Arthur Raistrick and the Pig Yard Club excavation of Sewell Cave 1933-34

The Pig Yard Club (PYC, Fig. 1) comprised a group of amateur archaeologists which met in Upper Settle. When a member, a Mr Sewell, discovered bones and a Romano-British brooch in a small cave at the bottom of a limestone scar to the north-west of Settle in 1932, the PYC decided to excavate the cave. Arthur Raistrick, the 20th century’s foremost archaeologist and landscape historian of the Yorkshire Dales, was well known in Settle, making him an obvious person for the group to consult.

It is fortunate for our understanding of the Sewell Cave excavation that Raistrick had a heavy teaching workload at Armstrong College in Newcastle, making it difficult for him to visit Settle except during holidays. Communications with the group were mainly by letter between Raistrick in Durham and Settle resident Tot Lord, the leader of the PYC, leaving a permanent record of the excavation. Raistrick addressed Lord as ‘Dear Tot Lord,’ and the latter addressed Raistrick as ‘Dear Doctor,’ the letters showing cordial and mutually beneficial relationship between the two men throughout the period of the excavation.

A letter from Raistrick to Lord on 18th September 1933 advised the PYC that the position of all the finds should be meticulously recorded. A datum should be chiselled into the cave wall so that strings and plumb lines could be used to define the position of any object in three dimensions. He added that ... ‘if you dig carefully and keep accurate records of everything, the digging will be of value, otherwise it might be entirely useless scientifically.’ Raistrick’s records of the Sewell Cave excavation in his presentation to the Durham Philosophical Society on 18th November 1935 [1] recorded the use of a slightly more sophisticated measurement system, which did not require constant reference to a single datum point. A line of constant height was chiselled both along the face of the scar and inside the cave.

The excavation involved, over a period of two years, six PYC members moving thousands of tons of rock debris, with some blocks weighing several tons and taking several days to move (Fig. 2). What was revealed once the debris had been removed was a shelter rather than a cave, 40 feet wide and 10 feet high at its entrance, and penetrating 13 feet into the scar face. Despite the attention of badgers and rabbits over the centuries, the meticulous excavation methods insisted on by Raistrick resulted in clear stratification being identifiable. At the base there was a layer of glacial clay which had entered the cave at the end of the Ice Age, and this was overlain by clay soils which included abundant bone material.

Included in the mix of bones were those of lynx and humans, Raistrick sending these to Sir Arthur Keith for analysis. Sir Arthur, perhaps best known for his later involvement in the Piltdown man scandal, expressed the view that the assemblage represented six or more humans, and that they had been buried in pre-historic times. His analysis of their age was the result of being able to reassemble 12 fragments of a skull. The reassembly suggested a man of 40+ years with abnormally large jowls and strong mastication muscles (author’s note: does the evidence of strong mastication muscles suggest the possibility of dating these human remains more accurately?).

Raistrick’s sketches of items manufactured from bone are illustrated in Figure 3, and include toggles (items 2 and 3), a comb (item 4), needles (items 9 and 10) and spoons with a hole (items 5, 7 and 8), the function of the hole being obscure to Raistrick. All of the finds Raistrick suggested were similar to those from other Craven caves, with the exception of item 1 in Figure 3. This was a square bone rod, four inches long and 5/8inch wide, incised with flowing scroll patterns on each flat side and cylindrical shanks at each end which suggested a miniature axle. Raistrick admitted being baffled by this item.

Stone and pottery fragments were from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Romano-British and Medieval periods (C14 and C15), and were sent for analysis to Mary Kitson Clark. Clark, who was the Secretary of the Roman Antiquities Committee for Yorkshire, would later become curator of York Museum, and at the time of the excavation was writing her most important work A Gazetteer of Roman remains in East Yorkshire [2]. In Clark’s view the Romano-British pottery from Sewell’s cave was all of the 1st or 2nd centuries. Importantly, a find at Wroxeter similar to a piece of Samian ware from Sewell’s cave depicting a man (item 7 in Figure 4) could be dated according to Clark to no later than the middle of the 2nd century AD. The metal work, which was all from the Romano-British period, included swords, knives, javelin tips, pieces of lead and iron, and copper alloy pieces thought by Raistrick to be Roman armour. The most important of the metal finds was a gladius, a type of sword carried by the legionary foot soldiers which went out of use during the 2nd century AD. (Figs. 5.6).

When remains of pre-Ice Age animals had been found in Victoria Cave in 1838, just to the north of Settle, the great-and-good of the archaeology world had taken charge of the excavation. Raistrick advised the PYC by letter in 1935 that he had heard rumours that the newly formed British Speleological Society was intent on stopping the work of the PYC but he, Raistrick, would publish the PYC’s work both at the University and the British Association. He had ‘sent the results to several very competent people and all agreed on the high value to place on them.’ The PYC should ignore the rumours.

