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Having carefully protected the exposed archaeological remains, we began to close up the site at East Field Road for the Christmas break at the end of 2016. We struggled through the mud of the marshland farmer’s field where the water had risen and fallen over the last few weeks. There, a former wetland hollow had silted up gradually from at least the Iron Age until finally being levelled, perhaps around the time of the demolition of the former RAF base at North Killingholme. We had been fighting the water with pumps and machines, but, although the landscape next to the Immingham oil refinery looked like it had been tamed, mere humans could do nothing to erase the seasonal swell of groundwater.
As for why Wessex Archaeology were contending with such challenging excavation conditions, a valuable opportunity to investigate this landscape had been provided by the installation of 40km of electricity cables by Ørsted, connecting the Hornsea Project One offshore windfarm to the National Grid. While the windfarm itself lay 120km off the Yorkshire coast, its onshore cables were located entirely within the Lincolnshire marshes, making landfall at Horseshoe Point and passing through the lowest-lying coastal areas of Outmarsh in North Cotes and Tetney parishes, before crossing a series of parishes in the Middle Marsh inland of Grimsby and Immingham.
From this relatively narrow slice through the landscape we uncovered a diverse range of sites, including six late Iron Age and Romano-British settlements, evidence of Anglo-Saxon occupation, two medieval moated sites, and extensive evidence of medieval salt-working. In each of these periods we can see how people survived in the challenging environment of the marsh – and that, until recently, the strategies they used changed only gradually, with a general continuity of land-use, agricultural practice, and economy. However, there were times when even these trusted methods were useless in the face of landscape changes, with parallels to the challenges of climate change that we face today.
Settlement: living in watery isolation
Settlements with Iron Age origins were encountered at six sites – Chase Hill Road, East Field Road, Westfield Farm, Keelby Road, Station Road, and Humberston Road – and took quite varied forms, including an enclosed farmstead, a ladder settlement, and four more irregular settlements. All six settlements persisted into the Romano-British period, with little change around the time of the Roman conquest. We can see a continuity of agricultural processes and traditions across these watershed years, as well as boundaries persisting for long periods. Pottery assemblages from across the project also hint at a smooth transition. Perhaps the relative isolation of these sites made them more resistant to cultural change.
Within these sites, direct evidence for buildings was scarce – limited mostly to a few roundhouses – but this is not entirely surprising as earth-fast fixings like post-holes can rot quickly in wet conditions and may have been generally avoided. Instead, the most striking aspect of the settlements was the sheer density of drainage and enclosure features that we identified. Ditch-digging would have been a burdensome task within this heavy clay landscape – something that we appreciated only too well during our excavations – and yet these features were intensively maintained and modified for centuries, emphasising their importance to the communities who curated them. They were probably dug to meet the immediate needs of protecting homes, agriculture, and stores, as small-scale attempts to impose planned systems of enclosure did not last long.
The settlements were all of low status, with little sign of outside contacts or trade. Instead, they appear to have relied on closed economies of subsistence farming and mixed agriculture. From the animal bones recovered during our investigations, we can tell that the communities were raising mainly cattle and sheep, with some pigs and horses, and the age of these animals at death indicates that the sheep and cattle were being managed for wool and milk, and that both cattle and horses were used for traction and eaten at the end of their lives. This latter insight is interesting, as horse flesh is thought to have been rarely eaten in the Iron Age and Romano-British periods – this might hint at lean times for the marsh-dwellers, or it could be a sign that they were cut off from mainstream cultural trends.
Butchery marks shed more light on the communities’ diets: we can see cleavers being used to dismember carcasses, portion joints, and split bones for marrow, while knife cuts on the bones point to skinning and filleting. Marks on some scapulae suggest that shoulder joints from cattle and horses were cured, while cuts to mandibles indicate that tongues were also recovered and consumed. Analysis of residues trapped within pottery sherds also revealed that two-thirds of the vessels had been used to cook meat from ruminant animals, while the remaining third was used for processing dairy; meanwhile, charred plant remains showed that the communities were cultivating arable crops, too, including barley, broad beans, and peas, alongside a staple crop of spelt wheat (emmer wheat was entirely absent). Largely missing from the menu, however, were fish and shellfish, despite the proximity of all the sites to the sea. This was confirmed by isotope analysis of human bone from the sites, together with the relatively low levels of marine shell recovered from feature fills.
