Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt, July 2011

Have been contacting the various landowners on whose land I need to collect a sample. All were happy for me to obtain a sample (even if they were surprised by such an odd request!) and it was wonderful to talk to people who know so much about the landscape.

Installed 8 sediment samplers in the River Skell tributaries from Dallowgill Moor to Fountains Abbey. These now need to be left for 2-3 weeks when hopefully there will be some sizeable rainfall events which will allow a swollen river to carry a large amount of sediment! However whilst I am desperate for rain, my friends at uni are desperate for a hot summer to wear shorts and t-shirts!

Met with Marian Wilby – the Head of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty for Nidderdale - who informed me about the work and research which had been conducted in the River Skell over the years such as the Ripon (Multi-Objective Project).

Just completed a walk of the River Skell catchment from its source on Dallowgill Moor to Fountains and Studley in order to actually experience the area which I am studying.

Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt, June 2011

Received permission from the Environment Agency to conduct my research in the River Skell catchment, meaning that six months of planning finally came to fruition to allow me to actually start collecting data!

Just finished collecting ten samples for preliminary experiments to ensure that there would be satisfactory results from my chosen methods of data collection and analysis. Even from this small number of samples, it is evident that there are distinct differences in the land use around the Skell catchment as well as differences in the soil types.

Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt, May 2011

Have decided to add another method to my research – isotope analysis. Isotopes are different forms of the same chemical element and if samples are tested for Carbon and Nitrogen isotopes this can determine the predominant land type from where the sample was collected. For example one form of carbon is predominantly found in the soil of woodland areas whereas it will be different for agricultural land. This method will complement the magnetic fingerprinting technique as whilst the isotope analysis looks at the organic matter in the sample, the magnetic analysis looks at the mineral matter – thus giving a more holistic approach to the research.

I have also finalised my sampling strategy. In order to incorporate the various land uses and types of geology I need to obtain 44 soil samples from across the River Skell catchment. In terms of sediment, I will collect samples from the water bodies at Fountains and Studley in ‘jam jar-like’ pots. I am also going to collect eight sediment samples from different points along the River Skell with the use of time integrated suspended sediment samplers – a complicated name for metre long modified drainpipes which are placed in the water for two weeks and trap the sediment.

Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt, April 2011

Conducted my first interviews today with Michael Ridsdale (Head of Landscape) and Alexa Morton (Head of Tourist Experience). I felt it was important to speak to the staff to learn about the project from different perspectives in order to learn of the considerations which had to be taken during the project in order to preserve the landscape whilst also maximising tourist experience.

I also conducted a brief walk of the National Trust site. Having visited the place countless times when I was growing up, I know Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal fairly well but looking at it from a geographical perspective was an entirely different experience – you don’t really tend to think about the flow of rainwater down a slope when you are enjoying a walk with your family!

Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt, March 2011

Just submitted my literature review assignment which is a review of the work of sedimentologists and geographers in relation to three elements of my dissertation –magnetic fingerprinting, dredging as an option for addressing sediment issues and the sustainability of management. Learning about past research is vitally important to any project as it is only through completely understanding the past that progress can be made for the future.

Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt, February 2011

Decided on a methodology for my research – magnetic fingerprinting. Sounds complicated (and not particularly exciting!) but is simply a way of discover the origin of the sediment in Studley Lake because just as everyone has a unique fingerprint, each grain of sediment has a unique ‘magnetic print’. The River Skell runs directly through Studley Lake, transporting and deposited sediment in the lake. Thus, soil and sediment samples need to be taken from around areas of the River Skell catchment which have different geology and land use. It should then be evident whether the ‘magnetic print’ of any of the samples matches the ‘magnetic print’ of the sediment in Studley Lake, and therefore explaining the presence of sediment in Studley Lake.

Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt, January 2011

A new year and a new idea! Met with Michael Ridsdale, the Head of Landscape at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal and discussed conducting my dissertation at the site. This location is ideal to study water and sediment processes as the site has experienced centuries of change to the water bodies – from the creation of the Abbey Mill in the 1100s to the Georgian water gardens in the 1700s to the Studley Lake dredging project in 2010. This would also allow me to investigate whether methods such as dredging are sustainable for the environment, water quality and tourism, compared to new innovative approaches.

Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt with Alice Gent

For any of you have trouble sleeping at night, my mum would not hesitate to recommend what she believes is a foolproof antidote to the problem – sedimentation! After all, why on earth would you be even vaguely interested in reading a blog about the work of someone who in January 2012 will have spent a year planning, collecting, analysing and writing about, well, mud?

Actually, sedimentation is when eroded material from rock or other biological matter is being, or has been, deposited by water.

To introduce myself, I am a third year undergraduate Geography student at Lancaster University and for my dissertation I am studying the process and management of sedimentation at the World Heritage site of ‘Studley Royal Park including the ruins of Fountains Abbey’. This process is a critical threat for the site of Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal whose World Heritage status is based upon its spectacular Georgian water bodies which are part of the River Skell. I am sure many of you will have followed the progress of the Studley Lake project whereby 60,000 tonnes of sediment were removed from the lake, demonstrating that only through careful management can Studley Lake be conserved. It was this project that sparked two questions in my mind which have become the aims of my research:

1.) Is there an area of the River Skell catchment which contributes most to the sediment in Studley Lake?
2.) Is the effect of sediment removal projects sustainable?

This blog is a month-by-month summary of my research in which I hope to contribute to the future conservation of Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. So, whilst admittedly my mum is right about the soporific effects of sedimentation itself (the woman is always right!), the contribution of such research to environmental management is vitally important as it is only through such management that we can begin to ameliorate the destruction we have caused across the landscape.

“Humans have changed the way the world works.
Now they have to change the way they think about it, too”
(The Economist, May 2011)

Remember Quebec! Treasured Islands! Episode 2, Day 4

I wonder if it’s significant that it was the remains of a hurricane coming from Canada that rather deflated the events planned for today….

It was on 12 September 1759, that the summer-long siege of Quebec, the leading city of the French settlements in North America, was brought to a successful conclusion by General James Woolf. It’s that event that may well have given the Quebec garden its name, as English landowners became more jingoistic in response to colonial rumblings in North America in the later 1760s, and started erecting monuments to the battle. There seems to have been a small brass gun on the site (removed before 1801) thought to have been fired on the anniversary of the battle, and it’s been suggested (rather unconvincingly) that the islands and the water around them depicted Quebec with its rivers on either side.

Well, we couldn’t let an opportunity to revive a 200 year old custom pass, now could we? We couldn’t manage to find anyone with a cannon to spare, unfortunately, but a loud “Huzzah” in memory of the brave Redcoats, as the culmination of a special guided tour exploring the symbolism of the gardens, wouldn’t be a bad substitute.

Unfortunately, the remains of hurricane Katia had other ideas. With very strong winds buffeted the estate, tearing limbs off the trees, the estate had no option but to close the gates at 1pm, for safety reasons. From the forecast, it looks like Katia may also stop play tomorrow.

However, it was possible to catch up with Justin and Robert on site. They’d spent Sunday (when we had even more visitors than we’d had on Saturday) starting to carefully clean down the sections – vertical faces – of the machine excavated trenches. This is crucial for revealing the details of the archaeological record. Although one can see the larger scale changes in the soil profile as mechanical excavation progresses, the detail only emerges when the soil surfaces are carefully cleaned by hand with a shovel or trowel. This is especially true along the long edges of the trenches, where the digger’s bucket blade smears the layers, one into another.

The north-eastern 20 metre trench has cleaned up particularly well (as shown in the photo above). We’re now confident that we have found both the shore of the pond and the island, pretty much as they are shown on the 1891 25” survey. The substrates on the two sides are rather different – the island’s has lots of pebbles in it, the shore none. This might suggest that a large open pond basin was opened first and then the island was constructed within it: however, that would be a lot of extra work to go to, rather than just leaving the island unexcavated in the first place. We know from many previous excavations across the estate that the subsoil (which is made up of the “sludge” that was left behind by the melting ice sheet at the end of the last glaciation) varies hugely from place to place – so the variation here could be completely natural. However, we’ll need to dig further to establish exactly what’s going on, in order to understand the development of the site fully. Meanwhile the cleaning has revealed what seems to be remnants of the topsoil on the island, confirming the depth at which we should be looking for the shorelines in the other trenches. That will help to guide the work to be done when the mechanical digger is back on site – probably on Wednesday.

