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Structural remains believed to represent the largest Viking Age hall yet found in Britain have been uncovered at High Tarns farm in Silloth, Cumbria.
The site lies close to Holme Cultram Abbey, a Cistercian monastery founded in 1150, and cropmarks had already alerted Grampus Heritage to the presence of another large building nearby. Its outline did not look Cistercian in layout, but the team of archaeologists hoped that excavation might reveal traces of earlier monastic activity on the site, which is known to have been established before the 13th century.
Geophysical survey in 2023 identified magnetic anomalies in the landscape to the south, and last summer excavations were able to begin, thanks to funding from Defra through Solway Coast National Landscape’s Farming in Protected Landscapes programme.
An initial trench was opened across the centre of the cropmarks, revealing ten large post-holes that picked out the outline of a large, triple-aisled building with ten bays. It was not the monastic farm structure that the archaeologists had been imagining, but an imposing timber hall measuring around 50m in length and 15m in width.
Samples were taken from one of the internal post-holes which would have supported a load-bearing timber in the central aisle, and radiocarbon dating returned a date of AD 990-1040, placing the hall firmly within Britain’s Viking Age.
The significance of the building’s discovery is hard to overstate, said Mark Graham, Project Manager at Grampus Heritage: ‘We have very little archaeological evidence of how people lived in the area before the coming of the monastery. This spans an incredibly important but poorly understood period in our history.’
The hall is believed to have formed part of a manor farm which, based on the building’s scale, may have been a seat of significant wealth and power in the late Viking Age, shedding invaluable light on social structures before the Norman Conquest (this area did not come under Norman control until 1092).
A second trench, targeting a magnetic anomaly that had been identified to the south of the hall, proved fruitful too. There, the archaeologists uncovered a well-preserved corn dryer, including its access steps, stone-lined walls, the remains of an arch over the stoke-hole, and a sub-circular drying chamber made of clay and cobbles (above). A sample from the base of the chamber returned a date of 1040-1180, probably reflecting a later development of the manor farm complex.
Grampus Heritage hope that further research on the site will help to establish whether life at the manor farm continued until the arrival of the Cistercian monks and the founding of Holme Cultram in the mid-12th century. Although further excavations will be at the discretion of the landowner, the Grampus team – who were aided by more than 50 enthusiastic volunteers throughout the geophysical survey and excavation of the site – hope to be able to uncover the northern and southern parts of the hall in the future, as well as investigating further anomalies that were highlighted in the geophysical survey. ‘We have much more work to do, both in assessing the significance of the site from our first excavation and through further investigation,’ Mark said.
Text: Rebecca Preedy / Photo: Grampus Heritage