Transformation: an evolving landscape
Despite the impressive mass of ditches and drains that we uncovered, sometimes water was too powerful to be controlled by human action. The Iron Age/Romano-British settlement at Humberston Road was located at the limit of salt water. A well had been abandoned there; had the water been too salty? The sea also caused the community’s eventual decline; we can see that the settlement grew until the pottery sequence stopped suddenly around the late 3rd century AD. Thereafter, higher tides deposited what is recorded by the British Geological Survey as ‘tidal flats deposits’ across the Outmarsh, burying parts of the settlement at Humberston Road. Ditches cut into the top of the tidal deposits indicate an abortive attempt at reoccupation, but this came to nothing. The community had been destroyed by rising sea levels – and the environmental changes that caused this were much more modest in scope than those we face today.
The other settlements declined for different reasons and at different times during the Romano-British period. One longer-lived example, however, was at Laceby Beck, which reached its zenith during the Anglo-Saxon period. Excavated settlements of this period are regionally rare. Unlike the other sites, this one had not previously been detected as a cropmark or identified by geophysical survey, although a handful of early medieval metal-detectorist finds had been documented by the Portable Antiquities Scheme. We did not uncover any structural remains, but did find a number of broad, shallow pits filled with midden, probably at the fringe of the occupied area. Artefacts recovered from these features were illuminating, including local and regional pottery; personal items like antler combs, a bone pin, and a single glass bead; and echoes of industrial activity including bone pin-beaters, a ceramic loomweight, and a stone spindlewhorl. This last object was made of Lias limestone from south-west England, suggesting it was a traded item – this, plus the greater range of economic activities taking place at Laceby Beck (textile production as well as farming) might hint at a higher-status settlement than the Iron Age and Romano-British ones that we uncovered.
Moats: an attempt to control water
Another site with an extended afterlife was the Romano-British settlement at Westfield Farm, which (allowing for a possible episode of abandonment until the late Saxon period) probably developed into the adjacent medieval moated site of Blow Field. This was one of two moated sites that we excavated (the other being at Habrough), forming elements of a regularly spaced line of eight known to run along a ridge. While both had been imposed on earlier drainage systems dating from the late Saxon period, the moats themselves conformed to the 13th-/14th-century dates typical of such features.
What were they for? Although moats are most commonly imagined as surrounding manor houses, they could be used to enclose a wide range of structures, including farm buildings, dovecotes, windmills, and gardens. With only pits and a couple of beam slots found in the interiors of our moats, though, and no finds indicating any high-status occupation, their function remains enigmatic. Moats have often been suggested as primarily symbolic, emphasising the wealth and power of their owners, and setting the areas they contained apart from the wider landscape. Nationally, the distribution of moats strongly correlates with heavy soils, and I am not the first to suggest that a primary motivation behind their digging was more prosaic: drainage. As with the earlier settlements in the area, fighting against water may have been a preoccupation of the moat-builders, and a necessary one to set a high-status space apart from the surrounding marsh.
A particularly intriguing element of the Blow Field site was the discovery of human remains in one of the drainage ditches located just outside the moat, adjacent to the parish boundary. This was the partial skeleton of a large, robustly built, and well-nourished man. Around 52% of his bones were present, and at least some of them were still articulated, indicating that the body had been partly decomposed at the time of its burial in this liminal location. It is possible that the man’s remains had been relocated from an original burial spot located nearby, or that they had been disturbed, damaged, and hastily reburied during periodic clearing of the ditch – but why were they there? Radiocarbon dating indicated that the man had died in AD 1170-1310, consistent with the mid-12th- to 13th-century pottery found within the ditch-fill, but burial outside consecrated ground was very rare (indeed, a dreaded fate) during this period. It could be that denying this individual a churchyard burial had been intended as some kind of posthumous punishment – but, tellingly, he had also suffered blunt-weapon trauma to his skull around the time of his death. Perhaps we are instead looking at the clandestine burial of a victim of murder or other violent encounter.