With that many historic maps, why dig holes? Treasured Islands! Episode 2, Day 3

It’s Sunday, and I’ve got the day off, leaving Justin and Robert to clean up the trenches we’ve got opened so far.

So that’s an opportunity to take a step back and talk about the results of the survey work done in July. The measured survey didn’t turn up any vast surprises, but it did create a completely accurate base map which we can use in all of our future works. Everyone thinks of Ordnance Survey maps as gospel truth, but in reality their precision varies considerably. The most accurate surveys are those of the first edition 6 inches to the mile survey, and the first edition 25 inch maps – which in Studley’s case were published in 1854 (surveyed 1848-52) and 1891 respectively. Both were completed after the site had been recorded by surveyors, whereas other editions drew on earlier sources for at least parts of their depictions. Even modern digital OS data is less precise, in some regards, than the first edition maps.

What the July survey gave us that we didn’t have before, were detailed contours of the site. These weren’t enormously illuminating, but were useful in confirming that the islands and the ponds hadn’t left any obvious surface traces (although the evidence did highlight inconsistencies in the location of the Quebec Monument, that we’re now keen to explore). So we could be sure that there was no other, better, evidence on which to base the location of our excavations than the historic maps (including the estate maps of 1831, 1838, and 1870 as well as the OS editions).

Using fixed points on our new survey, we were able to digitise the different historic map depictions of pond and islands and put them all on the same plan for the first time.

So much for all appearing to show us the same picture! As you’ll see from the image posted with this mailing, when looked at in detail the different depictions hardly correspond at all. A major objective of the excavations will be to try and determine which of the depictions is the most accurate, and another to establish whether there is any clear physical cause for so much variation in the course of just 60 years or so.

The trenches we planned to excavate are marked as red blocks on the illustration. As you’ll see, they cross the majority of the depictions of the edges of the ponds and islands, and so should pick up some sort of traces of whichever is the most accurate. Some of the southern trenches have had to be relocated, as I mentioned yesterday, and the most south-easterly one had encountered an unsuspected concrete track just beneath the surface. We’ll relocate it to hit less disturbed ground, when we’re back with the digger to finish the mechanical excavation on Tuesday.

Its all gone a bit soft around the edges... Treasured Islands! Episode 2, Day 2

I think it was General Eisenhower who is credited with the truism that planning is everything, while the plan itself is nothing. The working archaeologist needs to keep that thought very close to their heart when they get out onto site, as reality often doesn’t match one’s pre-existing expectations. Quebec certainly isn’t failing in that regard.

The current excavations are intending to open up a total of eight trenches, three large ones of 20 by two metres, and five of one metre by five. These are distributed around the site so that we can explore the locations of the different historic map depictions of where the shoreline and islands are shown, to determine which most closely reflected the truth.

Our first reality check, yesterday afternoon, was finding the error of our ways in not mapping the larger, recent, shrubs when we surveyed the site in July. Several of the planned trenches, that looked so good on paper, needed to be moved – but thankfully Justin and I were able to find some good alternatives.

Then it was the archaeology’s turn to misbehave! One tries to go onto a site like this with some vision of what the archaeological deposits should look like – and the story of the Quebec sounded reasonably straight forward. However, the first three trenches in the southern part of the site all encountered great depths of dumped silt, where the theory says they shouldn’t be. I’d also have guessed that the bottom of the pond would have been lined with puddle clay – absolutely no sign of that yet, though there are some other layers of pale loamey deposits that may yet prove to be the lining. The instant reaction – and one needs to avoid those, except when writing for a blog – is that there may have been a major episode of excavation/destruction in the southern part of the site that we didn’t know about previously, and that may have removed all evidence of the Georgian features. Closer examination of the trenches in the coming days will tell us more.

