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I Can’t See the Charcoal for the Trees! with Chris Atkinson - Episode 48
613 Plays11 months ago
An Investigation into Charcoal Production in West and South Yorkshire.
Recorded at the Red Deer Sheffield on the 30th October 2023
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.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Episode 48 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. This month, our guest speaker is Chris Atkinson, who will be talking about charcoal production in West and South Yorkshire here in England. Thank you very much.
Overview of Archaeology and Ale Lecture Series
00:01:07
Speaker
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Steve Hollings and on behalf of Archaeology in the City, I would welcome everybody to our first of the new series of Archaeology Nail Lectures. Just say thank you.
00:01:22
Speaker
OK, thank you to Emily for so graciously sort of giving us this venue free of charge. But on the basis that there's so many people here today, they're actually going to take a nice turn over the bar, so we should be on commission. This is the first of the 23-24 series of events, and we intend to carry on until at least the 25th of May. After that, we don't know what's going to happen, so we're going to enjoy ourselves for the rest of the year.
00:01:53
Speaker
I'm delighted to welcome... Are you? One of them! One of them! On the basis that we were sat here a year ago when Sun Muppet, me, organised this event to be on Halloween night when no-one could come out in the pouring rain and I was desperately trying to sell Chris. It didn't really matter that there's only six people here because we'd catch up with everybody on the podcast and I felt really bad about it. So I'm delighted that everybody's here.
00:02:20
Speaker
Well, I'm terrified at this time. It was easier last time. So without further ado, I'm going to hand you over to Chris. Chris Atkinson is going to tell you all about charcoal.
Charcoal Production Process Explained
00:02:30
Speaker
My PhD. Hello, everyone.
00:02:37
Speaker
I can't see the projection screen for all the people. Chris Atkinson doing my PhD at the Department of Archaeology, University Sheffield, funded by the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities.
00:02:55
Speaker
Just under halfway because I'm doing it part time. So this is very much what I've been up to so far rather than the complete deal. We've got to come back. Yeah, probably. Charcoal the revenge.
00:03:21
Speaker
So, as it says there at the bottom, if you can see it, a landscape and environmental study of historic charcoal production in West and South Yorkshire is the official title. But before I go any further,
00:03:39
Speaker
What is charcoal and what do we use it for? Well, as it says there, charcoal production is the process of removing all moisture and volatile constituents from wood. So things like tree sap, for example, through burning in a low oxygen setting. We can then use that fuel, that charcoal that you can see in the top right hand corner there for
00:04:07
Speaker
smelting, bronze, iron, all the rest of it. So if you can see the picture on the bottom left-hand corner, that's a woodland called Harcastle Crags near Hebden Bridge, and that's where
00:04:21
Speaker
the department's archaeology gang were out there on a community excavation and project back in 2017, I think it was. They, as part of a weekend of charcoal burning, iron smelting and excavation of a charcoal burning platform, we were demonstrating to the public, you know, woodland heritage, if you like. And so they constructed, much like the video that you saw at the beginning here,
00:04:48
Speaker
the things going on in the Abadale industrial hamlet, they were demonstrating how iron was smelted in the iron age. So Louis and a volunteer there working hard on the bellows. In the middle there, you can... No, that's... In the middle is Louis, on the left is Benoit.
00:05:09
Speaker
He has the iron bloom produced at the end of that smout. On the right, of course, we're probably more common with using charcoal for barbecues, whether it is to completely vitrify our food or send us off to the toilet later because we haven't cooked it for long enough.
00:05:28
Speaker
but that's what we use it for mostly in our households nowadays, but of course historically it was used in the textile industries, particularly for a wool combing. It was a preferred source of fuel to heat up the combs beneath the
00:05:53
Speaker
that were beneath the sheep's wall, so you could freely comb this wall to get all of the greases and impurities out of it to make it ideal for textile.
Historical Significance of Charcoal
00:06:09
Speaker
So a brief history of charcoal production, very brief. Probably, archaeologically, our first kind of evidence of people actually using charcoal for something is probably cave paintings.
00:06:21
Speaker
And if you're into your popular culture, cave paintings still going on in children's literature. The Gruffalo's child, for example, uses charcoal to draw the big mean mouse after the mouse is described to her by the Gruffalo, of course.
00:06:43
Speaker
But as we get into historic times, then we actually have a patron saint of charcoal burners, Saint Alexander of Kamana, which is in modern-day Turkey. Very much... Oh, I'm sorry, did I get that wrong?
00:07:07
Speaker
very much living as an outsider to the society there until they required a new bishop of the area and all the noble, the good, the rich and famous step forth. But it was this Alexander the charcoal burner who was kind of pushed forward by the crowd and said it should be him. He
00:07:30
Speaker
He loves the Bible, he loves religion, he should be the guy, and he's very humble. Unfortunately for him, however, he came a cropper with Diocletian's persecution of Christians and ended up on a fire himself, between 275 to 300 AD, somewhere in there, which is not very pleasant for him.
00:07:57
Speaker
Some of our earliest depictions of actual charcoal production, though, come in 1540 in the illustrations here in a document called Dilla Paratechnica. Apologies, I'm not Italian. But the top image there is of an individual or individuals producing charcoal.
00:08:17
Speaker
below ground, digging a charcoal pit, a coal pit, a pit kiln, a pitstead. They all have all sorts of different names and they're interchangeable. As time progresses, they also have the technique of, and I can't read them now, but mound kiln, charcoal half, clamp, and whatever the first one is on that line. But you can see that's very much an above ground technique for creating charcoal.
00:08:47
Speaker
And we have numerous historical accounts for charcoal being produced. One of the earliest ones in England, at least, is related to absolute guys in Bedfordshire, 969 AD, the old coal pit where the three boundaries go together.
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, thanks Rackham. And then we have some closer to home, Dembedale and Kirkleys in 1466, the said woods to cut down coal and spring. So we have all these references to charcoal production and also
00:09:22
Speaker
in some cases, where it's going. So there's one at the bottom there by John Evelyn in writing in the 1600s about it going into the forges, going to London, being used for chemical fires as well.
