Many thanks to Aleta Doran, Artist in Residence at Chester Cathedral for today’s introduction to stained glass artist Trena Cox, who was based in Chester for most of her long career. Aleta is a brilliant and engaging presenter, currently working hard on the upcoming Trena Cox exhibition, which she is curating. Although this was organized specially for Chester Archaeological Society, Aleta is doing more presentations during the Heritage Festival and if you get the chance to attend, do go. It will give you a completely new insight into the world of 20th Century stained glass, as well as introducing you to a really creative part of the cathedral’s history. I’ll keep this relatively short so as not to spoil the event for those of you who have tickets.
Trena Cox, apparently the least photographed artist in modern history, was born on the Wirral and trained at Birkenhead’s Laird School of art, learning her skills in traditional media before switching to stained glass. She has created over 150 stained glass pieces that are known, but there are probably many more to be identified. She worked mainly in the Cheshire and northeast Wales areas but her works are found further afield. There are many in Chester itself, mainly in churches. There are nine Trena Cox windows in the cathedral, one in the slype (a corridor) and the others arranged in groups of four, two at the top, two at the bottom, in adjacent aisles in the cloister (the walkway around the central garth or garden).
The big window in the slype shows the child Christ on one river bank, and St Christopher on the other. This is very unconventional, as Christ is usually depicted being carried across the water on the shoulders of St Christopher. Aleta described how this window clearly demonstrates many of the features of Trena Cox’s work, with the beautifully executed details of both figures, the surrounding landscape and the flowers, birds and animals that sit at the feet of the two figures. Also typical are the portrait-style faces, which seem incredibly life-like. The colouring of the glass, as in all her work, is vibrantly jewel-like and the background semi-opaque glass concentrates the eye on colours whilst allowing in light. There are many emblems of international pilgrimage, known from badges purchased from the Middle Ages by pilgrims to commemorate their achievements. As well as many others, these include St Thomas of Canterbury, St James of Santiago de Compostella, and of course Chester Cathedral’s own St Werburgh herself, her symbol being five geese in a basket. It is a rich and symbol-laden piece that rewards time taken to appreciate it.
The cloister used to open out onto the garth, with a stone arcade forming a corridor with the buildings that surround the cloister. In 1920 Dean Frank Bennet was appointed as the new head of the cathedral, and decided to take measures to improve the cathedral’s fortunes. In order to glaze the arcade that surrounded the garth, the dean decided to raise public funds. It is thought that some funds were raised by allowing donors for the cloister glass to add commemorations to loved ones in panes withing the windows, which survive today. Each window represents a saint, religious festival or holy day. Trena Cox contributed eight panels in two adjacent sections of the cloister, showing eight different saints. In one set of four, the two at the top are Hugh Lupus who founded the abbey and St Werburgh’s mother St Ermengild In the lower section are St Thomas Becket and King Henry II. In the other set, the two figures at the top are Abbot Witchurch and Ralph Higden and the two below King Alfred and St Piegmund. Aleta talked us through the significance of each of these saints, and why there were chosen. These are much smaller and therefore much simpler compositions, but again the colours are vibrant, and the faces resemble portraiture.
Aleta wrapped up by telling us something about Trena Cox and her influence on Chester life, not only as an artist but as something of an activist for the protection of local heritage. It seems remarkable that she is not better known, at least in Chester where she lived nearly all her life. Hopefully, the upcoming the exhibition “Trena Cox: Reflections 100”, which begins on the 7th October, will bring this under-sung local personality and talented, prolific artist to much wider public attention. Do take advantage of a tour of the glass with Aleta Doran if you have the opportunity. As an artist herself, she offers a unique insight into the work of Trena Cox.
Great to arrive home from our trip to our CAS introduction to Wirral-born stained glass artist Trena Cox by Aleta Doran (about which more later) and find the Heronbridge report on the doorstep. The report, “Excavations at Heronbridge 2002-5, Part 1: The Roman Settlement,” is a satisfyingly chunky 207 pages with maps, illustrations and photographs. It describes Chester Archaeological Society’s excavations between 2002 and 2005 at the Roman settlement at Heronbridge, about 2.5km south of Chester City Centre. With numerous contributors, headed by David J.P. Mason, it is edited by Peter Carrington with Rowan Patel and Alison Smithson (Chester 2024).
For those who wish to know a bit more about this publication, here are the cover details, the Table of Contents and the list of contributors. You can click to expand any of the images:
This is a bit of an experiment, using my iPhone, which I’ve never tried before for video. I did a lot of camcorder videos of scenery when I lived in Aberdovey on the west coast of Wales, but fell out of the habit when I moved to the Chester area, so I am out of practice, feel very peculiar using an iPhone to do video, and hate the sound of my voice, but here we go. So here’s my two-minute introduction to the wonderful priory of St Mary and St James, aka Birkenhead Priory, for better or for worse. I’ll get better!
At Birkenhead Priory the other day I very much liked this small building on Knox Street, very close to both Birkenhead Priory and the Cammell Laird shipyard. It has been painted in the style of dazzle camouflage, used in the First World War, and to a lesser extent in the Second World War, primarily to confuse submarines. “The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. Dazzle was a method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked” (Norman Wilkinson, 1969, A Brush with Life, Seeley Service, p.79, quoted on Wikipedia).
The moment I saw it, it reminded me of a 1919 painting by Edward Wadsworth (1889 – 1949) that I have hanging in my spare bedroom, showing a ship in dry dock in Liverpool receiving its new paint job. Wadsworth painted in the style of the Vorticists, whose best known proponent was Wyndham Lewis, inspired by machinery and industry, and focused on clean lines, hard edges and planes of strong colour. The dazzle ship was a near perfect subject matter for this style of painting, and Wadsworth was in an ideal position to get up close and personal with his subject matter, as in the First World War he worked as an intelligence officer, and one of this responsibilities was implementing dazzle camouflage designs for the Royal Navy.
I would love to know who came up with painting the building on Knox Street in the same style. If you know anything about it, do let me know.
Below is a painting from the Merseyside Maritime Museum showing the Walmer Castle painted in her dazzle camouflage. “The Walmer Castle was launched in 1901 for the recently created Union Castle Mail Steamship Company. The ship sailed between Southampton and Cape Town and in 1917 was requisitioned by the British Government. It is seen here dazzle painted for use as a troop ship in the North Atlantic. Walmer Castle survived the war and was broken up in 1932″ (National Museums Liverpool).
On a recent visit to Birkenhead Priory, which I am still writing up, I arrived some time before the Priory opened, and went for a wander. There are some great things to see in the area, but this combined monument and street light really drew the eye. I decided not to risk life and limb by flinging myself across the very busy road to read the inscription at its base, so did a web search when I returned home. It is a monument to the building of the Queensway Tunnel under the Mersey. It is Grade II listed (1217871), was designed by Herbert Rowse and erected in 1934. It was shifted from its original position in 1970 due to changes in the road layout at the tunnel approach, but originally illuminated the first concourse / plaza.
The monument has the fluted elements of a Doric column clad in impressive black granite, hints at ancient Egyptian lotus-top capitals, has a light on top, and simply yells Art Deco creativity and optimism, with a touch of eccentricity. It is such a hybrid of different ideas, incorporating ancient art and contemporary technology, and happily combining the functions of both monument and lighthouse that it has no chance of being rationally categorized. Like Greek and Roman columns or ancient Egyptian obelisks, it looks as though it ought to be in company, not standing all on its own.
The monument did in fact have a twin, but instead of standing alongside its sibling was erected over the river in Liverpool, lighting the other entrance to the tunnel.Sadly this was taken down in the 1960s, a period when so many bad decisions were made regarding architectural heritage. There was some talk in the media this time last year about erecting a replica, but I don’t know if that plan went anywhere or has been abandoned.
The inscriptions on the bronze plaques on the base display the names of the engineer responsible for the civil engineering of the tunnel, Sir Basil Mott J.A. Brodie and the architect Herbert Rowse, as well as the names of the team who built the bridge and the construction teams and committee members who oversaw proceedings. The commemorative declaration reads:
Queensway, opened by His Majesty King George V, 18th July 1934 accompanied by Her Majesty Queen Mary. The work on this tunnel was commenced on 16th December by Her Royal Highness Princess Mary Viscountess Lascelles, who started the pneumatic boring drills at St George’s Dock Liverpool MCMXXXIV
I love the monument. It has a real sense of joie de vivre. It is a shame that it is no longer located closer to its original position as part of the tunnel’s original architectural vision. On the upside, at least it has been preserved and not demolished like its twin. Other aspects of the original Art Deco vision do survive insitu at the tunnel entrance, shown above right.
The cairn rising above the tree tops on Gop hill, with the cave visible as a dark line in the light limestone ridge below. Source: Coflein
Gop Cairn is at an elevation of 250m (c.820ft) above sea level on the prow of a hill overlooking the Vale of Clwyd, just outside the village of Trelawnyd (formerly known as Newmarket). It is oval rather than round, and measures roughly 101m x 78m (331 x 255ft). It is the biggest man-made prehistoric mound in Wales, and in Britain as a whole it is second only to Silbury Hill in Wiltshire.
The cave has already been discussed in part 1(Pleistocene and Mesolithic) and part 2 (Neolithic burials).
The Excavation
The plan of the cairn and excavations by Boyd Dawkins. Source: Boyd Dawkins 1901
Sir William Boyd Dawkins was hired by the landowner to excavate the cairn. Boyd Dawkins had a simple, though labour-intensive strategy. The plan that Boyd Dawkins made of the cairn shows the dip in the top that remains today. Boyd Dawkins speculates that this could have been caused when the cairn was later used as a source of raw materials for local drystone walling, or alternatively by subsidence due to the collapse of an underlying chamber.
Although there is a thin covering of vegetation today, the cairn was found to be built of chunks of limestone. Around the base of the cairn there seems to have been a more organized and well presented kerb of drystone walling. Ian Brown suggests that when first built, and during the period when it still retained importance, it may have “shown a dramatic whiteness set against a blue or darkening site.” The limestone ridge below, in which the cave is located and shown at the top of this post, certainly seems almost white in the sunshine, and the cairn may have had a similarly noticeable appearance, particularly given its great size.
Boyd Dawkins sunk a shaft (6ft 6 ins by 4ft / c.2m x 1.22m) vertically from the top of the cairn, which had to be shored up with timber to allow work to proceed safely. The shaft reached the former ground surface, which was formed of bedrock. A main “drift” (a mining term for a horizontal subterranean tunnel) was then tunnelled running 30ft (c.9m) to the northeast from the bottom of the vertical shaft towards the edge, followed by two shorter drifts. The hope was to find a burial chamber at the centre. It was not unreasonable to assume that there would be a burial chamber of some description. Although Neolithic chambered cairns are not common in northeast Wales (examples are Tyddyn Bleiddyn near St Asaph and Tan y Coed in the Dee valley), there are many Early Bronze Age round barrows with cists, and there are several stone-built burial sites and a stone row on the Great Orme to the west.
Unfortunately, in spite of all the hard work, all that Boyd Dawkins and his team found were fragmented animal bones, which in spite of his considerable experience identifying animal remains, Boyd Dawkins was unable to identify with certainty: “hog, sheep or goat, and ox or horse, too fragmentary to be accurately determined.” Overall, the suggestion is that these were domesticated species that could have been herded or penned in the area.
No artefacts were found.