Today was Heritage Open Day, and another flagship event for the project. The wonderful Lace Wars chaps were back again, and were even more popular than they were in July. The offer this time included a dig pit for smaller archaeologists, which proved immensely popular, perhaps more so with those to whom the other appeals of the event didn’t speak. The point of crossover was being able to watch the mechanical excavator at work, live. That was a huge hit.

On the other hand, the northern trenches didn’t entirely behave themselves either. Here too, in some cases, the edges of the feature didn’t show themselves readily – and it wasn’t until about 12:30 that we found anything that could be described as a shoreline. However, that situation improved somewhat in the afternoon, and more relevant changes in the archaeology started to become apparent.

The theory, before we started, was that we didn’t know what the edges would look like, but we assumed that they’d be well-built in stone and/or timber. What we’re finding is that, with one exception so far, they’re not, but are soft edges represented by a change in the substrate from silty deposits to ones rich in clay and pebble. Again, an instant reaction (that needs a lot more careful thought and investigation) is that that could well explain the changing shapes of the pond and islands on the various different maps. On the other hand, it's very hard to see how the feature would have been sustained at all with such soft edges. Could edgings have been robbed out when the pond was filled c.1900? That’s the sort of question we’ll want to answer before we’re done.

Meanwhile, we comfort ourselves with General Eisenhower’s words…

Is it that time already?… Treasured Islands! Episode 2, Day 1

Blog 7 9th September 2011

At the very moment when I write this, at Studley Royal there should be a slight rumbling sound in the background as the mechanical excavator rolls off the trailer and trundles through the gardens to start opening up the trenches at Quebec. I have to say that I wasn’t expecting to the feeling the way I do – rather like its Christmas Day. And I sort of wish that I’d had another ten days to get ready.

Thankfully, unlike Christmas, there are lots of other very competent people on hand to take up the strain – especially, Sarah, Alexa, Tessa and Jen at the estate, and Justin and his team from Field Archaeology Specialists – so everything is in place that should be.

But I am still very aware that I’ve been doing less for this project than I’d have liked over the past few months, not least in terms of updating this blog. That’s the life of the NT archaeologist, I fear: those who are old enough might remember the old circus/Variety Hall act where a chap kept 50 plates spinning on the end of vertical bamboo canes. That’s what my job is like (and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The trick, of course, is to make sure that its not the expensive crockery that get’s broken!). Since the last posting there were other Festival of British Archaeology events to run at Nunnington Hall (which managed to secure national and international press coverage) and a number of very interesting things to do on our Housesteads Estate on Hadrian’s Wall. And a family summer holiday to fit in.

And things have been a little bit quieter on the Quebec front. Tessa delivered her amazing “Rubbing shoulders with Georgians” exhibition. The life size cut-outs figures from eighteenth century illustrations were unnervingly human presences – even if, in this week’s strong winds, they showed a surprising (and ungenteel) “Jackass”-style tendency to hurl themselves around the landscape. Justin and his team have processed the survey data, and produced a really accurate map of the site, including reconciliation of the different historic map depictions. I’ll say a little bit more about that in a future Blog (it’s the main thing I’ve been meaning to write about in the past few weeks). We’ve used the map to position the eight trenches we’re going to be excavating over the next fortnight or so, designed to try and find different parts of the shoreline and islands – while also leaving space for the interpretation spaces, and the family activities being run for tomorrow’s Heritage Open Day event. We’re having a dig pit with C18 finds – and the outstanding redcoat re-enactors of Lace Wars are back by popular demand. And Justin will be back with his digger, so that small boys of all ages can enjoy watching a JCB at work as part of the fun.

My turn for dressing up comes on Monday, when I’m leading two tours in the guise of William Aislabie, under the title “Remember Quebec!” – the 12th being the anniversary of the battle, which was once commemorated at the Quebec garden. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to source a small cannon to fire as they did then. Maybe next year?

The excavations open to the public tomorrow, and we’ll be digging every day except Wednesdays and Thursdays between then and Sunday September 25th. Do visit if you can – and please let us know if you’re reading and enjoying this blog.