Industry: salt-making in the Outmarsh
Until relatively recently, the Outmarsh was devoid of settlement; instead, it was used mainly for wetland pasture and for salt-making. This is an industry with early origins, though evidence for Iron Age/Romano-British salt-making was very limited during our excavations. We did, however, uncover extensive evidence for medieval sandwashing. During this process, large quantities of sand or other material (termed ‘mould’) would be collected from the high-tide line after a spring tide, when it would be at its saltiest. Fresh water was filtered through the mould, and once the resulting brine was salty enough (tested by floating an egg) it would be evaporated in lead pans to produce salt. This technique was preferred over the simple evaporation of seawater, as less fuel was needed to evaporate the saltier brine, sand was easier to transport than seawater, and the resulting product was higher quality.
Our investigations uncovered many examples of sandwashing apparatus, including the rectangular filtration pits (kinches) that once fed circular clay-lined brine-collection pits (39 of these latter features were found). Eight hearths were also identified, appearing as shallow layers of ash and heat-transformed, discoloured deposits. Evident, too, was how markedly the landscape of the Outmarsh had changed between the swamping of the Humberston Road Romano-British settlement by rising tides and the heyday of salt-making in this area. Around the 13th century, a chain of offshore islands had been destroyed by the sea, and the resulting material deposited in the Outmarsh. This was an important change, but a byproduct of the salt industry would have an even larger impact on the Outmarsh. Previous studies have estimated that 23 million m3 of mould was transported inland for salt production. Once used for filtration, this material was dumped in saltern mounds (we identified ten of these), and the accumulation of these heaps forced salt-making operations to move seawards. Ultimately, the mounds were ploughed out, transforming the Outmarsh into an area suitable for sustained agriculture and settlement, and revolutionising its use.
In 1727, Daniel Defoe described the region in this way: ‘one part is all fen or marsh grounds… employed in husbandry, in breeding and feeding innumerable droves and flocks of [red] cattle and sheep’. The agriculture of the Middle Marsh was largely unchanged since antiquity. The Outmarsh, however, had been repeatedly transformed. Its suitability for farming was a recent development at the time Defoe was writing, with the once-important salt industry all but forgotten. This key aspect of the landscape’s past has now come sharply back into focus, marking an important addition to our understanding of such practices in the region.
Above all, our investigations have opened a wide-ranging transect through the archaeology of north Lincolnshire, encompassing both better-studied areas and inland parishes that have received less archaeological attention. Discoveries span the Neolithic to the present day, though the most significant finds are those described in this article: the Iron Age and Romano-British settlements, Anglo-Saxon Laceby Beck, and the medieval moated sites and salt-making remains.
Real human experiences have been illuminated by this work: from at least the late Iron Age, people had led hard lives here in isolated communities, producing food and material items to meet short-term needs and concerning themselves little with the outside world. Evidence of trade and status were limited in these closed economies, with even the moated sites, assumed to be seats of power, producing assemblages almost completely devoid of indicators of status. This is perhaps surprising so close to the shipping route of the Humber estuary, but perhaps the marsh itself may have been a barrier to accessing the open sea, shaping the fortunes of these isolated communities just as the shifting environment brought some of them to a close.
Acknowledgements: Wessex Archaeology is grateful to Ørsted for commissioning the work, to consultants Royal HaskoningDHV, and to the Heritage Steering Group of local planning archaeologists for their work on the project.
Further information: Hornsea Project One has produced large amounts of data and research, allowing us to interpret the findings from this area. The full story is available for open access download or as a printed book from the Wessex Archaeology website: http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/our-work/full-publications-list.
All images: Ian Atkins, unless otherwise stated