00:09:40
Speaker
and charcoal production was very much the driving kind of fuel source for the Industrial Revolution and continued to be so right up until really the 1850s when by that stage railway had been established, canal networks had been established and with that
00:10:02
Speaker
it was easier to transport coal and coke around the nation.
Charcoal's Role in the Industrial Revolution
00:10:07
Speaker
And so charcoal production, which is labour intensive and time consuming compared to digging coal out of the ground and just setting it on fire, it went out of favour.
00:10:22
Speaker
how was charcoal produced? Well what we're looking at here, in fact I'm going to go back just to this slide here, there's been, hang on, hang on, hang on, I've forgotten the guy's name.
00:10:37
Speaker
Coinde Force and Co. in Belgium, from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, has been doing a fair bit of work looking at charcoal production sites in the Netherlands and Belgium and
00:10:54
Speaker
has actually managed to get a lot of funding to do a lot of radiocarbon dates of sites recognized as charcoal pits, coal pits, the below ground production sites for charcoal, as well as the above ground sites. And they very much see or they see in their results for that region that charcoal production was being undertaken below ground right the way up until the 1300s.
00:11:21
Speaker
after which the technique, the decision was made to start producing it above ground. So yeah, interesting kind of change in their production techniques. So what we're looking at here is very much how they did it from around about the 1300s onwards, if we're kind of superimposing the results of Netherlands and Belgium to England.
00:11:50
Speaker
So here we have a site in North Dean Woods. We did this as part of the celebrating woodland heritage project in the South Penn Islands. This again was in 2017 and we had permission to dig and actually create our own charcoal burning platform. So as you can see in the back that edge we cut into the gentle slope there and all the excess soil from that we piled up
00:12:20
Speaker
in this area to create an oval circular level platform onto which we then took our chopped wood and constructed that chimney that stack you can see there and then with all the wood piled that up on top and with a hole in the top there once the turf had gone on
00:12:42
Speaker
we dropped embers down for it to start to catch a light and then buried the whole thing and sealed it all up so that over 48 hours we kind of monitored it and made bromance and stuff like that and watched this thing simmer away, patched up the holes every now and then because of course
00:13:06
Speaker
The soil burns away, air gets in, and the last thing you want is a bonfire, so you've just got to patch those holes up again. And then at the end, we're left with all that lovely charcoal on the ground there. So that, in essence, is how it's done, really, monitoring it, reducing oxygen flow. And then right at the end, you start to open a few holes into it, pour water in, seal it up again, and then that starts to quench the fire.
00:13:36
Speaker
ready for extracting all the charcoal at the end.
00:13:42
Speaker
How do you identify these sites, though? They can be a bit of a pain to identify. They're even worse to photograph, as you might tell by those photos there. What the hell am I looking at? But they're described as charcoal burning platforms, an area of flattened or compacted ground used for charcoal burning. So here we have a photo. Hopefully you can see
00:14:09
Speaker
a sort of circular shape in the middle there so a very steep slope and they've cut into the hillside and created this platform and this is a place called Cold Side Oaks in the Upper Derwent Valley not far from Slippery Stones if you know it. The bottom left one there is a little harder to see believe it or not but it's again circular in there
00:14:34
Speaker
um gently sloping ground um this is a place called Shipley Glen near Salter
00:14:41
Speaker
and the bottom right one is probably the easiest one to see. It's again steep slope constructed into the side of the hill so you can see the flat surface there curving around and this is a place called Calliswood near Hebden Bridge and this one stands out nice and clearly because unlike the other two you see there it has a dry stone wall keeping it in place.
00:15:10
Speaker
So my study area, here we go, just going to take a sip. So, as I mentioned at the beginning, I'm interested in West and South Yorkshire, which takes in that whole area there.
00:15:29
Speaker
I'm particularly interested in how or where the evidence of charcoal production is in regards to ancient woodland. I've deliberately sort of looked at ancient woodlands over other woodlands, principally because an ancient woodland we know has been there since at least the 1600s.
00:15:50
Speaker
and if it's been there that long it's probably been there a lot longer and it's going to preserve women in it evidence of woodland management which will include charcoal production
Focus on Yorkshire's Ancient Woodlands
00:16:02
Speaker
whereas a woodland that isn't regarded as ancient might be I don't know planted 50 years ago or after charcoal production took place. That's not to say I'm ignoring other woodlands that aren't ancient because
00:16:19
Speaker
When this dataset that you're looking at here was produced, they were looking at areas of ancient woodland over the size of two hectares, I believe. So there's areas of woodland out there that are ancient, but fall beneath that. And there is a program of works going on in the area at the minute by the various authorities to kind of update that record and look at all of their woodlands that they own to see, well, do we have some ancient woodlands that have slipped the net?
00:16:47
Speaker
So I am kind of touching on those sort of areas in my research too. And on that map there, the ancient woodland is standing out because it's highlighted in a dark green.
00:17:06
Speaker
So my methodology, well, to begin with, I wanted to do, obviously you see the size of the area, I wanted to do a landscape desk-based investigation and get pooled together all of the known information that's out there from the likes of West Yorkshire Archaeology, South Yorkshire Archaeology,
00:17:28
Speaker
The South Pennines Park or Pennine Prospect, they did a big community investigation of woodlands of that region.
00:17:40
Speaker
And as I started my investigations, their reports hadn't yet gone into the West Yorkshire historic environment record. I'm also looking at the Peak District National Park as well and the National Trust because they have their sites and monument record as well and reports regarding archaeological investigations in the area. So what I want to do is pull all these reports together and look at
00:18:05
Speaker
what has been done within ancient woodlands and woodlands around the area that can signify or highlight the distribution of the charcoal industry in the region. Of course, there's a historic archives and we've already seen a few of those records for historic charcoal production in the area. And then place name evidence as well can be a really good
00:18:32
Speaker
indicator of perhaps how the woodland was used in the past or at least how old a woodland is because you'll have a Scandinavian name, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, French name for a location that indicates that it's been there for a long time.