Conditions were obviously very difficult, as Boyd Dawkins states: “The timbering necessary for our work was not only very costly, but rendered it very difficult to observe the condition of the interior even in the small space which was excavated.” It is possible that the chamber, if there is one, is off-centre, and that any passage leading to it is in a different direction. Until further survey or excavation work is carried out, there is no means of telling what lies beneath the surface.
Dating the Cairn
Neolithic arrowheads found on Gop Hill. Source: Glenn 1935
Data for the dating of the cairn is circumstantial. Although domesticated animal species were found within the cairn, these could have been deposited at an any time from the Neolithic onwards. On the other hand, arrowheads and other Neolithic stone tools have been found on Gop Hill. According to T. Allen Glenn in 1935, Gop Hill was known locally as Bryn-y-Saethau, the Hill of Arrows, due to the large number of Neolithic arrowheads found there over the decades. Just below the cairn, just 43m (141ft) away, shown in the above photograph, is a shallow cave in the limestone ridge that contained Neolithic burials. There are ephemeral Neolithic sites nearby, identified by T. Allen Glenn during field walking during the 1920s, and there are other Neolithic cave sites in northeast Wales. At the same time, nothing significant relating to the Bronze Age has been found in the immediate area. Although Iron Age and Roman sites have been found in the area, Gop Cairn is not an Iron Age or Roman form of site, and there is no record of a medieval motte and bailey castle up on the hill. On balance, accepting that it remains speculative, it seems probable that it will turn out to be a Neolithic site if it is ever properly investigated.
Myth: “Baseless Theories”
A local writer named Edward Parry, author of Royal Visits and Progresses into Wales, written in 1851, propagated the idea that Gop Hill and its cairn were connected with the battle between Boudicca and Suetonius Pauluins in A.D. 61. It is a bizarre theory, that Ellis Davies, under the subheading “Baseless Theories” says in 1949 was a “false derivation” based on one of the names of the Gop, Cop Paulini. It is otherwise incomprehensible why Parry should have come up with the theory, but it found its way into other pamphlets and local accounts. As Davies points out in a rather aggrieved tone, “It would not be necessary to refer to these absurd stories about the association of Boudicca with Gop and neighbourhood were it not for the fact that locally they still persist!”
The Beacon
In his 1949 book “The Prehistoric and Roman Remains of Flintshire,” Ellis Davies notes that in the 17th century there was a beacon on Gop Hill, the purpose of which was to send up an alarm, when necessary, should pirates be spotted off the coast. A small hut was built at the bottom of the cairn to store the combustible materials with which the fire would be lit.
Final Comments
It is a little ironic that there is such a lot to say about a rather small cave, and not a great deal to say about an absolutely enormous cairn on the prow of a hill that dominates the surrounding landscape. It seems clear from the burials in the cave beneath the cairn, dated by association with distinctive artefacts, and supported by stone tools found on the hill, that this was an important location during the Neolithic. It seems likely that the cairn could have belonged to the same period, but it is also possible that it could belong to the following earlier Bronze Age. Further investigation will be required to nail down the date of the site, and to establish if there are any additional structures, such as burial chambers, contained within.
Suggestions for the derivation of the name Gop. Source: Ellis Davies 1949, p.159
In Part 1 I looked at the excavations carried out at Gop Cave in 1886-7, 1908-14, 1920-21 and 1956-57 and talked about the pre-glacial levels of Gop Cave, with its finds of woolly rhino, hyaena and wild horse, and the Mesolithic tools found outside the cave mouth.
In this second part, the cave is still the topic under discussion, with a shift in focus to the Neolithic layers, whilst the cairn on top of Gop Hill is tackled in part 3. During the Neolithic, the cave was used to deposit a number of burials, two thirds of which were contained within a walled-off section of the cave, and the rest within a narrow passage that linked two parts of the cave. These burials are the subject of this post. References used for all three parts are listed in part 1, together with visiting details.
Just to recap briefly on the details from part 1, the earliest excavations in the cave were carried out by Sir William Boyd Dawkins, a well known and respected early archaeologist who excavated the cave site over two seasons in 1887 and 1887, having originally been asked to assess the cairn on top of the hill. The lowest level was barren , but the next contained numerous bones of Pleistocene animals, many of them now extinct. The top two layers contained mainly Neolithic material including human skeletal remains.
In 1908 John H. Morris began digging at the cave, and was joined by T. Allen Glenn, who took systematic notes and made a plan of the newly uncovered sections of the cave. They opened up a passage missed by Boyd Dawkins, referred to as the northwest passage, which linked to a very small opening just to the east of the main cave entrance. During these excavations a further six partial skeletons were found, two of them children. The skeletal remains in both cases were associated with artefacts and animal bones.
Most of the bone collection collected by Boyd Dawkins, and stored in a pigeon house at Gop Farm, were disposed of in 1913 by the tenant of Gop Farm, who threw them down a local mine shaft – which is particularly sad as Glenn had just received permission to take charge of them. Most of the Morris and Glenn finds, both bones and objects, were sent to the National Museum of Wales. Some finds from Gop Cave are also retained by Manchester Museum and Aura Museum Services, and possibly by the Grosvenor Museum in Chester.
The Neolithic burials at Gop Cave
In total, at least 20 individuals were recorded in Gop Cave. The 14 found by Boyd Dawkins and the 6 found by Morris and Glenn may have been deposited at slightly different times, due to the different character of the deposition. Whereas the individuals discovered by Boyd-Dawkins seem to have been buried whole, Glenn is fairly confident that the ones discovered by himself and Morris in a different part of the cave were only partial when they were interred.
Boyd-Dawkins excavations showing the chamber (feature B) above layer 3 and abutting layer 4, which contained skeletal remains of humans with artefacts. Source: Boyd Dawkins 1901. See other cave plans in part 1.
Dawkins describes how he found a thick layer of charcoal over slabs of limestone at a depth of 4ft (c.1.2m) from the surface, which formed an old hearth. Blackened slabs were found throughout the area excavated, and there were also burnt and broken bones of domestic animals and fragments of pottery. “Intermingled with these were a large quantity of human bones of various ages, lying under slabs of limestone, which formed a continuous packing up to the roof. On removing these a rubble wall became visible, regularly built of courses of limestone.” These limestone blocks made up walls on three sides, with the cave wall itself making up the fourth wall, to form a chamber 4ft 6 by 5ft 4 (c.1.4m x 1.65m). Inside the chamber was what Dawkins describes as “a mass of human skeletons of various ages, more than fourteen in number, closely packed together, and obviously interred at successive times.” Individuals were deposited in a crouched position, “with arms and legs drawn together and folded.” His assessment was that the bodies were buried whole. When the chamber became full, another area of the cave was used as an overflow for new burials, identified on the section plan above as area A. Because layer 3 was found beneath the burial chamber, as well as beneath layer 4, Boyd Dawkins concluded that layer 3 had formed a habitation area prior to the burials, in a similar way to two other cave sites in north Wales.
Glenn’s plan of the 1912 excavations. Source: Davies 1949
When Morris and Glenn opened up another passage, and found another six individuals, Although the view was confused by rock fall and a very uneven floor, it was thought that limestone slabs may have been used to create a wall around some of the skeletons. Glenn describes the bones as fragmented and partial. Glenn ascribes this to the remains having been brought from somewhere else, rather than having been depleted due to roof fall damage of fragile bones, or the work of the “burrowing animals” that caused disruption in the stratification within the passage. He was methodical and a good observer, so presumably had good grounds for suggesting this, and it is certainly in keeping with other, more recent archaeological evidence for Neolithic burials where partial skeletons are found, apparently due to having died elsewhere and been moved to a particular site for burial. Another possibility is that the body had been excarnated, a practice involving the ceremonial placement of a body in the open air to allow it to be processed naturally so that it was defleshed and partially disarticulated before being collected for interment, which often resulted in the bigger longbones and crania being collected whilst finger and foot bones were left behind.
Having opened the cave out and discovered the second entrance, Morris and Glenn found that it was blocked with limestone slabs, apparently deliberately, although it is by no means certain when this was done. It is not unlike the blocking of entrances to Neolithic burial monuments towards the end of the Neolithic period.
The artefacts associated with the burials
Polished blade found by Boyd Dawkins in Gop Cave. Source: Dawkins 1901
The artefacts associated with both sets of skeletons are all Neolithic in date. Boyd Dawkins assigned them to the Bronze Age on the basis of the pottery, but this has since been re-dated. Both the Boyd Dawkins and the Morris and Glenn excavations produced stone tools, most of which are fairly generic but can be assigned to the Neolithic. One of the Boyd Dawkins discoveries was a long, curved blade, very carefully carved and polished to provide it with smooth surfaces, and showing no signs of usage. He also identified quart pebbles, which he refers to as “luck stones.” Another notable stone tool, this time found by Harris and Glenn in the part of the cave undiscovered by Boyd Dawkins, was a bifacially worked axe head made from Graig Lywyd stone from the well-known Neolithic stone mines at Penmaenmawr, which was apparently unused.
Objects found by Harris and Allen in Gob Cave, including the Graig Lwyd axe at top. Source: Davies 1949.
The pottery was Peterborough ware, and it has been determined that the Gop Cave type was the Mortlake variant of Peterborough ware, which dates to between about 3350 and 2850 BC. All were fragments, and were either grey or black or burnt red.
Pottery found in association with the skeletons by Boyd Dawkins, since identified as Mortlake Ware. Source: Boyd Dawkins 1901
Kimmeridge sliders. Source: Boyd Dawkins 1901
Two unusual items were referred to by Boyd Dawkins as “links,” which he thought were proably used to fasten clothing, and are referred to by some others as belt-sliders. He described them as being made of “jet or Kimmeridge coal,” or “Kimmeridge shale.” As these items are now lost, they cannot be tested (they were last known to be in Manchester Museum, but now cannot be found). He gives the measurements as 54mm L x 22m W and 16mm H; and 70mm L, 22mm W and 27mm H. Boyd Dawkins says that they showed no signs of any usage, and according to Alison Sheriden’s analysis of these object types, this is typical. They appear to have been kept for show rather than being attached to clothing or employed in some other everyday capacity, much like the curved blade and the Graig Lwyd axe head. As jet and Kimmeridge coal come from Yorkshire, and a third of all known sliders have been found in and around Yorkshire, they are certainly exotic goods in northeast Wales, and the rarity of the substance may have endowed it with a particular cachet. Jet has the very unusual property of being electrostatic, so that when it is rubbed it can make one’s hair stand on end! If it was jet, this would certainly have added to its novelty value. 29 of them were known when Sheriden was surveying them in 2012, of which only 6 were certainly of jet, one of which was found in Wales. 12 or 13 were from burial contexts and distribution showed “a marked tendency towards coastal and riverine finds” that are a reminder of the extensive networks that operated in the Neolithic.
Although the objects in the cave are few and far between, some were unused suggesting that they highly valued and retained for special occasions or as prestige items. It is unclear whether any artefacts were associated with any particular individuals, although Boyd-Dawkins describes the the jet sliders and the polished flint flake forming one group together.
Animal remains
Although he does not list numbers, Boyd Dawkins says that the remains of the domesticated species “were greatly in excess of those of the wild animals, and the most abundant were those of sheep.” He also comments that the horse listed under wild fauna may actually be domesticated, and that foxes were using the vicinity of the cave area at the time of the excavation. All bones were found in what he describes as “prehistoric refuse heaps and that nearly all were broken and burnt.
As all the bones were discarded in 1913, none of the identifications can be checked, but Boyd Dawkins was very experienced in the identification of animal remains, giving some confidence that his work reflected the reality of the situation. Sheep and goat are notoriously difficult to tell part, so the question-mark against goat is not surprising. That sheep are dominant is not a surprise, as the area around Gop would be ideal grazing for them. The valley bottom would have been well-suited for cattle and horse.
