From ordinary fields, extraordinary finds; from mud, magic. Train yourself to notice small traces of the past, and you grant walking yet another way to transform your day.
EVERY YEAR IN late summer, powerful machines cut deeply into the 10,000-year-old soils that make our island the green and pleasant land it is. The earth is laid bare. Rain inevitably falls and it washes clean anything solid that has been raised to the surface by the ploughing. For the curious, this sequence of events reveals traces of our past, in the form of stone tools, pottery and metal objects. A chance find is a wonderful moment for any walker and it doesn’t have to be a once in a lifetime occurrence. Finding ‘stuff’ on a walk can be surprisingly easy. You just need to narrow down the odds and cross your fingers. Oh yes, and being eagle-eyed helps.
I like to collect things. I can’t help myself. Sat on the table now, six inches from my computer is a glass jar, filled with a selection of things found in the last 20+ years of wanderings: scallop-shells, bullets, squirrel-nibbled hazelnuts, fossils, coins, interesting stones, clay pipes, a spoon, pottery shards, buttons, a tooth, pottery shards, a small Palaeolithic hand axe, snail shells, resin from a Scots pine tree, a brass screw from a crashed plane, pottery shards, a sheep bell, crystals, more stone tools and of course, did I mention, pottery shards. The collected mass looks quite nice. My kids know that these are about the only riches they’ll inherit from their dreamer of a dad.
The real purpose of this jar is to take me back. It’s my vehicle for time travel. Initially to the day of the walk and then, more subjectively, to the era of the find. Whether it’s a bit of Roman pottery or a Victorian penny, I wonder how, why, and when it was used – and then lost. The joy of finding something is two-fold. There’s the initial buzz of handling something for the first time in what might be several thousand years. Then the enjoyment of ascertaining what the item was, when it was made and how it was used. You create a mystery and then try to solve it: walking is the enabler of all this, and any arable field with a path can be a hunting ground.
Stone tools are my real love in all this. Flint was the primary material used. There are other rocks that do the job, but none so well as this glassy substance. Generally speaking, it occurs in the south and east of England, but there is a wealth of flint bearing the traces of human working in Britain. Don’t forget, stone was being worked for thousands of years and it doesn’t rot down. It just lays on the ground accumulating. The fact that a natural object – in this case a lump of flint – has been created in the first place, then been picked up or dug out of the ground thousands of years ago, before being shaped, used, then discarded, blows my mind.
I think we could all recognise a flint arrow head if we found one (they are rare and my holy grail). It’s the wealth of other tools and waste associated with their making that take a bit of experience to identify. There are certain characteristics that ‘worked’ stone exhibits. First, if it’s a finished tool it may well have what is called continuous retouch along one or more edges. These are overlapping facets in the surface of the stone: the uniformity makes their human origin obvious. Without going too deeply into stone tools, other things to look for could be large facets on one side and none on the other, or a bulge in the flint next to an edge. This is known as the bulb of percussion and is the result of the hammer action. Once you get your eye in, the size of the bulb of percussion can tell you whether the flake was removed from the core with a soft hammer (antler punch) or a hard one (another rock). This little fact gets you a big step closer to the person that made it. Another thing about stone tools is that they’re often specifically fashioned to be used in the left hand or the right: realising this and then holding it how someone else held it makes the intervening 4000 years drop away.
Another tip that’ll help in identifying whether a bit of flint has been worked is to look at its overall appearance: it should all be weathered to the same degree. If some areas look fresher than others then there’s a good chance it’s the result of accidental natural actions like rocks falling on other rocks, or a shattering frost. There are many ways a bit of flint can end up looking the way it does and you can
Finds are soaked in water, then gently scrubbed with a toothbrush to clean them up.
A Neolithic blade reveals itself after 4500 years.
Inset right: Picking up a Victorian penny. Copper alloys turn to a bright green colour over time.
teach yourself the skills to tell if it was shaped by human or nature. That knowledge has let me reach much deeper into our countryside.
Do this next time you’re in a flinty area: strike two pieces of flint together. That sound has echoed down our evolutionary line for over a million years, just in this country. If you do find a stone tool, there’s a good chance there may be others there too. Yes, I’ve found random arrowheads lost while hunting, but more often tools pile up where some kind of prolonged use has taken place. Their presence can often tell you something about the lay of the land. On one particular walk close to where I live, I’ve found tools from many thousands of years of use. Styles changed over the years so this can be used to date them. What seems to be key to this location is that it’s an area of raised ground near a river and what would have been a vast area of swampy lowland perfect for hunting. The higher, better-drained areas would have been farmed from about 3000BC onwards so through a basic understanding of stone tool technology I can make these much larger assumptions about how the land I regard as home was being used all those years ago. Understanding one thing deeply often acts as a key to unlock much more than you bargained for.
Now let’s move on to something that takes us from around 3000BC right up to the present time: pottery. At the same time farming was introduced to Britain, pottery also made an appearance in the form of storage and cooking pots. We’re talking about the Neolithic period (4000-2500BC – think Stonehenge). Different eras since have had different pottery styles which, like stone tools, makes a useful dating technique.
Pottery can turn up all over the country, but the fields bordering a town or village are often the richest places to look. All kinds of waste were collected in midden heaps and the whole lot
COUNTRY WALKING
would end up on the fields to make the most of the rich organic material (sh*t in case you missed it). This practice went on for many years and while the compost has become part of the soil, pottery remains. The narrow window between a field being ploughed and sown again is the best time to look. You’ll need to wait for the weather to work its magic, washing or freezing away the soil from more solid objects. If this happens while the soil is ‘open’ then this can be a golden time. And of course, we’re sticking to footpaths; this is not a green light to trespass on private land.
By far the most common bits of pottery you’ll find will either be shards from the rim or fragments from the base. These are generally the strongest parts of a pot which is why they have withstood the action of the plough over all these years.
The good old Romans left us with a legacy of pottery styles, with many vessels differing subtly in rim shapes – fascinating for the nerds among us. In fact the Country Walking office in Peterborough is only a short walk from Britain’s biggest Roman pottery manufacturing site (maybe the first factory in Britain?). It’s shown on the Ordnance Survey map as Dvrobrivae Roman Town but, alas, has no public access.
Some Roman pottery is decorated with pictures. I’ve yet to find anything like this, but just imagine. One thing you do occasionally see in pottery fragments is a thumb or fingerprint, particularly if the pot was hand thrown rather than wheel thrown. Decoration on pots, especially on older ones, was often done with fingernails or sharp implements pressed into the soft clay. Don’t forget it’s not just pots that can be made from clay: tiles and drainage pipes are common finds too.
An early Bronze Age barbed and tanged arrowhead. The most easily identifiable flint object you could find.
A flint flake retouched to form a cutting edge on one side and a notch on the other. The original multitool.
Animal skins needed working before they could be used, hence scrapers are one of the commonest finds
– in all shapes and sizes.
Possibly a spear point – exact use of a tool is often a mystery. All these pictured here are Neolithic or Bronze
When it comes to metal objects, don’t expect to find many. During the years I’ve been looking I’ve only found a handful of rather worn coins, half a buckle and a sheep bell. I should make it clear I’m just a walker following footpaths with no metal detector, so the chance of finding this kind of treasure is much rarer. One tip is to look for objects that are a vivid green in colour: copper alloys soon tarnish to this wonderfully natural state.
Inset: A base fragment from a pottery vessel. These are thicker and consequently survive longer in the earth.