00:18:51
Speaker
So there's a map there, for example, that shows a little bit of wharncliffe wood. You probably can't read it, but that says Broomhead Spring. So whenever you see the name spring appear, it represents a woodland that was managed once as a coppice, i.e. trees were cut down low and left to grow back to create multiple straight shoots, multiple trunks that they could harvest.
00:19:17
Speaker
over rotation for charcoal production but also construction materials as well and so on.
00:19:32
Speaker
The next phase, after all the desk-based stuff, was to pick some locations to actually do some ground survey, reconnaissance archaeological field surveys, as it says up there. And I've identified five woodlands.
00:19:51
Speaker
So one near at the top there, Shipley Glen, which is near Solterre, Bradford, Wade Wood, which is not far from Hebden Bridge, which is just there. CSO 22, down on the bottom left-hand corner, is in the Upper Doerwent Valley. That's Cold Side Oaks. Interesting place because it's no longer a woodland. It's open, kind of rough pasture leading onto moorland.
00:20:21
Speaker
and at the bottom, Lady Springwoods, Bee Chief as well. And the purpose of doing these investigations was to firstly develop a narrative, as it says there, of land use and woodland management. And that is not just to go in there and identify charcoal burning platforms. I want to go in there and identify everything. So ancient tree or ancient veteran trees, field boundaries, woodland boundaries, park pails,
00:20:51
Speaker
ruins of cottage sites, mill sites, weirs, trackways, absolutely anything I can come across that relates to human interaction on that area of landscape. So at the end I can stand there and produce a narrative of how that landscape has evolved and changed over time. So there's a photo at the bottom left hand corner there, that's from Shipri Glen.
00:21:14
Speaker
It actually has a World War II home guard trench system in it. Because they were worried there, it faces Belden Moor and a large kind of flat area would be ideal for if the Germans wanted to come in during the Second World War and land their gliders and do a parachute drop. So they have multiple, and a few of them are actually listed as scheduled monuments in that area relating to the Second World War, and these are additional ones to add to the list.
00:21:44
Speaker
And then it's to go in, of course, to identify charcoal production sites, charcoal burning platforms within these woodlands too, which would then help me identify other locations to do an excavation.
00:22:01
Speaker
As I've identified all these features though, whether they're charcoal platforms or not, we've produced management recommendations as well, so that at the end when this grey literature report produced for the landowners arrives on their desk, not only can they look at it and go, oh yeah, I've got all this heritage, that's great, but they've also got a bit of advice
00:22:25
Speaker
using some of the statutory guidance as well from Forestry Commission and English Heritage and the like and go I need to consider managing it like this when I want to clear some trees out or plant some trees or if you have a cottage site or the ruins of something and there's brambles growing out the side of it and loads of sapling beach trees growing next to it then the advice would be you need to get control of that otherwise
Managing Archaeological Heritage
00:22:55
Speaker
that archaeological heritage feature is going to kind of worsen, deteriorate over time. Excuse me.
00:23:16
Speaker
The third phase of the research is going into an excavation. So from each of the woodlands I wanted to select one charcoal burning platform to dig up.
00:23:30
Speaker
And of course I couldn't do it all by myself. I needed people like Steve there to come along and help out and others in the crowd to come and support. Because one of the key elements of my research too is to make it as open and accessible as possible. So it wasn't simply for
00:23:53
Speaker
university folk to come in and have a good fun and dig around, but it was also for the general public and school groups to come along and visit as well and have a go. It was meant to be fun. It was meant to be fun. I didn't invite you for the bondage.
00:24:14
Speaker
I didn't pick my sights very close to car parks either. So what did I want to do whilst excavating these? Not just dig them up and have a look, but I wanted to assess how much charcoal there is on the site to give me an idea of perhaps their wood selection choices.
00:24:40
Speaker
You're excavating down, as many of you know, you have different layers of soil that you come across. And if the species of charcoal or the tree species represented by the charcoal changes within each of those layers, then it can give me an idea of, well, fuel sources there, a choosing, but also it might give me an indication of what the woodland looked like as well. So I may be able to capture how the woodlands have changed over time.
00:25:08
Speaker
The historic woodland management strategies. Basically, if I can count the growth rings where I have complete twigs or branches, then it might give me an idea of how often people were returning to that woodland between each one of those soil layers that we encounter to repeat the process of making charcoal. So were they coming back every eight years, 15 years, 30 years?
00:25:37
Speaker
And in doing so, kind of establish a bit of a chronology of charcoal production on each platform. In support of that, and this is something I've not yet done, I need to analyze some samples from the very top of my excavations and the very bottom and send those off for radiocarbon dating because it'll give me an end date and beginning date of when these platforms might have been in use for.
00:26:03
Speaker
I've already sort of touched on how the woodland canopy and ground floor might have changed or at least the woodland canopy might have changed by looking at the charcoal but I'm also looking at is the pollen that's in there and trying to work out from that the trees that perhaps are appearing in the record that weren't used for charcoal as well as those used for charcoal.
00:26:29
Speaker
but also any evidence of ground flora that might give me an indication of how open the woodland was, how close to moorland it was. I don't know. But I've got to look at this. This is a new skill I'm learning. Thanks to Dr. Emily Forster over there.
00:26:46
Speaker
And how environmental evidence of charcoal burning platforms could support modern tree planting schemes. I already mentioned cold side oaks in the Upper Derwent Valley.
00:27:04
Speaker
There's no woodland there today. They've recently planted it back up. I'm not sure how successful it's been though. But if you have an area which was once wooded and managed as an effective woodland and charcoal was produced, then can the archaeological record identify or highlight the species that once grew there?
00:27:27
Speaker
and therefore provide the individual that wants to grow a new woodland there the information of ensuring they get the best tree planting in the right place. There is a caveat there as well because
00:27:44
Speaker
as we go through with climate change and if temperatures are going to increase, it might be that an oak tree wouldn't be suited to cold side oaks because it would be just too hot and exposed or whatever it is. But it might demonstrate how archaeology can support tree planting schemes.