Dating the skeletons
Mandibles used in radiocarbon dating of Gop Cave skeletons. Source: Schulting 2020
Although the artefacts found in the cave, loosely associated with the skeletal remains, are indicators of a mid-Neolithic date, as described above, in 2020 Rick Schulting was able to pull together 23 samples from a number of caves for radiocarbon dating, including three samples from Gop Cave, comprising two mandibles and one cranium. Although some samples had been tested previously, an error in the sampling method had led to them being withdrawn in 2007. For Gop, the new dates lie firmly with the Middle-Late Neolithic range, tending towards the middle of the Neolithic (between c.3100 and 2900 BC).
This date range backs up the findings of the Mortlake variants of the Peterborough ware, the jet sliders and the Graig Lwyd axe.
The practice of non-monumental burials
The main form of burial recognized throughout most of the Neolithic Britain is the long barrow or cairn, or the round passage grave. In each case, there was usually an accumulation of burials over time, referred to as collective burials. These were not, however, the only forms of burial during the Neolithic. Although less often found, because of the lack of monumental marker, flat interment cemeteries are known, burials in the ditches of the so-called causewayed enclosures are often recorded and there is some, uncertain data that there may have been burials in rivers. During the later Neolithic, cremation became the norm.
Jawbone of skeleton from Gop Cave. Source: National Museum of Wales (47.97/104)
By far the most common non-monumental form of burial, however, is deposition within a cave. Cave burials of various dates are known from all over Britain. In his survey of cave burials in 2020, Rick Schulting noted examples from the Palaeolithic through to the Anglo-Saxon period. From the Neolithic in north Wales, contemporary with Gop Cave, nearby Nanty-Fuach rock shelter above Dyserth produced five burials, all contracted, and without grave goods. Outside the cave there were fragments of Neolithic pottery, a large barbed and tanged arrowhead and, nearby, some Peterborough ware. In the Alyn valley 16 burials were deposited within Perthi Cawarae, and 6 within Rhos Ddigre, the latter associated with a Graig Lwyd axe and pottery fragments, both in the Alyn valley. Other examples are known from Loggerheads and Mostyn with Neolithic flint implements. It is clear that Gop Cave is by no means an isolated example, although the precise arrangement of the skeletal remains within containing walls may be unusual. As many caves were excavated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when excavations lacked today’s precision, it is impossible to know what was missed by excavators. Finally, Schulting notes that there is a gap of “several millennia” between the last Mesolithic cave burial and the first Neolithic ones, indicating that there is no continuity of burial tradition in caves between the two periods.
Meaning in collective burial
Frances Lynch suggests that the use of caves for burial, occurring in many areas at different periods “seems to be a matter of convenience rather than cultural preference” but there are alternative views on the matter. In his book on the materiality of stone – Christopher Tilley does not discuss caves, but he references almost every other aspect of stone as a natural material that becomes objectified by human uses and actions. He comments that social identity requires “specific concrete material points of reference in the form of landscapes, places, artefacts and other persons.” Topographic and other natural features are often used by humans to anchor and fix memory and establish places of meaning in landscapes. Carole Crumley highlights the phenomenological experience of features like caves, mountains and springs, and their role in connecting the mental with the material to create both individual and social identity. In their chapter on the uses of landscape features like caves and springs by the Maya in Mesoamerica, James Brady and Wendy Ashmore describe how caves, eternally damp and dripping water, were connected with the sacred and the ritualization of water. By appropriating and modifying such natural features, people have embedded them with meaning to form bridges between the natural, supernatural and the manufactured, blurring the differences to confer special status on these dark places where the dead might be deposited safely.
Artist’s impression of what an excarnation platform might look like. By Jan Dunbar. Source: BBC
A number of authors have suggested that collective burial of humans, and in particular the mingling of bones rather than maintaining skeletons as delineated individuals, is an indication of the individual being subsumed into a collective identity, privileging the group identity over the authority or status of any one individual. Of course, these collective burials, whether in monument or cave, are representatives of much larger communities, and the criteria used for selecting one person for burial over another are lost. It is possible that in order to transform an individual into a representative of the community, a two-stage process was undertaken whereby an individual is excarnated or buried elsewhere, and then moved to a collective burial site, a transformative process during which the individual member of the community loses their individuality and becomes representative of a communal and ancestral link between the past and the present. With the addition of each new individual to the cemetery, another layer of communal meaning was added to the cave, reinforcing the message that the existing burials already encapsulated.
In the contrast between the brightness of the light-coloured limestone reflecting in the sun, and the darkness of the hidden, secret interior there is a resemblance between the relationship between the visually striking chambered tomb and the sepulchre within. Not forgetting, of course, that there is an enormous cairn on top of the hill, just 43m (141ft) away from the cave, which may in itself have been a marker rather than a grave. The cairn is discussed in part 3.
Final Comments
Neolithic stone implements found in and near Gop Cave. Source: Davies 1949, p.283
Gop Cave is often left out of accounts of the Neolithic in Wales, or merely mentioned in passing, which is surprising given both the number of its human occupants and the unusual combination of artefacts found within the cave. Cave burials are given secondary status to monumental constructions, but given the number of them in Wales, it is good to see that they are now being researched as valid contributors to the corpus of knowledge about the Neolithic both in Wales and the rest of Britain.
Graph from Jonathan Last showing the usage of caves at different periods in England (The Archaeology of English Caves and Rock-Shelters: A Strategy Document. Centre for Archaeology Report 2003)
The Roman bath-house at Prestatyn, discovered in the 1930s, is located in a rather nice little housing estate on the edge of Prestatyn, which hems it in but does not overshadow it. Today the site is pleasantly presented in its own space, accessed via a gate. There are two information posters, and a raised area from which one can look down into the site before walking in and on it. There has been a lot of work carried out to stabilize and preserve it with concrete and mortar, so it is a distinct mix of old and new, but the essential layout has been preserved. On the day that we were there, a blue tarpaulin was lying over a small part of the walkway around the site, presumably either due to unsecured damage or to protect repairs.
Roman sites in Clwyd. Source: Blockley 1989, fig.5 p.9. Click image to enlarge
Excavations in the 1930s (Professor Robert Newstead), the 1970s and again in the 1980s (Kevin Blockley for CPAT) revealed an Iron Age farmstead (to be described on a future post) and a Roman and Romano-British (indigenous) settlement dating from the late 1st century AD, some time soon after AD 70. The combined excavations revealed a Roman complex of structures over a number of periods. The main period of Roman and Romano-British activity, spanned two periods, defined by Blockley as IIA and IIB. This included eleven timber buildings, seven in Phase IIA and four in IIB, a water well, and three stone-built buildings, including the bath-house with its furnace and its water management system. The bath-house itself was built in around AD 120, quite late into the history of the site, and was extended in AD 150. The entire group of buildings appears to have gone out of use towards the end of the 2nd century. Originally it was thought that the bath-house and other buildings may have been outliers of a fort. There is no known fort in north-east Wales in spite of the existence of other Roman sites and three Roman roads, and it was hoped that this might fill a gap in the data.
The Bath House
Detail from one of the information boards at the site showing the various components on the ground
Today all that remains visible of this complex of buildings is the bath-house. When it was found, much of the bath house and surrounding area were covered with c.60cm (2ft) of rubble, described by Newstead as: “tumbled masonry, broken roof tiles, bricks and quantities of tile-cement flooring etc” a well as box tiles and ridge tiles.
The foundations of the bath-house preserve the main features of a very small but classic Roman bath house, the plan of which is clearly visible on the ground. It measures c.11.7m x 4.5m (c.38 x c.15ft). What you can see today was the under-floor part of the bath-house. Over the top of most of these features, except for the D-shaped plunge pool, would have been a tiled floor. The bath-house was built in two phases.
The bath-house in AD 120
Antefixes from the Roman bath house at Prestatyn. Source: Newstead 1937 (National Library of Wales)
The walls of the building consisted of three courses of ashlar (dressed stone, to present an attractive appearance) filled with rubble and mortar to create the thick walls visible today. The rubble within the outer walls was locally sourced, probably picked out of glacial soils near the site. Of the exterior ashlar, Newstead found purple micaceous sandstone blocks in situ along the base of the northern wall of the bath house, the nearest source of which was around 6 miles away (and can be seen in use today at Rhuddlan Castle and St Asaph’s Cathedral). Broken roof tiles were also used in the construction. Inner walls might have been plastered and could have been decorated. The roof was tiled, and provided with decorative triangular antefixes showed LEG XX V V legend as well as the legion’s wild boar emblem, which like the tiles were provided with stamps identifying them as work of the 20th Legion. The 20th Legion’s tile-works at Holt near Chester clearly provided the tiles and bricks required or the bath-house in AD 120, and it is possible that they assisted with the construction works, but there is no sign that this was a legionary base, or that the 20th Legion controlled whatever activities took place at the site. Apart from the tiles and bricks, all of the stone used at the site was sourced within a few miles of the site.
Information board in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, showing how antefixes were used
The first phase of the bath-house with the hot room and warm room in Period IIA. Source: Blockley 1989
The plan to the left excludes the later cold room (frigidarium) with the D-Shaped plunge bath, showing the stone-built components of the bath-house in AD 120, when the bath house was built. There is no sign of a stone-built cold room, which was was either missing, which would be very unusual, or was built of wood. The two rectangular rooms, both of which sat over two hypocausts were both built in this first phase. Hypocausts are artificial floors set on small pillars made of bricks and tiles (pilae) into which hot air, supplied by a furnace, is channelled.
In the tepidarium, Room B, Newstead found only two of the short hypocaust pillar bases, each bearing the stamp of the 20th Legion. An internal doorway gave access to the Room C, the hot room or calidarium which was nearest to the furnace, where the remains of another fourteen pillars (pilae) survived. The pillars were made of a c.28 x 28cm (11 x 11 inches) brick stamped with the 20th Legion’s name: LEG XX V V (an abbreviation of Legio XXValeria Victrix: 20th Legion, Valiant and Victorious). These were placed face down into the floor. These was then topped with tiles c.19 by 19cm (7.5 x 7.5 inches) set into clay, none of which were stamped. The hypocaust bricks and tiles were sourced from the specialist tile and brickworks at Holt on the Dee just south of Chester.
Tile bearing legionary stamp from Prestatyn. Source: Newstead 1937 (National Library of Wales)
Illustration of a 20th Legion stamp on one of the bath house tiles. Source: Roman Inscriptions of Britain (RIB-2463_29_xiv)
Praefurnium leading into the calidarium and the tepidarium beyond.
The technical challenge for the builders came in the heating process, which required a furnace to provide the required heat to the two rooms. The remains of the furnace were found by Newstead, built into the centre of west end of the building and projecting 1.4m (4ft 6inches) beyond it, providing heat via a channel known as a praefurnium. Its floor was originally flagged with large blocks of purple sandstone. You can still stand in the praefurnium, shown left, to look into the hot room (caldarium, room C) and the warm room (tepidarium, room B) room beyond. Ducts or flues conveyed heat from Room C to Room B.
Like feeding a steam engine, this furnace would have required a considerable amount of fuel to keep the heat supplied, and this would have required manpower both to collect the right sort of wood and to feed it into the furnace. There would have been storage nearby to dry and store wood.
The video below is a 3-D animation of how the hypocaust at Brading Villa on the Isle of Wight functioned, which gives a good idea how the smaller example at Prestatyn worked too:
Also see the excellent video at the end of the past where the Roman hypocaust at the bath house at Bath are described.
