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For several years UWHG members have been actively involved as volunteers on the series of excavations run by the Yorkshire Dales Landscape Research Trust, under the direction of Dr Roger Martlew.
As this year’s digging season came to a close, Roger provided members and guests with a unique opportunity to view the sites which lie on private land and are generally closed to the public.
He took us on a tour of several sites in the Chapel House Wood area, which together provide just a small indication of the incredible wealth of archaeology which lies beneath the pasture lands of the Upper Wharfedale valleys and hills.
Each of these sites is part of a wider picture and cannot be judged purely in isolation. They form parts of a long story of human influence upon the landscape, and must be placed within the context of that landscape as a whole. Hence, our guided walk took us up gullies, around escarpments, and across terraces all along the hillside.
Roger urged the group to consider a range of pertinent issues such as the importance of careful speculation based on evidence, which in this area is often incomplete or misleading. Such evidence has, he said, to be treated just as carefully as forensic evidence at a crime scene. And when it comes to interpretation, there seems always to be several available, and they can change from day to day as an excavation reveals a little more of a site.
Certainly as we viewed this year’s excavation trench, there could be no simple answer as to its function or siginificance. It remains as enigmatic a site as ever, and we await the results of post-excavation processing of the finds and next year’s dig with great anticipation.
Jane Lunnon
UWHG Archivist.
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