00:28:07
Speaker
The methodology of excavating one of these was each charcoal burning platform involved two excavations, one that was on the surface of the platform itself as it shows you there, one metre by two metre in size, and another one that was downslope of the charcoal production site. The reason being is that
00:28:31
Speaker
If you imagine you do your charcoal burn on the surface of the platform, at the end of it, you want to prepare that platform for your next burn, whether it's immediately or later on. So any waste that happens to be there, you're probably going to scrape downhill.
00:28:52
Speaker
and when you look at a lot of charcoal production sites the description there was of like a compacted or flattened area for charcoal production but
00:29:03
Speaker
When you look at them, they have a sort of, they call it an apron, but it's a little embankment, a lip on the downward slope of the charcoal platform, which represents where all the waste has been dumped after burns. And so I was particularly interested in that because in theory, if I could get to the bottom of one of those lips, then I would have evidence of when, or rough evidence of the first phase of charcoal production on that platform.
00:29:33
Speaker
So that was where I was getting my samples from and from each of the horizons, the soil layers that we came across, I was collecting 30 litre bulk samples and getting Steve to carry it back to my car over a distance of two kilometres or so, uphill. I gave you a run up sometimes, there were a bit of downhills before the up.
00:30:02
Speaker
And then coming across like secure samples of really good bits of charcoal, we're wrapping those in tin foil and taking them away for the radiocarbon dates as well. We're also using these tins knocked into the side of the trench so I could preserve the soil profile.
00:30:22
Speaker
and cut that out, take it back to the labs, and then take one centimeter subsamples from each of the layers preserved in that tin to produce for pollen analysis.
00:30:43
Speaker
So we'll start with a known archeology record. So phase one of the investigation, getting that data set together from West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire's HERs and National Trusts and South Pennine's Park. And you can see that kind of scatter of spots on the map there representing.
00:31:09
Speaker
You should have heard my sound effects Saturday night playing Alien versus Predator. Brilliant. But those locations there all represent archaeological woodland survey reports across the study area. And you notice straight away, there's quite a lean to the left there to the west of that map.
00:31:43
Speaker
At this point, I should probably also say that there is a sort of bias, accidental bias, deliberate.
00:31:54
Speaker
where you have all the orange splodges at the top there. There's a concentration because that's their work remit, the South Pennines Park, Pennine Prospects, as it was. It was very much within the South Pennines that ends here. So theirs are all very much concentrated in there. And then we have the reports of fueling the revolution of, produced by... Oh!
00:32:24
Speaker
NAA, they're all part of ethos now, aren't they? But they are all concentrated down here. So that's two projects kind of, yeah, dominating the dataset there.
00:32:41
Speaker
And in total, there's 71 woodland survey reports. I've got five to go and read in Sheffield South Yorkshire Archaeology's HDR on Friday this week, because they're not digitised. So the numbers are going to change.
00:33:03
Speaker
In all, you've got 15 reports there from Wyess, 14 from South Yorkshire, 12 from South Pennines Park within that area. And in addition to that, there were nine monument records basically recorded on cards to general observations where a historical society had walked past and gone, there's some charcoal burning platforms in that wood, the end. So there's a few of them and they're marked on there with black dots.
00:33:37
Speaker
In the case of three of those as well, they also include community projects, excavations as well. One of them, as I've already mentioned, the Harcastle Crags, and there was something going on in there, Buckwood up here as well, near Bradford.
00:34:04
Speaker
And compiling all those reports and sifting through them all, there's a total 368 charcoal burning platforms recorded in those reports. It's a massive underestimation for the area. And we know there's more than that. But the reports for them aren't in the HER. They're kind of scattered around and a bit difficult to find. So that's that. And there's a big kind of
00:34:33
Speaker
lean on Eckersall Woods down the bottom here, where I'm yet to find an archaeological report that references it, but in all the council documentation it mentions over 200 charcoal burning platforms within Eckersall Woods.
00:34:50
Speaker
I could believe it, but I haven't found the report, so I've included it in there anyway with a bit of a bit of a caveat. But the one where I do know there are an awful lot is 84 within Hardcastle Crags area of Woodland up there.
00:35:11
Speaker
But of course you can see again that massive lean where everything's on the left hand side. Yeah, left hand side of the map. So I need another sip of water.
00:35:35
Speaker
But why? Why are the sites distributed across the study area like this? What about the east of the area? Well, what I thought I'd do is look at place name evidence, as I mentioned at the start there.
00:35:52
Speaker
as an indicator for how long woodland has been in useful and so the place name evidence I'm using here is coming from the ancient woodland inventory but it's also coming from the Ordnance Survey open source data as well and so it is including place names that are
00:36:12
Speaker
not just ancient woodland, but all woodlands. And in this case here, I've picked or highlighting the location of woodlands with historic names that would suggest a long-established woodland. So these are Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, Norman names such as Hurst, Grieve, Holt, Shrog and Storf. And to highlight, right, OK, if you've got a woodland with that name,
Using Place Names for Historical Insights
00:36:39
Speaker
been there quite some time. It's well established and so you can see we've got a lot appearing particularly in the east there of Holt all around Doncaster.
00:36:56
Speaker
Also names to do with directly with woodland management. I mentioned spring earlier, but we have copy or coppice, stub, stubbing, hag, holling, fall, all to do with woodland management. Again, how you manage your trees, holling being directly related to holly trees.
00:37:19
Speaker
I'm not sure if bowl should be there. It might need to be in industry. I'm not quite sure yet because if we go to industry, I've not got it in there. But bowl or bowl hill can be a reference to lead smelting and a form of open air lead smelting.
00:37:37
Speaker
but woodland industry as well. Charcoal appearing at least twice in the north there, one in Wakefield, one in Bradford district. Forge, cinder, smelt, smith, coal and lime. So all of these
00:37:54
Speaker
you know, potentially relate to charcoal. So using the place names is kind of highlighting where charcoal production may have taken place in relation to place names. But you have to be careful, of course, with place names because there's names out there like Burnt and originally I thought Burnt would be a, you know, a big tick in a box or Burnt would. It's definitely going to have something to do with charcoal, but it actually comes from the Scandinavian to mean clearing through fire.
00:38:24
Speaker
So it's not to do with charcoal production at all. So you have to be slightly careful with your place name evidence.
