The Walk Part 1: Carvings

Greetings all. I’m back.

So, I have returned. I’m not going to bore you with the usual apologies for a lack of posts… let’s just ignore it and awkwardly move on.

Interesting things have occurred since I last blogged. I no longer work at a certain local museum, which means I now have more time to spend doing this sort of thing. For the first time in too many years, I put a trowel in the ground and went back to my roots of excavation rather than the academic theorising of more recent years. Even if it was only a 1m x 1m test pit, it was a good feeling, particularly as it was at Melandra, where my namesake excavated in the early part of last century. I didn’t find anything interesting (a piece of flint amongst some modern backfill), but the project as a whole seems to have made a significant discovery… more about that another time.

I have also recently returned from Florida, spending some time with my amazing daughter (hello Evie). Nothing archaeological to report from there, but we did find some nice bits of Native American flint in a flea market – I’ll blog about it, as it’s fun to look at.

So then, today’s post is a bit of a placeholder. I have almost finished a long and interesting post about a wall (stop groaning… I can hear you, you know!), but I need a few more photographs. Until then, I’ll post a short companion piece.

Mrs Hamnett, Master Hamnett, and myself, went on a short ramble the other day, to blow away the cobwebs so to speak (not a reflection on Mrs Hamnett’s housekeeping…). Being short in the leg department, and peculiarly large in the whingeing department, young Master Hamnett sets the length of our walks these days. And so, with much faffing and snot on the face, we set off “up and over” – that is, past The Beehive, along Hague Street,  left into the field, and then follow the path round until we arrive at Fieldhead, and then down to The Beehive (or if we are feeling full of energy and less full of whinge, we push on to Whitfield Cross (the cross) and then back. The last few times we have done this, I have picked up some bits and pieces of pottery and glass along the path – nothing earth shattering, but interesting nonetheless. I’ll post them tomorrow, as well as a third installment – the original post – later this week. Today’s post is made up of two of my obsessions: carved graffiti and benchmarks.

This is the route we took.

Bits and pieces of pottery were along the path, as I say, but I stopped to take these photographs in the areas marked with a green circle.

The first, in the lower circle… a benchmark! I’ve not posted many recently, and I really must address that as, well, they’re great. There are several on this route, as you can see from the map above, and a few hidden in field walls in the middle of nowhere. I’d like to do an odyssey at some stage, and track them all down – if anyone fancies joining me, give me a shout! Anyway, here is the benchmark in all its glory:

This is a bit of an odd one. It’s clearly a bench mark, it’s clearly on an immovable object, and the gate is clearly marked on the maps, but… there is no bench mark marked on the map at that point – check it out in the map above. The nearest is a spot height of 777 ft above sea level. Spot heights are recorded OS heights above sea level, but are not marked on the landscape by carving them – they serve more as a guide, than a definite point. I trawled through a pile of maps, and eventually found a spot height at that point on the 1954 OS map of 779 ft above sea level. It is probably a late entry in the Ordnance Survey, and it seems whilst they marked it on the stone, they forgot to mark that on the map. If there was a category for ‘rare’ types of bench marks, this would surely be one (and no, I’m not looking for bench mark collectors websites; I have too many ‘collections’ as it is, if I get sucked into bench mark collecting, Mrs Hamnett will almost certainly divorce me*). The gatepost itself is interesting; it appears to be a roughly shaped upright stone, rather than a carefully dressed, more traditional, post. Whilst one is hesitant to say ‘standing stone‘ for several reasons, it is quite common for them to be used as gateposts, and a brief glance at all the other gateposts in the area reveals them to be like the photograph below – shaped properly for the job.

Here is the upper green circle… carved graffiti!

 An inexperienced hand, but very clearly writing letters. At the top, we have a ‘T’ and a ‘B’ or ‘R’, and on the left, running down, are a ‘T’, a ‘B’, and an ‘O’, and there are other marks carved around the top, but nothing recognisable. The Ts are carved quite nicely with serifs, but overall it’s a bit messy… 3/10?

Right, that’s all for today. As I say, I have two more related posts almost ready to go (tomorrow for at least one of them, if I get chance), and lots more to go after that.

As always, comments are very welcome, and please feel free to email me with any information or questions.

More soon, I promise.

But until then I remain, your humble servant.

RH

*Alright, so I lied. I did check. And there are so many. So like a moth to a flame… apparently, we are called ‘bench mark baggers’. Here are two websites to whet your appetite: One is the central bench mark database, which is worth an explore, and the other is a blog run by someone worryingly like me, well worth checking out. I might be single again very soon.