Old mud and pipes

I took the oldest three into town to go on a tour put on by the County Council archaeology people. The old library had been demolished and the archaeologists allowed in to excavate before the new stuff is put on top. We couldn’t go on the site itself due to the recent rain, but we went up to the edge, and then went into a listed building on the site (that wasn’t demolished) to look at the finds.

The dig itself was a bit boring actually – they’d uncovered a cobbled street and some buildings, but these had all been removed so that they could dig down further. All that was visible was a lot of mud with the occasional hole dug in it. They had been hoping to find the course of one of the local Roman roads but it hadn’t turned up. It’s funny how people (including me) go “Ooh! Roman!” and then are unimpressed by Medieval (unless it’s a big castle), Stone Age (unless it’s Stone Henge) etc.

Anyway, the staff seemed to want to talk to people about what they do (which appeared to involve a lot of mud – archaeology in the UK in winter = nice). It turned out that one of them ran the local Young Archaeologists Club, which we’ll look into for J in a couple of months. J correctly identified some coprolite as “poo” and we all learned that you could tell the age of a tobacco pipe by the size of its bowl – the older it is the smaller it is as tobacco was very expensive when it was first introduced but got cheaper over time and so people could afford to burn more of it. The mud had apparently had some benefits – it had preserved a Victorian leather shoe and a big Medieval wooden bowl used for dying clothes.

I’ll put this here so I don’t forget it or lose it. There’s a nice site for querying local history databases: the Heritage Gateway. Some County Councils appear to have put their stuff onto it, but not all of them so your mileage may vary.