00:38:37
Speaker
We've also got the historic archives. Now, I've not managed to get to the archives good and proper yet, but I do have various accounts in my back pocket I can pull upon. So in areas where the known archaeological record is missing, there seems to be a lot missing around Barnsley, which I was surprised about. But if you have a record there from 1720 Colton near Barnsley to dig and get clods and cover in the said woods for covering the said bark,
00:39:06
Speaker
and coaling the charcoal. So basically describing part of the process of producing the charcoal. Kecksborough again, sufficient turf and hilling, basically like the photos you saw earlier, all that turf and vegetation that sealed the stack of wood for coaling of the woods.
00:39:32
Speaker
and then West Breton Wakefield, the woods of the said mares shall be cold. So we've got records there and I thought well
00:39:46
Speaker
So these are clear indications that charcoal production is happening in those areas where the contemporary records, obviously the archaeological records missing out. So I thought I'd do a mini desk-based kind of assessment on each location. So here Colton Barnsley have a nice 1850s map here. Colton just there and then north
00:40:13
Speaker
North Royd Wood, big area of woodland there. Royd suggesting woodland clearance or enclosure of a woodland. So that's again a contender as an ancient woodland location. It's been there for a long time. So let's say in 1850s,
00:40:35
Speaker
The early 1920s, 30s, that's the same location, but hopefully you can see a railway line chipping through the side of it there, and then extending out towards a colliery site down in here. So you're starting to see this woodland being kind of eaten up until that's what it looks like today, where urban development has seen it entirely cleared.
00:41:05
Speaker
That's one of the reasons perhaps why we're not finding the evidence of charcoal production within areas in the east of my study area, because you've got urban expansion, expansion of fields as well, because it is fertile good land for farming.
00:41:26
Speaker
When we go to Kecksborough, Barnsley, a lot of this woodland, in fact, you can see the woodland that's highlighted in green there represents ancient woodlands. So it's still there today. We know charcoal production was going on there.
00:41:44
Speaker
But when we look at this map, or this LIDAR survey, and you're looking through the canopy, all those circular dots down there all represent bell pits, coal mining. And you can see the density of that. If there was any evidence of charcoal burning platforms there, they're going to be gone. What you also have in here as well is it's not particularly
00:42:13
Speaker
The gradient is very undulating across there too. If you think back to those photos at the beginning where if you've got a platform constructed into a side of a steep hill, you're going to see it. If you've got a platform constructed into a gently undulating slope, you're less likely to see it.
00:42:33
Speaker
And so I've kind of gone through this data set in the rest of the woodland and all I can pick out in there is the odd woodland boundary or drainage ditch or quarry. Such as that little pimple up there and a little quarry in there too. So industry can have a major impact.
00:42:54
Speaker
And we go to West Breton. A lot of this now is Yorkshire Sculpture Park down here. But in the north, we've got long-standing ancient woodland up here too. And I thought, well, we'll definitely find some charcoal platforms in here until I looked at the lay of the land. And I'm sorry that the elevation colors don't quite stand out on here, but you've got kind of high ground here and it's relatively level. I think the
00:43:24
Speaker
The elevation changes one meter over a distance of something between 18 and 30 meters. So you can imagine someone constructing a platform in that area to produce charcoal, not having any issues at all because it's relatively flat. And as such, not really identifying the charcoal burning platforms in that area.
Challenges in Woodland Surveying
00:43:47
Speaker
So the factors, as I've mentioned, topography can be a factor. Vegetation, too, can be a massive factor, especially if you're surveying these places on foot. There were large areas of wharncliffe wood, for example, that were just an absolute nightmare to get through, because even in the depths of winter, the brambles were this high. I need new trousers. They got ripped to shreds. And eventually I just gave up and thought, ah.
00:44:15
Speaker
I'd record it enough and I'll probably catch it on Lidar as well. So that's one of the cheats. Industry and agriculture having a major effect as well as we saw at Colton, the clearance settlement too. Also changing the woodland management.
00:44:33
Speaker
where you have an area of ancient woodland. I should have mentioned this for Kecspara. A lot of it is conifer plantation now and if you look at the Lidar really closely you can see where they've ploughed it before planting the trees. So that too is going to have an effect on erasing any evidence of your charcoal industry in these locations. And then right at the bottom there, funding opportunities available. You know it's just
00:45:04
Speaker
undertaking an archaeological woodland survey is a bit of a nicety sometimes rather than a necessity. So my five case study woodlands
00:45:23
Speaker
So that map there shows you where they all are. Saltair, Wade Wood, Lady Spring, Warmcliffe, Cold Sighoaks. So they're quite scattered across the area.
00:45:38
Speaker
I'm not going to go through each one of these woodlands and go, and I found this and I found that. And it was used like this because a lot of them are quite similar. But what I will do is kind of warm cliff wood sort of encapsulates a lot of the types of archaeology that we were coming across. So it's a huge area.
00:46:02
Speaker
I mean, it looks bigger on that map, but the map I saw initially when I picked the site was, you know, it was only about that big. I thought I'd do it in a day, but, you know. Two weeks plus later, and I still need to go back. There's an awful lot going on in there. But some of the great heritage in there is the trees themselves, particularly along where you have the escarpment up here.
00:46:31
Speaker
and this area all the way on the upslope. Absolutely fantastic, that top right photo there of one of many coppice trees, I would say, that have been left to grow out and do its own thing growing up there. There's a fair few pollarded trees up there too, which is like coppicing, but you're chopping the tree back higher up.
00:46:54
Speaker
up in the canopy, and they're situated on boundaries coming down the side of the hill. You've got, as I said, boundaries, fantastic ones, big ditch boundaries, some of them marking potentially, or potentially representing a park pail, because in the 1400s this area up here, the chase, was turned into a deer park.
00:47:24
Speaker
But a lot of them representing woodland compartment boundaries. So within the woodland, there's multiple kind of named historic woods like Stead Spring, Broomheads Spring, Higgswood, Todd Wickwood. Yeah, Utterbridge Hag, I think is another one. All within there, all separated by boundaries, whether they're banks, ditches, drainage ditches, watercourses, or drystone walls, they're all in there.