A letter to Lord from Raistrick on 5th November 1935 advised that he would give a talk to the Durham Philosophical Society on the Sewell Cave excavation on 18th November. The society would then publish the proceedings as a pamphlet and copies would be sent to the PYC. Raistrick clearly kept in touch with the PYC after giving his paper to the Durham Philosophical Society and a letter of June 1936 advised that on a recent visit to Ireland he had been to the museums at Dublin, Cork and Galway. The Sewell Cave bone axle (item 1 in Figure 3) still baffled him, and remained ‘entirely unique’. In his presentation to the Durham Philosophical Society Raistrick concluded that the 2nd century artefacts in Sewell Cave comprised an unusual combination of makeshift everyday objects and rich bronze brooches. This suggested that the cave had been used as a refuge during a 2nd century AD rising against the Romans, a suggestion reinforced by the finding of the Roman sword dateable to the 2nd century and copper alloy strips, which Raistrick interpreted as Roman armour (Figs. 5 and 6). Other Craven cave excavations had suggested uprisings in the 4th century AD, but the Sewell Cave excavation would appear to have been the first to suggest to Raistrick that there had also been an uprising in the 2nd century AD. It is interesting to see that when he published The Pennine Dales in 1968 [3] Raistrick was much less tentative about a second century AD uprising ... ‘There had been a widespread uprising around AD 155 all over the north down to Derbyshire. Many of the forts were destroyed, and one of the tasks of the next few years was the rebuilding of the more important ones at Ilkley, Bainbridge, Melandra and Brough (in Derbyshire)’. The Sewell cave excavation of 1934-35 should therefore be regarded as much more important than the mere finding of a few Romano-British trinkets. Although unrest in the Pennines in the second century is no longer put forward as an explanation for cave use at this time, it shows how Raistrick attempted to weave the results of the Sewell’s Cave excavations into a broader regional historical narrative. The significance of this today is not so much the validity or otherwise of the hypothesis, but how this illustrates Raistrick’s belief that ordinary working people can go out and discover for themselves the history of their forebears. Today this ethos underpins community archaeology, and Heritage Lottery projects. We should recognise Raistrick as a pioneer in this movement, his real significance being as an educator rather than an archaeologist.

Arthur Raistrick (1896-1991): Dalesman of the Millennium

Arthur Raistrick was born into a working-class family in Saltaire, near Bradford, perhaps explaining his work ethic of getting up at 5am and working until 8pm [4]. His long working day must have contributed to his ability to make important original contributions in so many different fields. His formal education was at Bradford Grammar School and Leeds University, where he gained an MSc in civil engineering and a PhD in geology. Being a conscientious objector during the First World War led to imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs and Durham gaol, and influenced his decision to become a Quaker. He later researched and published the early history of the Quaker Movement [5]. As Reader in Applied Geology at Armstrong College in Newcastle, part of Durham University, he taught college students during the week and mining engineers at the week end, and his academic writings, which started in 1925, are from this period.

Letters to Tot Lord reveal him bringing groups of students to Settle at Easter for week-long field trips in the 1930s, and staying at the Golden Lion on Duke Street. Having a mainline railway station made Settle easily accessible by train, and it is likely that the field trips will have been to Malham, a relatively easy walk from Settle. His interests at Malham [6] included the Pre-Dissolution holdings of Fountains Abbey and the Malham Moor calamine workings. A letter of 1934 advised Tot Lord that he was hoping to buy a cottage in the Dales, and a number of letters in 1935 were headed Beckside, showing that his purchase had been in Linton near Grassington. His converted barn in Linton would be his home for over half a century.

Durham, he said, ‘had to suspend me without pay’ during the Second World War, when he was again a conscientious objector. Refusing to earn sufficient money to pay income tax meant that he would not be helping to fund the war effort. He continued to research and publish during the war years however, and also spent time improving Beckside for himself and his wife, Elizabeth, who he had married in 1929. After the war he never again held a full-time job, but was an enormously influential lecturer for the WEA, and extra-mural tutor for the universities of Leeds, Durham and Newcastle.

Of the roughly 330 books and articles he published some were scholarly treatises but others were short articles in popular magazines such as the Dalesman, which brought his work to a much wider audience. The breadth of his knowledge and interests in the Yorkshire Dales is revealed in his The Pennine Dales, published in 1968 [3], topics ranging from the geology and early formation of the Pennines to its literature and music. Those who only knew him in his later decades, whether through his writings, classes or field trips, might have viewed him simply as a Yorkshire man, particularly after the Yorkshire Dales Society voted him Dalesman of the Millennium. Many will have been unaware that possibly his most important work was outside Yorkshire. His research into the industrial archaeology of Coalbrookdale, published in 1953 [7] is acknowledged as the stimulus which led to the Coalbrookdale furnace site being excavated and, in 1987, nominated as a World Heritage site.

Amongst many other public roles, he was a founding member of the Holiday Fellowship, Vice-President of the YHA and member of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, and his obituaries in 1991 reveal other wide-ranging interests — including the organ music of Bach and his study of ancient Chinese civilisation. He was, his obituaries said, the most approachable of men, although the late Bill Mitchell, editor of the Dalesman, recorded that this approachability did not always apply to editors. Woe betide an editor brave enough to suggest that even a comma might be changed in a script submitted by Arthur. It was always, he said, with some trepidation that he visited Arthur at Beckside.

Acknowledgement

References

1. Raistrick, Arthur, 1935. Excavations at Sewell Cave, Settle. Proceedings of the University of Durham Philosophical Society Vol IX pp191-204. (A copy of this paper may be found in the Durham University Library)
2. Kitson Clark, M., 1935. A Gazeteer of Roman Remains of East Yorkshire. YAS
3. Raistrick, Arthur, 1968. The Pennine Dales: Eyre and Spottiswoode
4. Arthur Raistrick’s biography in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Raistrick
5. Raistrick, Arthur, 1968. Quakers in Science and Industry. Augustus M. Kelley
6. Raistrick, Arthur, 1947. Malham and Malham Moor. Dalesman Publishing Company
7. Raistrick, Arthur, 1953. Dynasty of Ironfounders: The Darbys of Coalbrookdale. Longlands