The history of the ‘Hill of Goats’: Revisiting Brian Hope-Taylor’s famous Yeavering excavations

More than 70 years ago, Brian Hope-Taylor led excavations at Yeavering in Northu mberland – investigations that have gone down in archaeological history, both for his skill in recording and analysing the scant remains of the royal palace of Edwin of Northumbria, and for illuminating a previously unlit period in early medieval history. Roger Miket’s new book Ad Gefrin traces the story of Hope-Taylor’s life and work, and recounts the latest thinking on the sites that he excavated. Chris Catling reports.

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 432

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When Brian Hope-Taylor died on 12 January 2001, Diana Murray – one of his former students and, at the time, Deputy Curator at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, a predecessor of Historic Environment Scotland (HES) – mounted an operation to salvage the archives stored at his home in Cambridge. Diana was later to report that, by the time she arrived at the property, a house-clearance firm had already disturbed the contents, which were destined to be consigned to a waiting skip. Worse, more than half of the recovered material had been stored in a very damp garage where it had suffered from water damage and mould.

Even so, Diana was able to rescue more than 156 boxes of artefacts and organic samples, as well as 31,027 drawings, photographs, notebooks, and letters. Half of this material relates to Hope-Taylor’s personal life, and half is concerned with the 25 excavations that he led, including his celebrated work at Yeavering, as well as at Lindisfarne, Doon Hill (Dunbar), Bamburgh Castle, York Minster, the Devil’s Dyke in Cambridgeshire, and the early medieval palace site at Old Windsor in Berkshire.

Yeavering from the north looking south.The lighter triangular field in the lower centre of the picture is the site of the early medieval royal palace. Image: The Gefrin Trust

English Heritage showed little interest in acquiring the archive (even though its predecessor, the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, had commissioned some of the excavations) so Diana, by now Secretary of the Royal Commission, took it to Edinburgh, where the paper archives and photographs were stabilised, conserved, and catalogued. They now form part of the Brian Hope-Taylor Archive, curated by HES, and can be consulted via the online catalogue: trove.scot.

The cinerary urn in Brian Hope-Taylor’s hands came from a Bronze Age cemetery at Yeavering, found in the 19th century. Image: Historic Environment Scotland, SC 1565218

By remarkable coincidence, that same year, archaeologists excavating at Bamburgh had just discovered additional finds and archives of Hope-Taylor’s in a long-unopened storeroom at Bamburgh Castle. A newspaper dating from 1974 recorded the last time the room had been entered, which came at the end of his excavation of the promontory fort (see Antiquity’s open-access article ‘Excavating an archaeologist: Brian Hope-Taylor at Bamburgh’ by Graeme Young: https://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/youngg318).

Rescued artefacts and samples from Ad Gefrin laid out for evaluation in the Birley Room at Durham University in 2008. Image: Roger Miket

Attempts have since been made to track down further objects, environmental samples, and paper archives linked to Hope-Taylor’s work, and though much has been lost (including charcoal fragments, pottery, bone, and reconstruction models of Yeavering), some material has been traced to various museums and repositories in Scotland and England, including a fat National Archives file (TNA, 14/2186) containing Ministry correspondence relating to the Yeavering excavations (described by Roger Miket as full of ‘civil service drudgery interspersed with moments of enlivening insight’).

Roger is the main author of a new book (see ‘Further reading’ below) that draws on these surviving archives – and on the memories of those who worked with Hope-Taylor or were taught by him – to reconstruct the story of a remarkable archaeologist whose discovery of the summer palace of King Edwin of Northumbria (AD 586-633) at Yeavering has informed archaeological thinking about the early medieval period for more than half a century. When the excavation report – Yeavering: an Anglo-British centre of early Northumbria – was published in 1977, it was hailed as ‘one of the most brilliant and satisfactory pieces of research ever to be made in such a field… vibrant and inspiring… a masterly exemplar of interpretation’, in which ‘Brian’s skill as an illustrator and teller of tales leaps from the pages’.