00:47:55
Speaker
Massive quarries as well and mines. I don't know if many of you have been to Worncliffe Wood, but one of the dominating features there is these massive scars in the side of the hill on this west-facing slope here, where in the late 1800s, early 1900s, they were mining for Gannister to create fire
00:48:20
Speaker
heat resistant bricks for the furnaces. So there's a lot of that going on up there and you can sort of see highlighted on the Ordnance Survey this big scar here, a huge one up here and that's this here. So this is just one trackway going through but where you see the top of the hill there that's the that is the top of the quarry where they've cut in and extended out that way.
00:48:45
Speaker
great for off-road biking as well which is a favorite pastime out there at the minute and then of course bottom right hand photo is a charcoal burning platform of which there were a fair few in this woodland so where I couldn't I did a good job at getting around all of this and a fair bit of this but there were areas on this slope that which is
00:49:07
Speaker
dense with ground vegetation that I just couldn't penetrate, just couldn't get in, didn't have the willpower in the end diver, I have to say.
00:49:22
Speaker
So I kind of turned to things like Lidar to Lenderhand.
Lidar Technology in Archaeology
00:49:28
Speaker
So I could look at the landscape in relief as a slope model or a hillshade model, and I hope straight away you can sort of see the scars there, there, and then down the bottom there.
00:49:44
Speaker
and that one there, all representing these massive gangster mines that were put into the side of the hill to get at that bedrock material. Hopefully you're just about to make out some trackways as well in there. But if I zoom in to an area that's represented down the bottom here,
00:50:08
Speaker
There's a zoom in to one of the massive quarries that's there, the trackways. Interesting thing about the tracks, like this one, I think this is called Plank Gate. You've got another one just up here called Stock Horn Gap.
00:50:25
Speaker
and there's another, I can't remember, is it Chase, Chasegate, something like that, up on the top here, or Palegate. I was interested in the use of gate for a lot of these names, and apparently I need to look more into it, but there was a medieval tax
00:50:45
Speaker
regarding gates as trackways through woodlands like a toll, a toll charge for travelling through large areas of woodland. So it was interesting because it's about five of the main tracks around there all end with gate and I wonder if it has a reference to that but that's something for me to look at on an occasion. But you can see there
00:51:09
Speaker
the tracks, the quarries, but hopefully you can make out these little white splodges dotted on there, little spots. Well, they are our charcoal burning platforms in that area. And these are the ones that, well, these are the locations that surveyed, so the white dots
00:51:33
Speaker
Like there, there, there, there, there. They represent the ones that I identified on the ground. What the LIDAR has allowed me to do is look at other kind of extrapolating, go, well, I've confirmed them as charcoal burning platforms. These look like the exact same form and character. So they're likely to be charcoal burning platforms as well.
00:51:54
Speaker
So Lidar in this instance, where I couldn't get into those areas because the vegetation was just impassable, I can use Lidar as a support.
00:52:10
Speaker
And at the end, I've had to put the map on its side because it doesn't quite work as portrait. But all of the white dots you can see in that area represent charcoal burning platforms recorded in the survey so far, 119 of them, which is quite a lot. And this...
00:52:33
Speaker
by no means, you know, all of them. Because there's certain areas of the woodland, like up here, I didn't find any. Again, vegetation was problematic in certain areas. But I'll also put it down to the topography itself, if you can spot the
00:52:52
Speaker
the contour lines here very close together indicating it's an extremely steep slope, whereas up here they're much further apart. So you've got a very gentle slope there, so the identification of constructed level platforms in that are going to be difficult.
00:53:15
Speaker
looked at Lady Springwoods as well, Bee Chief, and again the white dots on that map, difficult to see, but there's a load up there, all representing charcoal burning platforms. So there's a lovely photo of a charcoal burning platform, can you see it?
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah, me either. But compared to all the other woodlands I looked at, these ones also have cupids within there as well, and they're represented by the red dots on that map. And a cupid is also a charcoal production site, but it's for producing white coal. And I don't think many people have really done a lot of investigation into cupids and
00:54:04
Speaker
and white coal. But they're supposed to be related to producing a fuel source suitable for smouting lead. So I'm assuming in my kind of dense mind that it's producing a fuel that
00:54:29
Speaker
It doesn't burn as hot as charcoal. Thanks, Toby. And it's very much a dry piece of wood, a very dry piece of wood rather than your charcoal. That's pure carbon. And that's that.
00:54:57
Speaker
But identifying these sites is tricky, certainly the charcoal burning platforms. Q-pits are a lot easier to identify, especially when you've got things like LIDAR. So that bottom right-hand photo is of a Q-pit looking into it from its opening. So again, it doesn't really look like an awful lot. Hopefully you can see that it's like a little indentation in the hillside there.
00:55:25
Speaker
But what we're going to now look at is this area zoomed in. It's a little bit pixelated, but that charcoal platform that was represented on the top photo is this.
00:55:40
Speaker
where the lidar is picking it up. This side of the map is uphill. Down here is the river. And you can see that they've cut into this hill slope. So that dark shade represents the slope of the back of the platform. The lighter patch represents the platform surface. And then that kind of shade on the lower slope, that's our apron. That's our embankment of deposited
00:56:07
Speaker
charcoal waste. There's also another charcoal platform just a little bit further up slope as well. But then where the red dot is, you can see our Q-pit represented by this pit, but then this channel or funnel coming off it. And this is where they were producing their stuff for lead smelting.
00:56:35
Speaker
And I'm, I'm owning an R-ing. I have been kind of counting these up as I've been doing my research, so I could kind of produce distribution maps. They do dominate within the Sheffield area, which is unsurprising because we're closer to the lead sources.
00:56:53
Speaker
But yeah, I don't really know where to take that. I feel like it's one of them, yeah, are just going to get absorbed down some tunnel of horrors away from my charcoal burning platforms. And, you know, perhaps it's like PhD2. He says, he does that.