Beyond the bath-house, to its east, was a stone-lined well, and a drain that was also partially stone-lined. The well was 1.6m deep and 1.1m sq at its base, flaring to 2.5m wide at its top. It was probably used to supply the bath-house and the two nearby buildings R4 and R5, both of which were copper-alloy workshops dating to IIA.
AD 150 – the extension of the bath-house
The cold room (left) and D-shaped plunge room, right.
The Bath house as it was found when Newstead excavated it. Rooms B and C were included in the original building of AD 120; Room A, the D-shaped plunge-pool, and the masonry drain under the cold-room floor and a drain out of the plunge-pool were added in AD 150. Source: Newstead 1937 (National Library of Wales)
As already mentioned above, there is no sign that a cold room was included in the first phase of the bath house. It may have been built in timber, now lost, or it may not have been built at all. Perhaps given the climate, a rectangular cold room and accompanying apse-shaped cold plunge pool, Room A, were not considered necessary, although this is not true for other bath-houses in Britain. The stone-built cold room was only built 30 years after the original construction of the bath house, measuring 32m by 4m (104 x 13ft). A new entrance was presumably provided in the cold room, with an internal doorway into the warm room.
Plan and hypothetical elevations of bath-house water supply. Source: Blockley 1989, fig.28 p.51. Click image to enlarge.
The accompanying D-shaped plunge pool was lined with a 12cm (c.4.5ins) thick layer of opus signinum (a type of waterproof pink mortar) on a base of limestone and mudstone fragments set in to clay. It was around 1.4m (4.5ft) deep. Blockley describes the water supply to this plunge-pool as the “most completely recovered layout known in Britain,” which included a stone and timber drainage channel, an aqueduct fed by a natural spring, and possibly water tanks.
The diagonal drainage channel crosses the cold room, originally under the floor of the cold room. Blockley believes that this was probably connected to an internal basin. A second drain leads from the apex of the D-shape as shown on the diagram above, the first 1.6m (c.5ft) within the bath-house had a floor of 40cm sq (c.15.5cm) bricks and was lined with limestone. South of the masonry section it was made of wood, and extended for 14m (c.46ft). The wooden uprights survive along one section, probably used to hold planks in place along the sides of the drain, which was 25cm deep and 70cm wide with stakes at c.20cm (c.8ins) intervals.
The line of the aqueduct, found in the 1980s excavations, was indicated by a row of parallel postholes. It ran from the east of the bath-house into the plunge-room, running over the top of the external drain. Nine of the postholes had timbers of alder-wood in situ, up to 65cm long and 35cm (c.13.5ins) diameter. The distances between timbers varies along the route, between 1m (c.3ft) and 1.5m (c.5ft). A water tank may have been sited part way along. It is thought that a spring further up the slope would have taken the aqueduct over a gradient of some 3m.
Using the Roman bath-house
A section of one of the information boards at the site showing the hot room, far left next to the furnace, the warm room in the middle and the later cold room and plunge pool. Click to expand and see the text clearly.
Had you been lucky enough to be a Roman official with access to a local bath house, bathing followed a sequence of steps that was imported from the core of the Roman Empire. Movement was through a sequence of warming and cooling experiences.
Roman bathing followed a specific process. Bathers would get changed, and in bigger bath-houses there was a room put aside for this. They would then progress from the unheated cold room (frigidarium) to the warm room (tepidarium) to acclimatize and then to the hot room (caldarium) before heading back to the cold room to cool down and take a cold dip in the plunge-pool. All well and good in southern Italy during a balmy Mediterranean summer, and perhaps even in a good Welsh summer, but that cold pool really didn’t look that appealing to me on a chilly day in April! A bathhouse was often accompanied by an outside, walled exercise area, but there is no indication that the Prestatyn bathhouse offered such a facility.
The Melyd Avenue complex of buildings
1930s survey of the masonry buildings at the site, showing the stone buildings including the bath house (B3 near the bottom of the image) and the trial cuts cut across the site. Source: Newstead 1937 (National Library of Wales)
The bath house was part of a bigger complex of buildings, only some of which have survived. The site was discovered and informally investigated in 1933 by Mr F. Gilbert Smith, who noted objects and carried out surveys. It was thought that it might have been a component of a Roman fort. It was excavated between 1934 and 1937 by Professor Robert Newstead, who found both the bath house (his Building 3) and two other stone-built buildings (Buildings 1 and 2). He also investigated a section of “paved causeway” found by Smith, and made 9 “cuts” (investigative trenches) at other parts of the site. The bath house has been described above. Building 1 consisted of three rooms in a line, with what had once had a tiled floor at one end, and measured c.19 x c.7m (62ft 6ins by 23ft). It produced a coin of Vespasian dating to c. AD 71, as well as pieces of a Samian ware platter also dating to the late 1st century. Samian ware (terra Sigillata) is a bright, glossy red high-status pottery often highly decorated in relief, which is often stamped with the manufacturer’s mark, and is very useful for dating (see image further down the page, and the excellent video at the end of the post by Guy de la Bédoyère). Building 2 was less clearly defined and far less informative, at least c.11m long (36ft), producing a single undated piece of amphora, and had been damaged by fire.
Samian pottery found at the Prestatyn site. Source: Newstead 1938
The cut through the section of “paved causeway” identified by Smith and shown on the above plan revealed that it was made of flat sandstone slabs over large pine logs on top of “a mess of brushwood in a peaty matrix.” Within these layers there were Roman potsherds and pieces of window glass as well as animal bones. The other cuts revealed no features but the one in front of building 3 produced a piece of millefiori glass, 7 pieces of window glass, some fragments of a glass flask and a small black counter as well as some samian ware. In 1938 further excavations produced no more buildings, and consisted mainly of taking sample cuts through the site, and these produced Roman levels that contained fragments of Roman objects. All of the data from the site over the years of excavation placed it within the later 1st to the later 2nd centuries AD. As well as tiles and antefixes stamped with 20th Legion stamps, diagnostic finds included a Vespasian coin, some distinctive pieces of samian, other dateable types of pottery and fragments of decorative and glass as well as some fittings for horses and some jewellery.
The 1972-73 rescue excavations followed another building development in nearby Prestatyn Meadows, during which Roman materials were found, including a column base and tiles stamped with LEG XX VV. Excavations could not take place at the precise location of the discovery due to building regulations, and were therefore carried out a little to the south, with three trial trenches opened to sample the area. No structural remains were found, but there were plenty of objects dating to the late 1st and 2nd centuries AD, consisting of building fragments and domestic rubbish including samian, coarse ware, window glass, flint, animal bones and coal.
Period plans showing the location of major features. Source: Blockley 1989, fig.6 p.12
The 1984-5 excavations, undertaken and published by Kevin Blockley in 1989 on behalf of the Clwyd and Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT), considerably expanded the view of what was going on at the site. Excavations took place over two seasons, or 47 weeks, and uncovered 1544 sq m (c.5065) sq ft). As well as both pre-Roman and post-Roman discoveries, he found eleven timber-built buildings over two phases of Roman occupation, most of them with both postholes and stakeholes, indicating a probable timber frame with wattle-and-daub wall construction. Over 2000 small-finds were excavated. Blockley and his team were also responsible for the discovery of the well and the water supply to the new cold room and plunge pool added in c.AD 150, described above. Most importantly, the excavations were able to make more sense of the chronology of the site, making use primarily of pottery types to derive date-ranges for different buildings and phases.
Sequence diagram for Period II, and location plan. Source: Blockley 1989, fig 31 p.54. Click image to enlarge.
Blockley concludes that the earliest phase of the site was building R1, which, judging by Flavian date pottery and Vespasianic coins, both of which showed significant use-wear, suggest a start date somewhere in the AD 70s. The bronze-smith workshops were first established in around AD 90-100 with buildings R3 and R4, and the site continued to develop until around AD 160, when it was abandoned. The bath-house, established in AD 120, was therefore built when the site was already some 50 years old.
The data in the timber-built buildings included features (like postholes, wall trenches, hearths and floors) and finds (industrial tools, industrial waste, and manufactured objects like horse-ware fittings, whetstones, querns, millstones, spindle whorls, pestles and mortars, brooches and finger rings, tableware glass, window glass, both fine and coarse pottery, ceramic crucibles and moulds, items made of bone, leather, wood and clay, and bricks and tiles). Pulling all the data from all of the timber buildings together, Blockley found that a picture of a copper-alloy works emerged, an industrial site that was producing goods that were probably purchased both locally and sent further afield, making use of the Roman communication network.
Brooches of copper alloy of the Colchester type. Source: Blockley 1989, fig 36 p.89
The metalwork, including some lead (including weights and pot rivets) and heavily corroded iron, was dominated by copper-alloy, a form of bronze. This was used to make brooches, studs, plates, simple finger rings, pins, needles and shield-bindings. Of particular interest are the enamelled brooches, with coloured enamel inlays in different patterns, of which a number of complete or near-complete examples were found. These include Colchester, Headstud, trumpet, plate and penannular types, all popular fashion items in late 1st and 2nd century Britain, and some unclassified types. Only one of the finger-rings stood out, and this was a copy, in tin, of a 2nd century Roman type of silver ring using yellow glass in place of a precious or semi-precious stone.
The glass includes 600 fragments, 377 of which were table- and kitchen-ware (the bulk of which were bottles) and 159 from window glass. It all falls within the time-range of the first half of the 1st century AD to the end of the 2nd century. Some of the table-ware was brightly coloured and highly prestigious, but most of it was blue-green. The window glass is thought to have come mainly from the bath-house, and was notably smooth and of very high quality.
The pottery assemblage, consisting of broken pieces, included both fine wares and coarse wares. It ncluded items made of local raw materials, making up 44% of the assemblage, and imports. The imports included black-burnished ware from Dorset (10%), samian (14%) and amphorae from Spain and Italy (19%). A small number of white-ware flagons from Mancetter were also found (1%). Some were manufactured from the Holt kilns, near Chester, and others were probably made on the Cheshire plains.
Botanical and faunal remains give some indication of diet. Although botanical remains tend to be fairly rare, the waterlogged conditions in the well preserved 13 samples of plant remains that were sent for analysis, and included carbonized grain, chaff and seeds. The well was abandoned after Period IIA, so these survivors probably belong to IIB, contemporary with the second phase of the bath-house. Of the grain remains, spelt was the dominant species, followed by emmer wheat and small amounts of barley and oats, probably all crop-processing waste. Spelt is particularly resistant to cold, wind, diseases and pests, so would have been the most suitable crop for an exposed area without good quality soil. Weeds found in the samples represent those that grow in amongst crops, and are well adapted to disturbed conditions.
Animal remains, some of which retained butchery marks, include sheep, the dominant species, cattle and pig remains. Some fowl were kept and horse bones were found in small numbers. Wild species include red and roe deer, goose, duck and hare.
Interpretation – what did these buildings represent?
Coarse pottery from the Prestatyn site. Source: Newstead 1938 (National Library of Wales)
Although this all suggested a well-built if fairly modest settlement, neither Newstead nor Blockley discovered any indications of a potential fort. A ditch with a clay “rampart” was found, but this was later interpreted as an enclosure for the settlement. However, the idea that there may have been a fort at Prestatyn continued to linger, as this could have been a civilian settlement on the outside of a fort. In 1973 Roman building rubble was found c. 30 to 40m south of the bath-house, and judged to date to not later than c. AD 150. This rubble included a column base, some 20th Legion roof tiles, and fragments of building stones, pottery, window glass, fine and coarse pottery and flint, all dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. When planning permission was granted for the housing estate, it was excavated by archaeologists in the 1980s, published in 1989, discussed below, producing numerous timber buildings of 1st-2nd century Roman date. Geophysical survey in the grounds of Ysgol y Llys in the mid-1980s and further evaluations in 2001 and 2003 failed to provide any Roman features or material. Overall, the idea that the bath house was associated with a fort has now been rejected.
