker
And so that was it. That's Wadsley and Locksley Common, as far as this investigation goes, in a nutshell. I'd just like to thank Sheffield and Robram's Wildlife Trust for kind of having me on board and contracting me to do this. In particular, Alex Soverin, who was their community archaeologist at the time for having me on board.
00:52:36
Speaker
and of course to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for funding this project as well as all the other wonderful projects they fund nationally. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Chris. Have you got time for a couple of questions? Yeah. Does anybody have any questions?
00:53:05
Speaker
In your map of the trenches they were kind of stretched all the way along so do you think they were always just little pockets of trenches or do you think they extended all the way along?
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah, there were definitely just little individual trench systems. There might be some on the... So they're looking south. They've got a south-facing direction. I'm quite sure there's some on the other side of the ridge looking north as well. But we just didn't get around to recording them properly, but that's for another day.
00:53:44
Speaker
Can I ask you about the shape of the enclosed area? It's a bit like a dumbbell, only one end of the dumbbell is much smaller than the other. How did that arise? Which is loxley and which is loxley? I have no idea how it arises and why that shape was chosen. It almost doesn't exist.
00:54:11
Speaker
Yeah, but the Wodsley bit is... Yeah, with the big quarry in is definitely Wodsley if I... So that's Wodsley Common, all the way along and down to about there. So I think this is this is Loxley Common down here.
00:54:36
Speaker
And I think the boundary is very much, you can almost just look at the escarpment of Loxley Edge and use that as your boundary. Although, as I say from that survey, we did pick up that boundary that seemed to correlate to the 1700s enclosure rewards map, which might be the official boundary. But certainly the boundary is somewhere in there between the two commons.
00:55:04
Speaker
And you don't know why that funny constriction came about? No, no, this little bit here. Yeah. Taking bits off it or what? Well, that was the enclosure. It was all about just trying to enclose as much land for agricultural purposes as possible. And so, yeah, someone had rights on it, they took it. What's the state of that bit at present day?
00:55:33
Speaker
This bit here? Yeah, no, no, the kind of squarish bit where they really tried to clear everything. It's open to dog walkers. It's just rough past here. When you walked down to the Rosencrantz somewhere, where's... I should know, I never went to a pub.
00:56:07
Speaker
I don't know. I know there's a track where that kind of pops out here somewhere and heads off on that point. So you thought that perhaps there might have been some medieval mining happening in this area. Could you actually find any evidence
00:56:33
Speaker
No, and I often think, because this has been such an important site for mineral extraction, for whatever it's been, coal, sandstone or, or, uh, gangster, um, I think their works have kind of erased anything earlier, so it might be difficult to, to find, saying that I didn't really go out and have a proper look. And we, there are,
00:56:59
Speaker
Across the site, there are small delves, small pits, really shallow ones, kind of everywhere where it looks like people have just
00:57:10
Speaker
take an opportune kind of, oh, we'll have that boulder, it's lying there, we'll take that out, and it's easy access. So, I mean, they could be, some of them could be medieval in origins all the way through, but because you've got so much mineral extraction going on all in the same space, the chances are they're kind of erasing each other out. I've liked to, yeah, I'd like to, but there's nothing planned.
00:57:39
Speaker
Nothing planned at the minute. I know the local community are very keen to do something. Chris, the whole theme behind our talks this year has been sort of community involvement in archaeology and we've seen lots of photographs of happy smiling faces and mentioned how your volunteers have sort of come up with trunks on certain pieces of information. How many people has your work
00:58:07
Speaker
How many volunteers have become involved in this? How many people have it touched? I think with this, I think it was over 80. I can't remember the number. Over 80 is quite good for this because it was a two week excavation and five days survey. So, yeah, yeah, over 80 with lots of people kind of stopping by and having a look and seeing what's going on.
00:58:38
Speaker
There are no more questions. I would have thought if the firing point had been actually used for firing, then you'd find, even with the thousands of scavengers, you'd find some casings or something. But presumably if you had, you would have mentioned it.
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah, we didn't find anything at all. So maybe it was a practice trench in the sense of pretty dry practice. Yeah, could well have been. And as I say, if it's relating to that 1906 event,
00:59:11
Speaker
So yeah, 1906. By the time they'd got to Wadley and Locksley Common, they canceled the exercise. So yeah, they may not have been used in anger, if you like. And the 1916 really does look like a dry exercise. I mean, the machine gun they had was
00:59:39
Speaker
made a wood or something, so yeah. Can we just say thank you very much to Chris once again? Thanks for having me.
00:59:54
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archaeology and Ale. For more information about our podcast and guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archaeology Podcast Network. You can get in touch with us at Archaeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you.
01:00:18
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.