00:57:16
Speaker
So we did the woodland surveys. We have all this data set about how these woodlands were used and managed over time from prehistory. We have evidence of prehistory at Shipley Glen in the form of a timber like this, cup and ringmark stones, a few hut platforms as well, and in the case of Shipley Glen as well, all the way through to the Second World War. And it was a sort of
00:57:42
Speaker
Yeah, well-documented woodland landscapes, how they were used, how they were removed in the past and maybe used for fields for a time and then woodland regenerated. I then picked my platforms I wanted to excavate.
00:57:59
Speaker
And here's a nice collage with people hard at work. So the top right photo there is of Shipley Glen. Top left, Cold Side Oaks. Was it cold there? Yes. Yeah. Bottom left is Wade's Wood, middle, bottom. Again, Cold Side Oaks, bottom right, Lady Springs.
00:58:27
Speaker
And I'm just going to skim over the top of these summaries because my research is ongoing, my analysis of what we got from these excavations continues. But our trench one was always on the surface of the platform.
00:58:46
Speaker
So you could see there our trench, so charcoal rich soil down onto a sandy soil underneath and that sandy soil very much represents the original surface of the platform. There was no need to dig any further into that because that was it.
00:59:07
Speaker
And you can see from the bottom left-hand photo, we are getting charcoal from there. And we were knocking tins into the side of the trench as well, so we could extract our samples for pollen analysis.
Excavation Finds and Methods
00:59:22
Speaker
Again, Trench 2, this time on the downward slope. This platform had a kind of crumbly drystone wall retaining wall on it, and this is running downhill. But hopefully you can see the density of charcoal-rich soils in there. That's a 50 centimeter scale, if that helps. So again, ideal location for extracting our samples, for radiocarbon dating, charcoal analysis, pollen analysis.
00:59:52
Speaker
Wade Wood in Calderdale. This was quite a nice one because once we got through the charcoal rich soils we came onto this clay surface there which looks red and it's red because it's been
01:00:07
Speaker
burnt it's where the stack was on the last firing and it's burnt the clay. What we also have here is evidence of resurfacing of the platform as well from that bottom right hand corner. Hopefully you can see this yellow patch but beneath it there's another dark patch of charcoal rich soil and underneath there again another burnt layer of clay. So you've got two phases of charcoal production on that platform.
01:00:38
Speaker
Yeah log samples taken away. Yay! This one again weighed wood down slope crumbling dry stone wall retaining wall.
01:00:52
Speaker
One of the problems we did have with ways would warn cliff and cold side Oaks was that we found charcoal burning platforms very attractive to badges and other burrowing animals. And so they particularly like that down slope edge where all that soft deposits are. So when it comes to getting our radio carbon dates and source cure context charcoal, I'm a little bit iffy, but we'll find out.
01:01:18
Speaker
And then cold side oaks, different sort of structure very rubbly underneath all of the charcoal rich topsoil. And then on the down slope there, again, you can hopefully you see all the little burrows into there making a good mess of things. What was the result?
01:01:46
Speaker
Well, you'll have to wait. That being said, I'm hoping it's going to be something like this. I am almost finished, I promise you. This is an excavation undertaken at a place called Hurstwood. It's salt air.
01:02:00
Speaker
as part of celebrating woodland heritage project. My colleague, Dr. Howell Lewis now, he undertook the charcoal analysis on the site and Emily here undertook the pollen analysis of the site at assessment level. And we very much wanted to ask those similar questions that I'm trying to find out. And so at the bottom there, it kind of says from the charcoal analysis, there was very much
01:02:29
Speaker
50% or over 50% was oak, roundwood, 15 millimeter diameter radius. There was birch and hazel there as well between the layers. But looking at the growth rings on those roundwoods that we had, you could see that there was a crop rotation of 10 to 15 years that people were coming back to produce charcoal again.
01:02:53
Speaker
I can't see what it says at the bottom there. It says at lower levels, there's evidence that there was actually a 30 year crop log rotation there too. Come on, let me see this slide.
01:03:10
Speaker
Oh, I skipped one. And then when we looked at the pollen, which is a poor preservation, but it did indicate that the woodland was relatively open in the past. An alder dominated in the horizon just beneath the topsoil, which is interesting, but we also had hazel, birch and grasses. But there was very limited oak, which is interesting because the oak dominated the charcoal record. And so there's a
01:03:39
Speaker
A discussion there to be had was, was the oak not having time to grow to the correct age to produce pollen? Because I think it's around the 30-year mark that oak starts to produce pollen. Emily could correct me if you wanted to. So that in itself is a bit of an indicator of how often people were coming back to harvest wood for charcoal making.
01:04:09
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you all of the volunteers. Thank you, Chris. Does anybody have any questions? Oh, hands going up for everyone.
01:04:30
Speaker
Is there any information about whether they were using different woods to make charcoal for different purposes in the industry? Yeah, there is, there is. The one that springs to mind is older being used for gunpowder. Yeah, so they were, yeah, yeah. Just one here.
01:04:56
Speaker
As far as Exel Woods goes, you said there's a kind of an apocryphal or a saturated number of 200 platforms. Could it be 200 cupids? No, because there was a survey undertaken... Oh, I can't remember when. Not that long ago, really. But they looked at cupids in particular and surveyed them all to well over 100. Can't remember the exact number.
01:05:24
Speaker
Well, that's what I was about to say. I remember hearing 10 years ago of the Friends of Eccles or Woods funded later scanning of qubits and tried to build a typology of the double ones and the big ones and the small ones. And I don't know that they managed to get a coherent story of what the different types were connected to.
01:05:49
Speaker
A general question, if you find a platform and you dig into it and there's charcoal, then it's charcoal, it's like, by eye, when it's coupled with leaves, are they distinctive?
01:06:01
Speaker
You can often see it in areas of erosion, or if you just kind of scuffed a bit of leaf litter away, you'd probably see charcoal flecks on the surface. And they are very distinctive to kind of pick out as well, because unlike most things, they're always constructed to like an oval or a circular shape. You do get the odd rectangular one, but yeah, they do stand out. Once you've got your eye in, I guess.