So what was the bath house doing in this particular location? It so often happens that prominent Roman sites lie in unexpected places. The one that springs to mind is Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum) which was once a bustling walled town in Hampshire, an administrative capital with all the buildings, facilities and services that Roman Chester once had, but is now just a set of fields and ruined walls in agricultural land, which requires (and has received) research and explanation. The Prestatyn settlement is very small by comparison, but equally requires contextualization and explanation.
Detail from one of the information boards, showing the relatve locations of the bath house and its associated buildings, the nearby lead mines and St Asaph, which may have been Roman Varis.
The buildings themselves and the objects found suggest that the site probably represents an industrial site with a Roman lead-mining operation and harbour, which attracted Romano-British metallurgists who set up workshops nearby. There was certainly a lead ore mining operating dating to the Roman period in nearby Meliden, and this seems like a good match for the location the site, sitting between the mines and the sea. It is not the only lead-mining operation in northeast Wales. The best known source of lead locally in the Roman period was Halkyn Mountain, which had rich veins of lead ore (galena). Another site exploited by Roman miners was in the Pentre-Oakenholt area of Flint, accompanied by a number of masonry buildings, and another was found at Pentre Farm, where timber structures and 20th Legion stamped tiles were found.
David Mason has described the Prestatyn site as “most likely a transhipment centre if not the actual focus of ore-smelting.” He believes that one of the ingots of lead found in Chester, dated to AD 74, probably originated in Prestatyn (see image below). It was marked with the word “DECEANGL,” meaning “mined in the land of the Deceangli tribe,” in whose territory it was found. According to Roman records, at the time of the Roman conquest, most of Britain was divided into tribal areas, and the Deceangli were based in northeast Wales, giving the area a geographical as well as a tribal identity. The ingot (or pig) was discovered in 1886 in the remains of what is thought to have been a Roman timber quayside on the Dee in Chester. This quayside location for the ingot, together with the 20 ingots of lead found in the river at Runcorn, thought to have been lost in a shipwreck, underline the importance of moving lead by boat.
Lead ingot from a river jetty site at the edge of Chester racecourse dating to 74AD. Source: David Mason’s “Roman Chester. The City of the Eagles,” p.45
Three lead pigs (ingots) in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, including the example shown above
In fact, given the sheer quantities that David Mason estimates would have been needed for the building of the fort at Deva (Chester), it is difficult to imagine the significant amounts being moved any other way: 39 tons or 50 wagon-loads for water pipes, and 34 tons or 43 wagon-loads for reservoir linings.
Roman lead pipes in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester
Lead stamp used to mark bread. The abbreviated inscription reads “Made by Victor of the Century of Claudius Augustus”
The Coflein report suggests that “a vicus-like settlement associated with a harbour installation designed for the shipment of lead and silver from nearby the mines, though its precise nature is unclear.” A vicus was a small settlement (plural vici), usually rural, that springs up on the edges of a centre of Roman activity such as a fort or mining or quarrying operation in order to sell goods and services. It has been suggested that some of those connected with larger military forts were established intentionally, but at smaller military and industrial sites there may have been a more spontaneous development of such vici.
The mixture of Romano-British timber buildings and more official stone-built structures argues for a pragmatic working relationship between the Roman military, the Roman industrial team operating at Prestatyn and local metallurgists, each benefiting from the resources, skills and knowledge of the other, as well as the potentially extensive through-traffic – although whether a British copper-alloy worker ever had the opportunity to test out the joys of the bath-house is an other matter!
A Roman Road?
Information board at the site showing linkages between different sites in the Roman period. Click image to expand to read clearly.
Most of these proposals would make sense if the bath house and the related structures that must have accompanied it were on a road that connected into the road network; or that it was associated with a port, or both. The Antonine Itinerary lists a route in north Wales as Iter IX, which ran between the legionary fortresses at Chester (Roman Deva) and Caernarfon (Roman Segontium) at the crossing to Anglesey. This bypassed the north coast in favour of a more direct route, which still, however, had to skirt the Clwydian Range, nearing the coast at the northern end of the range, which would not have been too far from Prestatyn . As the CPAT report puts it:
It is assumed that a major Roman road ran the length The Vale of Clwyd, linking military sites at Caer Gai near Bala and an assumed fort in the Corwen area with sites in the neighbourhood of Ruthin and St Asaph. The course of this road and its relationship with Roman settlements and possible military activity in the vale will no doubt be discovered in the future.
The Roman fort of Canovium at Caerhun with St Mary’s Church in one corner. Copyright Mark Walters, Skywest Surveys, CC BY-NC-DD 4.0. Source: Vici.org
The route is presumed to have proceeded to the fort at Caerhun (Roman Canovium) in the Vale of Clwyd before heading towards Segontium and Anglesey. A bath house with a hypocaust was found in the Canovium fort, which was built in c.75 AD and destroyed in c.200, with tiles similarly stamped with Legio XX markings. The Antonine Itinerary’s description of Iter IX mentions a Roman way station named Varis. Although its precise location is unknown, and there were suggestions that this might have been located at Prestatyn, the most likely candidate at the moment is thought to be St Asaph. It is possible that a branch road could have connected a settlement at Prestatyn to this route, possibly at St Asaph, particularly if it was being used as a coastal port. Looking at a map, Rhyl might seem a better choice for a port, but there may have been political as well as economic reasons why Prestatyn could have been more suitable.
A Roman milestone was found at Gwaenysgor in 1956, dated to AD 231-5. The nearest known Roman road was 6km away, so it was either brought from there or an as-yet undiscovered off-shoot of that road.
The site and its objects in the 20th and 21st Centuries
The bath-house site
Although the site was opened up for excavation in 1937 and 1938, it was covered over afterwards to protect it. When planning permission was granted for the building of the housing estate, which began in the 1980s, archaeologists were allowed in to excavate, after which the site was left uncovered and preserved for visits by the general public.
Screen grab of part of Steve Howe’s Chester Walls page showing what Melyd Avenue looked like on one of his visits, as well as one of the stamped tiles in situ. Source: A Virtual Stroll Around the Walls of Chester website . Click to expand.
The modern story of the Prestatyn Roman baths as a visitor attraction is described by Steve Howe on his A Virtual Walk Around The Walls website here. Steve Howe visited in 1998, when the hypocaust was in good condition, preserving tiles stamped with the name and symbol of the 20th Legion. In subsequent visits in 2001 and 2008, Steve Howe talks about the the deterioration of the site, the absence of the stamped tiles and the general state of degradation. Writing in 2022, in County Voice (a Denbighshire County Council newsletter), Claudia Smith outlined a series of works being proposed in order to repair the site and to improve its public appeal.
At the end of the 1984-5 report, published in 1989, Blockley suggested that looking for the postulated harbour would be a logical follow-up project, in the Fforddisa area of Prestatyn, but this has not yet taken place.
In 2018 the Daily Post reported that an area of land earmarked for a housing development near Dyserth (to the south of Prestatyn) was under assessment by the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust with a view to excavating it to attempt to find the elusive section of Roman road that it is thought must have connected Prestatyn with the wider world, but I have not yet tracked down any follow-up to this story.
Artefacts
Professor Newstead describes, in his 1937 publication, how some objects remained in the private collection of Mr Smith, the discoverer of the site, and how those that Newstead himself had excavated were removed to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. The Roman Inscriptions of Britain website mentions that many of the inscribed objects from Prestatyn were in the Prestatyn Museum, but also notes that this appears to have closed down. There is no note of where either Mr Smith’s collection or the Prestatyn Museum’s objects (perhaps one and the same) may have ended up. I cannot find a record in Kevin Blockley’s account of the 1984-84 excavations of where the artefacts from that excavation were eventually sent.
Final Comments
Although the bath-house, built in around AD 120, was small, by AD 150 it contained the three main components required for a bath-house: the hot room, warm room and cold room with plunge pool. This required two technical elements – a means of heating the two heated rooms (furnace, flues and hypocausts) and a means of channelling cold water to and from the cold room (aqueduct and drains, and possibly water tanks). A store for wood would have been required adjacent to the bath-house. The bath-house was the leisure-centre for a settlement dominated by industrial workshops, notably for the manufacture of objects made of copper-alloy (bronze).
The site is a bit like a glacial erratic – something unexpected left during a substantial invasion and after a substantial retreat. There is not a great deal of Rome surviving above the ground in northeast Wales, and that gives the Prestatyn Bath House all the more kudos. As more sites are discovered and more stretches of road revealed, the picture should become clearer. In spite of neglect in the past, during which some of the stamp-marked tiles were apparently removed, it is a great little site to visit, for which details are provided below.
Visiting
As mentioned above, this is right in the middle of a small housing estate, a cul-de-sac. It is just off the A547 (Meliden Road) to Prestatyn on Melyd Avenue. Its What3Words location is ///unfocused.detective.jetting. There are two car parking spaces at the site, and a limited amount of on-road parking, but this is not a busy destination. It was nice that we were not the only people there when we arrived, and I am sure that there are occasional school trips to a local heritage celebrity, but it was a quiet visit whilst we were there.
The two information boards at the site were helpful, and each of them had a QR code. Very sadly it comes up with a “404 Page Not Found” message. Always a disappointment when this happens and a good idea to provide additional information is allowed to lapse.
The approach pathway to the bath house ends in three steps.
Always thinking about people with unwilling legs, I would give this a thumbs-up based on my Dad’s experiences (walking with a stick due to a dodgy leg, but okay for the three steps at the site if there was an arm to lean on). There are no handrails accompanying the steps, and part of the circuit around the site was blocked by repair works.
If you are coming at it from Chester, and want a day trip, it is worth coming off the A55 at Junction 31 and taking the opportunity to visit Gop Cairn, Gop Cave (see details on the Coflein website – parking in Trelawnyd and reached via public footpath, and about which much more on a future post) and the stunning Dyserth waterfall as well, which is just a few seconds from the road (operating a 50p per person honesty payment system, with a small car park next door). Take a raincoat or hat – the spray from the waterfall is considerable and we got quite a good soaking!
There seem to be plenty of places to stop for a coffee in the villages, and we had a very good lunch at the newly renovated The Crown public house in Trelawnyd after walking up to Gop cairn and cave.
Sources
Books and papers
The site under excavation by Newstead in the 1930s. Source: Newstead 1937 (National Library of Wales)
Arnold, Christopher J. and Jeffrey L. Davies, 2000. Roman and Early Medieval Wales. Sutton Publishing
Blockley, Kevin. 1989. Prestatyn 1984-5. An Iron Age Farmstead and Romano-British Industrial Settlement in North Wales. BAR British Series 210
de la Bédoyère, Guy, 2001. The Buildings of Roman Britain. Tempus Publishing
de la Bédoyère, Guy, 1988. Samian Ware. Shire
Dark, Ken and Dark, Petra 1997. The Landscape of Roman Britain. Sutton Publishing
Mason, David J.P. 2001, 2007. Roman Chester. The City of the Eagles. Tempus Publishing
Newstead, Robert 1937. The Roman Station, Prestatyn. First Interim Report. Archaeologia Cambrensis vol.92), p.208-32
Newstead, Robert 1938. The Roman Station, Prestatyn. Second Interim Report. Archaeologia Cambrensis vol.93), p.175-91.
