Posts from the “Featured” Category
11/03/2010 1 Comment

Ancient sea gods live on in Dorset lighthouses. Maybe

The Chantry, South Street, Bridport.

I’VE WRITTEN before on this site about how Bridport’s oldest building – The Chantry in South Street – almost certainly began life as a seamark or primitive lighthouse.

Then, when it was converted to a priest’s house, one of the priest’s duties was to say regular masses to St Catherine.

That’s significant because, as the Dorset coastal historian Gordon Le Pard has noted, “St Katherine is the dedication of both the chapel at Abbotsbury, built as a sea mark, as well as the only certain medieval lighthouse on St Catherine’s Down on the Isle of Wight.”

St Catherine's Chapel, Abbotsbury. Photograph by Graham Horn, reused under Creative Commons licence.

But, is there even more to this connection?

Right back in Edwardian times, before the First World War, an unusual young man called Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford used to visit a Bohemian couple called Harold and Charlotte Peake, who lived in Boxford near Newbury.

The Peakes, says Kitty Hauser, in Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (Granta, 2008), were “comfortably off… spurned organized religion, worse sandals and went in for vegeterianism, Japanese art, the resuscitation of folk-rituals and the re-organization of mass society.”

And they also ran a sort of pagan cult based around St Catherine, as Hauser explains.

“Harold Peake had the idea that churches dedicated to Catherine had replaced sites where an earlier deity called Llud (known to the Romans as Nodens) was worshipped.

“Peake came to this conclusion because Llud – the Celtic god of the Severn estuary, associated with healing – shared St Catherine’s symbol of a wheel; the idea was reinforced by the high incidence of chapels dedicated to St Catherine that overlook a harbour or have a good view of the sea, since Llud had many of the characteristics of the sea god Poseidon.

“Somehow the Peakes and their visitors honoured this pagan connection by performing ceremonies in which they  walked round in circles lighting fires, loking out for ‘Kataric portents’, and signing off their letters with a wheel symbol, ‘yours in Kata’, and so on.”

St Catherine's Chapel, Abbotsbury. Photograph by Jim Champion, reused under Creative Commons licence.

Now, St Catherine’s Chapel at Abbotsbury clearly has a very good view of the sea indeed, and the Chantry used to be right by the river at the edge of Bridport.

So are these sites connected in some way with old Celtic and Roman gods? Or is it all just a coincidence?

Crawford believed that nothing ever quite disappears. There are always clues, if only we have the tools and the skills to interpret them. In the case of Bridport and Abbotsbury, is it the name of St Catherine that carries the trace of ancient ways of life across the centuries?

A bit more about Crawford and Hauser’s book. Crawford was the Ordnance Survey’s first Archaeology Officer, back in 1920. He got the job after serving in the Great War as an Intelligence Officer, where he developed a fantastic eye for landscape features, and what they could mean. He was brilliant at fieldwork, and as Hauser writes, his work in Dorset (and other counties) “put British prehistoric archaeology quite literally on the map.” As founder and editor of the journal Antiquity he also published the work of Mortimer Wheeler, who excavated Maiden Castle during the 1930s. Hauser writes superbly about the excitements of field archaeology and photography, and her book is highly recommended.

One final point: if you want to spot things in a landscape anywhere in Britain, Crawford reckoned that dry afternoons in March were best.

Just what we’re getting at the moment…
11/01/2010 1 Comment

Was Bridport’s oldest building really a lighthouse?

 

Does it look like a lighthouse to you? The Chantry, on South Street, behind the lit streetlamp and the red three-wheeler.

THE oldest and perhaps the oddest place you can stay in Bridport is the Chantry, down South Street. It’s let out by the Vivat Trust who mention in passing that it may once have been a primitive lighthouse…

This suggestion is oft-repeated but no one – until recently – ever seems to have stopped and thought: Hang on a minute, how on earth would that work? It doesn’t look like a lighthouse – it’s more than a mile from the sea – where would the light have gone – who would have seen it – and how would they have used it?

Such questions have now been answered in a beautifully simple way by the Chickerell-based Dorset coastal historian, Gordon Le Pard.

First, a quick bit of background. The Chantry dates from about 1300. In those days Bridport’s harbour was close to the medieval town, up the River Brit. Firelight from the top of the Chantry could have acted as a guide.

Bright fire could have burned in an iron fire basket on top of a pole fixed to the south side of the Chantry. On the south side there is an odd-shaped corbel, with “a small round socket in the center of its upper face… aligned beneath a larger circular cut-out in the projecting offset course at second floor level.” This is where a pole would fit. (Archaeologist KA Rodwell surveyed these features in detail; click here to read more from her).      

Anyway, when a new Bridport Harbour was created down at the mouth of the River Brit (where West Bay now is), it seems the Chantry still served as a lighthouse.

So how did it work? This is the clever bit.

Gordon Le Pard notes that two reefs lie just offshore from West Bay, the Ram to the west and the Pollock to the east. They could be dangerous; in the 17th century, the Ram wrecked an armed merchantman, whose remains still linger on the seabed.