01:06:28
Speaker
It's like the following when it comes to identifying them as charcoal burning platforms. Has proximity to water sources and rivers been a contributing factor in terms of saying this is one or have you found any that have not been near water sources? Yeah, I don't think there's any plan to it really. Some of them are next to water sources, others are quite a way away. Yeah.
01:06:57
Speaker
I have kind of kept it in mind whilst doing the surveys when I've done it. And it was clearer, I think the best... I think Hardcastle Crags on a survey that years back, that was the best kind of example where you found charcoal platforms next to water sources, all these natural streams coming off the side of the hill. But yeah, on the whole, not really. Would you need much water? Is it just the trench paint? Yeah, yeah. Did you do that when you did it?
01:07:27
Speaker
Yeah, we had a few gallons there. We did have quite a bit. Can't remember how much we went through there.
01:07:39
Speaker
So you talked about there being different turnover times of when they were having a proper rotation over time. Did you notice across the survey area, there being different approaches to methodology from what you could tell in, like I said, the north compared to the south?
01:07:59
Speaker
Not yet, not yet. That's what I'm doing at the minute, is analysing the charcoal, counting those rings and then hopefully by the end of next year I'll be able to go, oh it's different there, it's different here and yeah, yeah so I'm not there yet.
The Itinerant Charcoal Makers
01:08:16
Speaker
Charcoal wakers are spending most of their time in the woods next to the charcoal grids. There's an evidence of that, because obviously they've made hooks. Yeah, little platforms are sometimes next to them. I did record a few platforms around, not that many, to be honest. You would clearly say, yes, with confidence. That's where they had a hurt. I'm not going to make much impact on
01:08:47
Speaker
But I certainly with the surveys recorded, you know, platforms around. So if there is one, I should have picked it up and I can't say that's definitely what it is.
01:09:08
Speaker
So talking about the tea books, was it a kind of specialised thing that somebody would have gone around in different places and made charcoal for people? Or was it kind of part of a sort of overall job that you did, a farming job?
01:09:23
Speaker
Yeah, it certainly appears to have started as like a specialist job, itinerant work, charcoal burners going round. But as time progressed, it was very much like an all-round agricultural labourer, particularly picking up records in the Colder Valley, where the local labourer is coming in and producing it at this particular time.
01:09:52
Speaker
I mean, some of the examples you had were ones a bit under slopes because they used to want to notice. I was curious as to are there any tells of...
01:09:59
Speaker
the charcoal pit that was built onto Flatland, like, for example, do different things grow there? Is there any way? You can look, yeah, I've kind of looked at charcoal platforms and the sort of stuff that grows on them. And as I mentioned with the management recommendations, I kind of list the species that are sort of growing on archaeological features. But it's like Hearstwood, for example, I got to one, there's only two charcoal platforms there. One of them was covered in ivy and the other one was just covered in blue boughs.
01:10:29
Speaker
And it was like, well, you know, I'm done there trying to build a story. I forgot the species that are on these platforms. And yeah, it sort of varies. It's not quite straightforward. So it's all soil sciences, I guess, and whatever that is. But there has been Bradford University in their archaeology department. They have spent a bit of time
01:10:57
Speaker
using geophysics in essence to identify charcoal production sites in in woodland so they would pick them up in areas where it's flatter particularly if they're using like a magnetometer or so because they'll pick up the burn areas so you could do it that way within your flat area of woodland if you really wanted to do it.
01:11:19
Speaker
When you did your experimental bird, so you said it went for 48 hours, so were you there overnight? Yeah, the whole time I've had a tent, didn't need a campfire. We're all right on that. Cider actually, cider and locally delivered pizza.
01:11:45
Speaker
But yeah, we had to be there the whole time and as you say, we did it in shifts. How much charcoal did you get out? Oh, a lot. How much wood did you put in? What sort of material did you get?
01:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, just under half, I guess. It kept us going with barbecues. Yeah, we all went back with massive sacks full of charcoal. On the on from that, are you able to do any sorts of rough calculations to try and work out whether all those pits or paths are being used at once, whether on different rotations they're opening up different pits? Because interestingly, I have that phasing.
01:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I don't know how I'd be able to do it. No, not with like mass excavation. Yeah, I would imagine I've always kind of thought that they'd have multiple burns going on at the same time and they would move around.
01:12:51
Speaker
because you could do that. It was quite leisurely for us, for example, in that 48 hours just to sit there and go, oh, there's a hole in it again and patch it up, you know, every four hours or whatever it was. So... Yeah, and I guess for half, it's not quite so much work to create the place that you need. With my cola, it just constantly bamboozles me that they have 100 pits. I love them just bringing it to a few.
01:13:23
Speaker
Is there a seasonality to the work at all, like for charcoal burning? Yeah, I think it's lower earlier in the year is the preferred time to do it. In spring, oddly. Okay.
Evolution of Charcoal Production Methods
01:13:37
Speaker
Spring and early summer, at least that's... Yeah. That's why I understand it anyway.
01:13:47
Speaker
Can I ask about... Yes, you started off talking about them as pits. They do the full... Why would they have stopped doing that? Because that seems quite good to me to go on that. Yeah, don't know. Don't know. Techniques change, I suppose. Perhaps they could produce more charcoal because you've got increase of industrialisation of new as you're going through medieval times.
01:14:14
Speaker
Have you found any of the pits? No, I've not. No. I've got a couple of reports I need to read about some potential Romano-British pits around Leeds. Yeah. No, no. I'm sorry. OK, on that, can we just say once again thank you to Chris?
01:14:45
Speaker
If
Podcast Wrap-up and Future Availability
01:14:46
Speaker
you realize Chris has been wearing a microphone, so this thing will be made into a podcast, if I can get my finger out and remember how to use the software, which should be up on the Archaeology Podcast Network in the next couple of weeks. And we will be back here in a month's time, hopefully with Is There Another Doctor in the House, which should be a zoo archaeology special. Excellent. Let's please take drinks.
01:15:14
Speaker
Enjoy the food and thank you for attending. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Archaeology N.A.L. For more information about our podcast and the guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archaeology Podcast Network.
01:15:40
Speaker
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. See you next time.
01:15:59
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo 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.