The Chester Archaeological Society 2024 season of excursions started excellently today with the CAS visit to the Church of St Collen, who gave his name to Llangollen. It is the only church in Wales to have taken the saint’s name. Like most Medieval churches in Wales, St Collen’s has undergone considerable alterations, including an 18thcentury tower and a 19th century chancel, vestry and south nave, but there are some very fine 13th century features to be seen, in the Perpendicular Gothic style, including an impressive shrine canopy and mason’s marks. There are also intriguing signs that a Lady Chapel was once incorporated into north aisle. The most remarkable feature of the church is a really superb hammerbeam roof bedecked with ornamental sculptures, both religious and secular, from the early 16th century.
Today, to ensure the survival of the church as a living and breathing community asset, it is undergoing extensive but very sympathetic re-forming. Suzanne Evans is the Project Manager of this massive task, and was our superb guide today. Suzanne described how the reinvented church will be fully inclusive, not only of the existing congregation who are much-attached to the church, but of the wider community as well, taking into account the needs of those currently unable to make the most of what St Collen’s has to offer. At the same time, the exciting opportunity will be taken to investigate as much of the church’s architectural and funerary history as possible, adding to the community’s understanding of this important contributor to the town’s impressive ecclesiastical heritage.
Suzanne guided us around both the key features and recent discoveries, explaining all the steps to be taken in the upcoming weeks and years. As well as replacement glass doors and the opening up of the nave to enable the interior to be visible by passers-by, there will be new lighting, heating, kitchen and toilet facilities, as well as a large stage, which will all contribute to enhancing the value of the space and improving the visibility of the superb architecture. All archaeological and architectural discoveries will be professionally recorded and published.
After a very welcome cup of tea, there was a round of applause as we thanked both Suzanne for being our terrific guide and Pauline for making all the arrangements. It was great to meet some of the other CAS members, and to hear all the questions and observations. There was a lot of information sharing, which is exactly what one expects of CAS members. What a great start to the year’s excursions! Many thanks again Suzanne and Pauline.
Whether the visitor is an adult or a child, the prehistoric copper mine on the Great Orme’s Head next to Llandudno in northwest Wales is one of the best days out in Wales, and not only for those with a love of prehistory. A visit carries with it a real sense of adventure and discovery, and it is an almost unique experience.
The Great Orme mines, which became one of the most successful mining operations in Bronze Age Britain, were worked at the mine-face by both adults and children. Metallurgy revolutionized many aspects of industry and society in later prehistory before the arrival of the Romans. As the use of bronze (a mixture of copper and tin) spread throughout Britain and Europe the Great Orme became part of a European network of metal distribution. Objects made with raw materials from the site were found not merely in Britain but as far away as the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland and France, indicating how important this supply of copper became be when combined with tin from southwest England to make bronze.
Some prehistoric copper mines in Britain have only been recognized in the last few decades, partly because they were worked in more recent times, disguising earlier mining operations, and partly because they do not stand out as obviously as other archaeological sites. By contrast, the most familiar Bronze Age sites in north Wales are those that stand out clearly in the landscape, including round barrows (earth mounds) and cairns (stone mounds) in their 100s. Stone circles, stone rows and menhirs (standing stones) are also found, and occasionally a lucky find will produce a settlement site. Thanks to a number of research projects, four major concentrations of copper mines have now been identified, one of which is in Ireland, two of which are in Wales, and one in northwest England. These are now adding to the body of data not merely about copper mining but about the Bronze Age as a whole. Many are still the subject of ongoing investigation.
The Great Orme. Llandudno is clearly visible where the Great Orme begins, forming a crescent, the end of which is marked by the Little Orme to the east. On the right, heading west, is the opening of the river Conwy. By Jay-Jerry. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC_2.0_Generic.
The Great Orme mining enterprise, which operated from around 1700-900BC (Early Bronze Age to Early Iron Age), was at its busiest for a period of over 200 years between 1600 and 1400 BC (c.3600 to 3400 years ago). In order to sustain itself for that long, the mines required, as an absolute minimum: a) a food-producing economy that could sustain a large group of miners on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, b) the knowledge, technical ability, and labour to tunnel through limestone, c) the technical ability and skills to process the ore, d) a long-term supply of wood for fire-setting and furnaces, e) a market for its products, and f) the development of long-distance connections to acquire the tin that was needed to make bronze and to distribute the finished product to its purchasers. There was also certainly a requirement amongst the miners and smelters, just as there were amongst other members of society, to address their religious needs and their sense of identity. These issues will all be touched on briefly below.
Location of the Great Orme’s Head. Courtesy Google Maps
This post will cover the following topics, all very briefly
Vital Statistics
The earliest British copper mining
Discovery and excavation at the Great Orme
Why copper and bronze?
The geological source of the Great Orme copper
Mining the ore
Processing the ore
Manufacture of copper and bronze tools
The development of the Great Orme Copper mines over time
The miners of the Great Orme
The copper and bronze trade in Britain
The end of Bronze Age copper mining in Britain
Final comments
Visiting
Sources
Some of the vital statistics
Part of the opencast mines and, at the base of the steps, access into the tunnels of the underground mines
The vital statistics for the Great Orme copper mines are sufficiently eye-popping to give a sense of how remarkable the mines were during the 500 years in which they were operational. Bearing in mind that they are still under investigation, and will be for years to come, the following figures, summarized by Steve Burrow of the National Museum of Wales in 2011, are merely guidelines, as they will have shifted upwards since then. Burrow refers to the development of the bronze industry out of the beginnings of the copper industry “the first Industrial revolution,” and when you consider the figures for the Great Orme alone you can see why this claim can be made, as they represent a considerable demand for a new product.
The opencast mines were dug from above, top-down, rather than horizontally through tunnels. This left great upright remnants of hard rock behind, now rather eerily resembling some devastated dystopian city. The soft rock could be removed with simple bone picks and hand-held hammers and it is estimated that using this tools the mine eventually covered an area 55m long, 23m wide and 8m deep. It has been estimated that 28,000 tonnes of rock had been removed from it, in order to gather the copper ore it contained, before it was exhausted.
A simplified plan of the mines in 1992, before further investigations took place. Source: Burrow 2011, p.86
In the underground mines where miners tunnelled through the rock horizontally following seams of ore, 6.5km of tunnels had been investigated by 2011, with 8-10km more anticipated, and it had been discovered that the mines reached a depth of 70m over 9 separate levels. An estimated 12,600 tonnes of ore-bearing rock were removed from them (on top of that removed from the opencast mines). The illustration on the right provides an impression of how the mines were understood in 1992 and although this picture has been considerably expanded in the last 32 years, it demonstrates very nicely how the vertical shafts and horizontal tunnels were connected and how ambitious the tunneling was.
Of the tools found, over 33,00 either whole or fragmentary bone objects were found, used as picks and shovels, and over 2400 stone hand-hammers and mauls were discovered, some of which can be seen on display at the site in the Archaeology Store. The smallest of these could be hand-held, but the largest at over 20kg would have to have been incorporated into some sort of swinging device in order to smack it into the rock. See below for details of these and other tools.
The magnificence of these numbers becomes entirely plausible on a visit to the mine when something of the extent of both opencast and underground mining operations can be experienced in person.
The earliest British copper mining
Neal Johnson’s useful visual timeline of the Early Metal Age, showing how bringing together excavated data can help archaeologists to understand when and how technological, economic and social changes occurred. Source: Neal Johnson 2017, p.7, fig.2 (in Sources at the end of Part 1). Click to enlarge and read clearly.
In the 19th century Three Age system, the Stone Age is followed by the Bronze Age, which is followed in turn by the Iron Age. The Three-Age System was devised in 1836 by Christian Thomsen, Danish archaeologist and curator of the National Museum of Denmark who developed the scheme for his guidebook to the museum’s archaeology collection. The scheme was very influential, and Thomsen can be commended for attempting to make chronological sense of an archaeological record that had was poorly understood at this time. Although these are now recognized as very crude categorizations, which exclude certain vital components of material data, they continue to be used and do represent the basic chronological truth that for hundreds of thousands of years utilitarian tools were made of stone and only then, in quick succession, by copper, bronze and iron.
Richard Bradley’s dating of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age
In more recent systems, a Copper Age, or Chalcolithic, is inserted between the Neolithic (New Stone Age) and the Early Bronze Age and as Neal Johnson’s helpful timeline above shows, a far more nuanced understanding of this period of prehistory is now possible, incorporating pottery and the soft metals gold and silver. There has also been a shift away from materials and objects towards understanding the people and the behaviours that they they help to represent. The Bronze Age itself has been subdivided into three main phases, which reflects social and economic differences as well as changes in raw material usage and tool types. Richard Bradley assigns the dates shown in the table to the right, above, to the various sub-periods of the Bronze Age, and in regional schemes these can be modified to suit local findings.
The Moel Arthur axehead hoard. Source: Frances Lynch, The Later Neolithic and Earlier Bronze Age in Prehistoric Wales, p. 101, figure 3.7
Copper mining was introduced from Europe. Two possible sources are viable for its arrival in Ireland and England. One is central Europe which was a major early producer, and the other is the Atlantic coast, with Iberia a plausible source of copper working to Killarney in southwest Ireland, where the earliest Irish and Britsh mines are found. The early Ross Island copper mine was in use from around 2400BC, and is the earliest of the Irish and British copper mines, whilst Mount Gabriel was in use from around 1700BC.
In Wales the earliest copper objects to be found in Britain are axes, but they were not made in Wales. A broken copper axe thought to be from south Gwynedd, and a collection of three copper axes from Moel Arthur are well known examples. On the basis of metallurgical analysis they are thought to have been imported from southwest Ireland. Copper axes were modelled on stone tools but were soon followed by an entirely new form, for which no precedent in stone is known, called a halberd. It is thought that it may have been designed as a weapon, either actual or symbolic, but what is of primary interest here is that the value of copper for inventing new and special designs was being recognized at this time.
Chronology for Bronze Age mines in Britain. Source: Williams and de Veslud, 2019. Click image to enlarge to read more clearly
Dates for the Great Orme extend from c.1900 to 400 BC (Early Bronze age to Early Iron Age) but the main activity took place towards from the middle of the Early Bronze Age until towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age. The phases described by R.Alan Williams in 2019 identify a main period of activity between c.1600 and 1400BC. This “mining boom” peak coincides with the well-known Acton Park phase of metal production, first identified at Acton Park in Wrexham, which will be discussed on a future post. The decline of metal working at Great Orme began to take place between 1400 and 1300 BC. A “twilight period” lasted into the Early Iron Age. Note that that Ross Island had already gone out of use by the time the Great Orme was opened, and that many of the other Early Bronze Age mines in mid-Wales and northwest England were also coming to an end by this time. Some of the Irish mines survived into the Middle Bronze Age, but the Great Orme was he only site to continue into the Late Bronze Age.
Discovery and excavation of the Great Orme mines
Today it is recognized that Welsh copper mines are to be found concentrated in mid- and north Wales, the biggest of which were the Great Orme and Parys (Anglesey) mines, just 20 km apart. Both were exploited for copper during the 18th and 19th centuries, and it is at this time, both in Wales and at Alderley Edge in Cheshire, that the earlier mines were first recognized and recorded when the miners found that their new shafts were colliding with pre-existing ones. Antiquarian interest in some of these much earlier mine shafts resulted in some speculative reports about how old they might be.