Now look at this diagram, which takes into account the historic positions of the East and West cliffs at West Bay, and how they would block the view from sea towards the Chantry:

As Mr Le Pard says: “If you draw lines between the Chantry and the present East Cliff it marks the edge of the Ram, if between the Chantry and the approximate former location of the West Cliff, it marks the edge of the Pollock.

“So a captain steering for Bridport Harbour only had to keep the Chantry in view to avoid either of the reefs.”

Isn’t that smart?

One other thing. When the Chantry was adapted to serve as a priest’s house, one of the priest’s duties was to say regular masses to St Katherine.

Mr Le Pard comments: “St Katherine is the dedication of both the chapel at Abbotsbury, built as a sea mark, as well as the only certain medieval lighthouse on St Catherine’s Down on the Isle of Wight.”

No one will ever know for sure whether the Chantry was a lighthouse as well as a sea mark, but Mr Le Pard finds the evidence he has amassed “especially pleasing” – and so (I think) should all the rest of us.

You can find out more about Mr Le Pard’s research in the latest volumes (numbers 129 & 130) of the Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, that is the society which runs the excellent Dorset County Museum in Dorchester.
06/11/2009 2 Comments

Radar reveals secrets of Chesil Beach. Is it doomed?

SCIENTISTS have been using ground-penetrating radar to find out more about the history of Chesil Beach.

Tests near Abbotsbury, Langton Herring and Ferrybridge have provided fresh clues about the evolution and internal make-up of one of the greatest features of the Dorset landscape.

Results also hint at what might happen to the beach in future, particularly if global warming causes sea levels to rise.

Experts think it may shrink – and the sea may break through it. 

Chesil Beach runs from West Bay to the Isle of Portland. Its sand and pebbles famously vary in size, getting bigger the closer they are to Portland. Coarse sand at Burton Cliffs, “horse beans” near Abbotsbury, and “hen’s eggs” at Chesil, was how De Luc described the beach’s composition in 1811.

It’s been extensively researched since the late 19th century.

“Probably the most extensive and extraordinary accumulation of shingle in the world” was how one writer described it in 1902; “an heroic piece of natural engineering” another, in 1919.

But – until now – scientists have been limited in their investigations by the very nature of the beach itself.

It’s probably impossible to dig a deep hole into the middle of a mass of sea-churned cobbles without the hole collapsing dangerously inwards…

But radar waves can go where people cannot.

Geophysical techniques have previously been deployed in places like Norfolk, Denmark and America.

And they have now been used in Dorset by Professor Matthew Bennett and Jeremy Pile from the School of Conservation Sciences at Bournemouth University, and Nigel Cassidy, from the School of Physical and Geographical Sciences at Keele University in Staffordshire.

Their findings are reported in “Internal structure of a barrier beach as revealed by ground penetrating radar (GPR): Chesil beach, UK” in the journal Geomorphology, Volume 104 (2009), pages 218–229, published by Elsevier B.V.

The authors suggest a three-phase history.

(Note: their technical language has largely been paraphrased).

Summary of radar observations

Summary of radar observations

Phase One: Chesil Beach began as a low, narrow barrier beach, possibly composed of both sand and gravel, that moved (transgressed) back towards the land because it could not keep up with rising sea levels.

Phase Two: The beach grew rapidly and bulked out, despite sea levels continuing to rise, because of a sudden abundant supply of gravel. “Although an off-shore sediment source cannot be discounted, the most likely source is the encroachment of the transgressing shore against the periglacial slope debris found in abundance along the coastal slopes of West Dorset.” In other words, material eroded from the cliffs of West Dorset was swept by the sea round Lyme Bay towards Portland and deposited – according to its size – on Chesil Beach.

Phase Three: The beach humped up (prograded) towards the sea. “This may have occurred during a more stable sea level regime or perhaps a falling regime, in the presence of continued sediment abundance… According to this model… there are three architectural components to the current beach ridge each formed in a different sea level, and sediment abundance regimes.”

Key point: if there had not been enough sediment drifting along the coast, Chesil Beach would most likely have closed in upon the land, and there might well have been no Fleet Lagoon.

Evolutionary model of Chesil Beach based on ground-penetrating radar results

Evolutionary model of Chesil Beach based on ground-penetrating radar results

Questions for the future

Prof. Bennett and his co-authors use their findings from their radar surveys to emphasise more strongly than perhaps any previous researchers the interplay of sediment abundance and sea level.

So: what will happen to Chesil Beach in future if sea levels do rise because of global warming?

And: will Chesil Beach be sufficiently replenished by material eroded from West Dorset cliffs or has that process been interrupted by developments like the new harbour at West Bay?

I asked Prof. Bennett for his thoughts (in journalistic terms rather than full-blown scientific ones) and he replied:

“Difficult to say, but I would say that without continued recharge of sediment it will decline in size, and breach; the long shore supply of sediment is unlikely to keep pace with the rate of sea level rise.

“This might be a rather pessimistic scenario and only time will tell.

“As always in these debates, the key question is the rate of sea level rise and the speed at which a system can adjust.

“I would say, however, that change is natural and you can’t set a landscape in stone, and if ultimately the beach does breach then it will simply be another chapter in its life history – you can’t halt change or ageing!”