In the case of the Great Orme, the first modern excavations took place in 1938-1939when Oliver Davies, an expert on Roman mining in Europe, headed up a committee for The British Association for the Advancement of Science. The remit of the committee was to investigate early metal mining. In mid and north Wales it investigated mines on Parys (Anglesey), Cwmystwyth (Ceredigion), Nantyreira (Gwynedd) and the Great Orme’s Head. Although their attempts to date the mines assumed that they were probably “Celtic” (i.e. more recent than they actually are) the project successfully raised an awareness of prehistoric copper mining in Wales.
Building on this initial research, the amateur archaeologist Duncan James carried out some excavations in the Great Orme area in the 1970s, and was able to obtain an radiocarbon date that indicated a Bronze Age date. In the 1980s Andrew Lewis for the Great Orme Exploration Society and Andrew Dutton for the Gwynedd Archaeological Trust both undertook survey and excavation work that made considerable advances in knowledge about the copper mines. Work by Simon Timberlake and the Early Mines Research Group greatly expanded knowledge of copper mining in the north- and mid-Wales area as a whole. Since the 1980s work has continued to be carried out at the Great Orme and elsewhere, and a number of post-graduate research projects, some of which are available for download on the Research page of the Great Orme official website, have focused on particular aspects of the mines and related topics. Most recently, the important PhD research undertaken by R. Alan Williams at the Great Orme was published by Archaeopress in 2023, and contains the most up to date information.
Why copper and bronze?
Simple stone reduction process from core to tool. Source: Grace 1997
Before the introduction of copper, the main materials for making tools were stone, wood and bone. Whereas these were worked by reduction (knapping pieces of stone off a core or carving wood and bone to make shaped tools), copper was created by melting well-ground malachite using a pestle and mortar until it underwent a process of change, becoming molten. This was poured into a mould to cool and create an object. This is discussed further below. It was not an entirely alien production process, having something in common with kiln-fired pottery, which had been made since the Neolithic, but it was a new approach to tools-making.
Copper was not as strong or resilient as stone, and its primary value was the production of a particularly thin and very sharp blade. Although stone tools could be very sharp, it was impossible to achieve the thin edge of a cast metal. This edge was particularly useful for tree felling and branch cutting, as well as the shaping of wood. Although it would blunt quickly, because the metal was so soft, the blade could be easily sharpened after use. When damaged, it could be recast with other broken objects and used to create new tools. However, because of its softens its uses continued to be limited. In some cases, its value as a prestige item may have exceeded its value as a functional tool.
Group of damaged bronze objects probably originally destined for recycling.
Copper came into its own when blended with 10% tin to make bronze, which represented a new world of possibility and innovation. By lowering the melting point of copper, the addition of tin made copper easier to handle and the resulting bronze was harder and stronger than copper, just as sharp, and less prone to damage. Although the earliest bronze forms copied copper objects, designs soon emerged that represented significant departures from stone and copper antecedents, including adzes, halberds, knives, pins, ornaments and in the later Bronze Age swords and shields. Like copper it could be recast and moulded into new shapes, providing them with a very long-term life cycle that outlived the lives of individual tools, conferring a particular and unique value on metal tools. Where a stone tool would be reworked so many times that it had to be discarded, and a pot once broken could not be safely mended, metal could achieve a form of eternal life. Many of the hoards of broken tools that have been found in Britain were clearly grouped together and retained in order to be recycled in this way, although others were clearly deposited in special locations for more spiritual purposes, perhaps partly because of this unique quality.
Bronze Age stone arrowheads from Merthyr Mawr Warren, Bridgend, Wales. Source: National Museum of Wales
Stone, wood and bone continued to be important in the Bronze Age. Stone tools in particular, became the heavy-duty implements that complemented the new metal equipment. Pestles and mortars continued to have an important role in the processing of cereals, pigments and ores, and small arrowheads continued to have a value in hunting during the Early Bronze Age. Bone was still used for small, thin needles and pins, and wood was still vital for hafting tools of bone and stone. In the longer term, although stone retained a role in many parts of life, copper and bronze took over many of the roles that many organic materials had previous had for the manufacture of tools.
The source of the Great Orme copper
The Great Orme is a grey limestone promontory surrounded on three sides by the sea. It emerges from the main coastline of north Wales at Llandudno, and is the same rock system that sits so dramatically along the western edge of the Clwydian Range above Llangollen. In a paper on the Great Orme research page, Cathy Hollis and Alanna Juerges explain some of the processes that took place to produce the mines on the Great Orme, of which the following summary is a much-simplified version. Go to the above link to see the detailed overview.
The Great Orme limestone is a sedimentary rock formed of the accumulated remains of billions of calcium carbonate-secreting organic sea creatures that died and were laid down with rock salts in warm, shallow tropical seas during the Lower Carboniferous (c.335-330 million years ago). These include shellfish, foraminifera and corals, some of which can be seen as fossils in sections of the limestone on the Great Orme. There are multiple layers of the limestone on the Great Orme, often clearly visible, and each represents different phases of sediments as they were laid down. Around 330 million years ago this deposition of carbonates stopped, and the landmass of which the Great Orme was a part was eventually buried beneath a kilometer of other materials. In the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods, a collision between two shifting tectonic plates lead to folding and uplift of the landscape in north Wales, with faults torn across the Great Orme.
The faults allowed molten rocks, minerals and gases to escape. Amongst these escapees was dolostone, which in some places on the Great Orme altered the character of the limestone, becoming dolomite,or dolomitic limestone. The copper ores for which the miners were searching were found in veins that cross-cut the dolostone, meaning that they formed after it. This formation probably occurred during a new period of tectonic activity that was responsible for the uplift of The Alps and other European landmasses, including the Great Orme. The ores found their way into these new faults, and as this period of tectonic activity ended, and the atmosphere began to cool the molten materials, they slowly solidified where they lay. On the Great Orme, chalcopyrite was the copper ore that had inserted itself into seams of the limestone, and this was oxidized and became malachite. It was the malachite that was used for the manufacture of copper objects. Because much, but by no means all, of the limestone on the Great Orme was dolomitized, this created conditions that were favourable for mining. This new rock was much softer than the parent rock and some of it was highly friable and quite easily removed by bone tools.
The extent of the Devensian ice sheets. Source: Nicholas Flemming 2002
A further relevant process was the geomorphological activity that took place during the last Ice Age, the Devensian. The Irish Sea ice sheet that covered North Wales during the Devensian dragged down the surface of the Great Orme’s Head, scouring it of its upper surfaces as the ice sheet made its relentless way south. When the ice sheets finally retreated at around 11,000 years ago, Wales had been reshaped and re-profiled, and the the copper-bearing seams of the Great Orme had been exposed. The horizontal and vertical cracks in and fissures the limestone were further expanded by the subsequent action of rainwater erosion, groundwater and ice as the rock was subject to continual weathering.
For anyone interested in a full understanding of the geology, there are references at the end of this post in Sources.
Mining the ore
The copper mining process on Mount Gabriel at a similar date, by William O’Brien 1996, p.32 (see Sources at end).
As an industrial process, malachite had to be extracted first and then processed. Malachite is not the only ore that can be used to make copper metalwork and bronze, but is one of the simpler ones to process. As William O’Brien discusses, following his excavations at the Mount Gabriel copper mine in southwest Ireland, this requires prospecting, organizing mining teams, collecting raw materials and applying existing skills for the manufacture of tools to enable the extraction of ore and the specialized conversion of that ore to metal. O’Brien has put some elements of these workstreams into a diagram shown right, which gives a good sense of some of the processes involved (click image to enlarge). Although there are differences at the Great Orme, what this demonstrates very effectively is that there are three connected flows involved. The first, on the left of the diagram, is the collection of raw materials and the preparation and manufacture of tools and equipment. The second is the extraction cycle, and the third, in two stages, is the processing of ore.
Mining tools
The tools left behind in the Great Orme mines were mainly made of bone and stone, but there is evidence in the form of markings in the stone of bronze picks and chisels. Metals were almost certainly recycled rather than abandoned. Pottery was probably used for some tasks, although not much evidence of it is found at the mines, which suggests that other, more lightweight, less fragile and larger forms of carrier were preferred, made of basketry, leather or textile (such as sacking). All organic materials that are vulnerable to decay over time and are only very rarely found on archaeological sites and usually only in exceptional environmental conditions.
By far the greatest number of tools, over 33,000 of whole and fragmentary pieces, were made of bone. Over half of these were cattle bone, and the rest were a mix of sheep, goat, deer and wild boar or pig, mainly ribs, limbs and shoulder blades. The long thin bones were used as picks, whilst the wide-based shoulder blades were used as shovels. Many of them were bright green when they were found, stained by the malachite.
Some of the stone hammers and mauls used in the mines, held today in the archaeological store on the site.
The majority of the stone tool collection is represented by over 2400 vast stone hammers with have been battered into their present shape by usage. At least some of them were thought to have fallen from nearby harder outcrops that were more durable than the softer local sedimentary rocks. Many of these were found on the local beaches, where they had been rolled and rounded. They varied in size from pieces that could be held by hand to enormous “mauls” that could be up to 20lbs in weight and would have been employed using some form of sling so that the stone could be swung into the rock face.
Possible reconstruction of the hafting of a Copa Hill maul from mid Wales showing how it may have been used in a sling. Source: Burrow 2011, p.90
Opencast shaft mining
Helpful artist’s impression from the Great Orme mines of what the opencast mine would have looked like.
The earliest phase of Great Orme mining was opencast mining that took place in the Pyllau valley, as shown in the artist’s reconstruction left, on one of the information boards. The scoured landscape that the retreating ice-sheets had revealed permitted the prospectors to recognize the malachite-rich seams in the limestone, and to access it with relative ease by open cast mining. The techniques was to mine from the top down, removing the soft dolomitic limestone from in between the pieces of harder original limestone, creating the bizarre-looking landscape that remains today. This could be done using picks and shovels manufactured from bone, aided with hand-held hammerstones. A series of ladders, lifts and pulleys were probably required as the mines shafts became deeper, ready for copper processing on the surface. Eventually these stone shafts were exhausted and if the mines were to continue to provide copper, underground mining was the only solution.
Underground tunnel mining
“Deads” in one of the galleries on the tour
Underground mining would have been very hard. Over the centuries eventually nine levels were excavated out of the limestone (of which two are included on the visit).
Some of the tunnels, like most of those shown in this post were tall and thin, allowing people to move down them upright in single-file. Some were significantly smaller, long and thin that could only be mined lying down by the smallest members of society – perhaps women and certainly, given how tiny the passages were, children. Others were opened out into large galleries like caverns, one of which is thought to be the largest surviving prehistoric man-made underground excavation in the world. One of the hollowed out galleries on the visit is filled with what are known as “deads,” the large fragments of waste rock left behind after ore had been extracted. It made more sense to backfill exhausted tunnels and galleries with waste then to remove it laboriously to the surface, where disposal would still have been a problem.
There were three methods of excavating malachite in the underground mines. The first continued to be bone picks for softer rock, the dolomitic limestones, but harder rocks eventually had to be mined as well. Harder rocks were excavated by a combination of fire-setting and stone tools. Stone tools, described above, included hand-held hammers and large mauls that would have been fixed in a sling in order to swing it at the mine face, both requiring the the input of energy and strength in a very difficult environment filled with stone dust and sharp fragments.
Simulation of a fire in one of the narrow shafts that head off horizontally from the bigger tunnels, thankfully without the smoke
Fire-setting added to the discomfort and raised the risk of serious injury. It consists of gathering a large pile of dead wood, which was placed against rock faces to be mined in order to make them more brittle and easier to work. Sometimes water could be added to the hot rock to help with the fragmentation process. The smoke created by the fire in such small spaces with no ventilation carried the risk of suffocating anyone in the vicinity, as well as the possibility of lung disease. Presumably the mines were vacated during this process, but the risk must still have been high for those who set the fires. In the long term, lung damage both from the smoke and the dust and fragments of stone must have been an ongoing problem.
Processing the ore
Cleaning the ore
The site of the ore cleaning site at Ffynnon Rhufeinig. Source: Wager and Ottaway 2018
In order to ensure that few impurities entered the smelting process, and that a good quality copper was obtained, the ore mined from the Great Orme had to be separated from the general waste material around it, called gangue. This stage in copper manufacturing is called beneficiation. When an ore was mined it was still attached to bits of rock and dust, and this had to be removed. This involved grinding, cleaning and sorting. Pestles and mortars were used to grind down the ore, and examples have been found at the Great Orme. Once it had been reduced, the mixture of rock and ore had to be sorted both by hand and eye, and usually by straining through running water. Once the cleaning process had been completed, it might be re-ground into a powder that could then be smelted. On the Great Orme a cleaning site was discovered and excavated at Ffynnon Rhufeinig, a natural spring that was run into a series of channels and ponds. the site was a kilometer away from the mines themselves, and it is suggested that the wider landscape was used during the Early Bronze Age phase of the site for processes connected with the mines, other than mining itself.
Copper smelting
Location of copper smelting site at Pentrwyn, Great Orme. Source: Williams 2014
Once the ore was sorted and cleaned, it underwent a process called smelting. Smelting is a term that refers to an ore being converted to a metal by the application of heat up to and beyond melting point. This took place above ground, and required specialized skills and equipment. So far only one smelting site has been identified at the Great Orme, dating to around 900BC, well after the copper mine’s main period of maximum exploitation, at a location some distance from the mine itself at Pentrwyn on the coast. Copper can be found in a number of different forms, some more difficult to process than others, but the malachite (copper carbonate) at the Great Orme required a relatively simple production methodology.
Display of prehistoric smelting equipment in a shelter on the pathway at the top of the opencast mine at the Great Orme.
After the ore had been cleaned, a furnace had to be built and prepared. The furnace was often formed by a pit with short walls. To this a clay tuyère was fitted, which was a tube that interfaced between the furnace and a pair of bellows. The bellows helped to raise the heat by blowing oxygen to feed the flames. This was an important factor because malachite needs to be between heated to between 1100 and 1200ºC before it will become molten. It runs the risk of mixing with the copper ore to become copper oxide, which cannot be used for metal production, so charcoal was also added into the furnace. The charcoal burns much hotter than wood, so contributed additional aid to the heating process but at the same time releases carbon dioxide as it burns, which helps to neutralize the impact of the oxygen on the ore, enabling it to become copper. The ore was heated in the furnace within a crucible, which is a vessel that will handle the high temperatures required for melting metals. The melted metal was then poured into a mould made of stone, pottery or bronze.
Bronze smelting
Bronze was a transformation of copper and tin into something entirely stronger and more resilient than either. It usually consisted of 90% copper and 10% tin, although later cocktails produced slightly different results. Tin lowers the melting point of copper, making it easier to convert the copper ore to liquid form. There were two methods used at the Great Orme. The first was by combining both copper and tin ore in a single smelting process. The second was adding tin or or to copper that had already been melted. As with copper, the Bronze was then moulded to form different tools and weapons.
The excellent video below shows a copper palstave under construction from the crushing of the ore using a pestle and mortar, via the smelting of the ore, to the moulding of the molten metal to the trimming of the final tool.
The manufacture of metal tools
Copper axe and stone mould from Durham. British Museum WG.2267. Source: British Museum
The earliest casting moulds in which the tools were formed were made of stone, and were open, with no top half. An example of an open stone mould from north Wales was found at Betws y Coed. The making of moulds became in itself a skilled task, creating the exact shape in stone that was required in the finished metal object, and they could create much more complex forms. Later,moulds could be made of clay or bronze. Once the copper or bronze had been poured into the mold and allowed to cool slowly, the object hardened and could be removed from the mould, to be finished by breaking off any excess metal and sharpening the blade. Initially only solid items like flat axes and more complex palstaves (such as the one shown below) were made.
A palstave found at the Little Orme
Two parts of moulds for a palstave were found in three miles from the Great Orme in 2017 by a metal detectorist, shown below
Palstave moulds found near the Great Orme in 2017. Source: BBC News
Soon hollow or socketed objects were made as well, with the use of double-moulds and by inserting cores made of clay or other materials, which created a new way of hafting tools. and as these and the the socketed axe below shows, additional features like functional loops and decorative components could be added if required.
Bronze socketed axe head from Pydew, in the hills above Llandudno Junction, to the southeast of the Great Orme north Wales.
Socketed axe head on a haft, found at Must Farm, Cambridge. Source: Cambridge Archaeological Unit
The copper miners
An opening into one of the tiny shafts that only children would have been small enough to work
The early opencast miners would have been fit enough to undertake physical labour, and the first open cast mining required both knowledge and some basic skills, but once the knowledge was acquired, the rest would have been well within the capability of a farming or herding community. The veins of malachite sandwiched within soft limestone had to be recognized, and a strategy for extracting it and processing it had to be learned, but the ores could be excavated from soft dolomitized limestone using bone picks. The use of bone for tools rather than stone means that although it would have been a laborious task, it was not as back-breaking as tunnelling through solid rock.
This clearly changed. As the mining activities plunged underground and tunnels had to be excavated in the limestone to give access to the malachite, the miners must have been selected for more than merely strength and fitness. As stated above, it is entirely likely that women were employed in the task, being smaller than most men, and it is unquestionable that children were employed to excavate the slender warrens that only such small bodies could excavate and navigate. The community must have been in a position to replace its miners, because this was not merely back-breaking work, but dangerous too.
Damaged vertebra from the skeleton of an 18-year old found in a cave burial on the Little Orme. Source: John Blore 2012.
The risk to lungs and life from smoke, dust and rock particles has already been mentioned. Other dangers potentially included the collapse of walls and roofs, poor ventilation and the difficulties of lighting. No evidence has been found so far to show how the mines were illuminated, although there are a number of alternatives possible. As the mine went deeper, nearing the groundwater level, there may also have been danger of flooding. Wet stone from constant dripping in rainy and weather and falling rock must have been responsible for their fair share of bruises, cuts, head injuries and bone breaks, a potential problem where minimal medical knowledge was available and when infections could result in serious difficulty.
Long-term repetitive strain and stress injuries must have been common as well, leading to defects, as well as certain debilities and disabilities. A burial of four skeletons in the North Face Cave on the Little Orme, contemporary with the mines, shows that one of the individuals had sustained serious compression damage to his vertebrae, perhaps a result of extensive mining activity over a long period.
Visitor centre reconstruction of one of the Great Orme settlements.
Although a number of settlement sites have been recognized on the Great Orme, not all of them were necessarily associated with the mines, although the characteristic round houses would have been the type of settlement familiar to the miners. It has been suggested that the mines may only have been worked on a seasonal basis, at least in the first decades, and that the miners belonged to farming communities whose main settlement sites were elsewhere, or that they were nomadic pastoralist who were either fully mobile or transhumant. Later on, when the mines were more intensively worked, more permanent lodgings may have been required. It is also possible that over the entire span of time during which the mines were used, settlements shifted positions.
Visual representation of domesticate bone elements found in the mine. Source: James 2011.
The miners were not ill-fed, if the available evidence represents ongoing dietary possibilities, and there is nothing to suggest that there is any reason why they would not have been well sustained for the hard work undertaken, although conditions were certainly unpleasant. Sîan James has carried out post-graduate analysis of the bones found at the mines, which give some insight into what types of meat were consumed there. Sîan James’s research carried out at the Great Orme on the animal bones indicates that over cattle, which represent over 50% of the faunal remains, were butchered elsewhere and were brought to the site in manageable joints or portions. Sheep/goat (difficult to distinguish from one another in the archaeological record) and pig are also represented, making up the other half of the domestic species. No fish bones were found and only a handful of shellfish remains were discovered. Coastal resources were obviously not much used, if at all, at least at the mine itself. The picture that emerges is that the miners, at least whilst they were at the mines, relied on animal husbandry. They either maintained their own herds, were provided meat by their communities or acquired it by exchange with other groups.
Mining is an extreme form of landscape modification and management that impacted not only the immediate area of the mines themselves, but the surrounding landscape. Fire-setting and smelting would have required trees for burning on a much larger scale than previously known, and the miners would have required livestock in the vicinity for both food and raw materials. There can be little doubt that just as humans modified the Great Orme, the miners and their surroundings became entangled with the identity of the mining community and those connected with it. Although settlement and associated community activities may have been mobile, the mines were a fixed point on the Great Orme and an anchor that remained the same over multiple generations. The transmission of specialized craft knowledge from one generation to another may have differentiated the miners and smelters as a group apart, in either a good way, as valued contributors to the local wealth, or in a negative way, as an isolated minority alienated from normal community living. There is no way of knowing.
Drilled amber bead from the North Face Cave burial on the Little Orme (from one of the visitor information signs).
Although it is beyond the scope of this post, understanding who the miners were is a matter of looking not only at the mines and the resources that supported them but at the burial sites and other monuments in the surrounding landscape that incorporated their ideas and beliefs. Their own burial monuments inhabited this space. On the Great Orme there are Bronze Age round cairns as well as a stone row and a possible stone circle. On the Little Orme the North Face Cave revealed the remains of four individuals buried at the time that the mines were worked, aged from 4 to 18 years old. A drilled amber bead was found with one of the burials. The Great Orme is dotted with the sites of those who came before. Neolithic sites and earlier Bronze Age sites are common here and throughout the uplands of north Wales, and the miners would have been aware of them. The landscape was inhabited not merely by the miners and by pastoralist herders but by their distant and recent ancestors, making this a spiritual as well as an economic landscape.
The Little Orme to the east of the Great Orme, seen from the Great Orme just above the copper mines. Llandudno follows the crescent of the bay between the two promontories.
From left to right. The Mold Cape superimposed on a digital sketch, which could be man or woman (Source: British Museum Partnership Programme); Photograph of the Wrexham County Borough Museum hologram of the reconstructed head of Brymbo Man (my photo); The recreated grave and capstone with original skeleton and grave goods of Brymbo Man in the Wrexham County Borough Museum (my photo).
There is a potential link between the Little Orme North Face Cave with the Bryn yr Ellyllon cairn. As well as the gold cape and other fine objects, numerous amber beads were found. One of the Little Orme burials was also accompanied by an amber bead, shown above. Amber beads are in themselves evidence of communications over long distances as amber was not available locally. It was sometimes washed up on beaches of northeast England, but otherwise had to be sourced from the Balkans and central Europe.My earlier series about two burial monuments in northeast Wales at Bryn yr Ffynnon (containing the remains of “Brymbo man” and a very fine Beaker) and Bryn yr Ellyllon (containing the Mold gold cape and other luxury objects) touches on some of these ideas.
The copper trade – selling and travelling
Trade and/or exchange
From a visitor centre sign showing the Voorhout hoard of bronze metalwork found in the Netherlands. 13 out of 17 of the objects were made with materials from the Great Orme
At the Great Orme the movement of goods falls into two parts. The first concerns the acquisition of tin for the manufacture of bronze from southwest England. The second concerns the distribution of metal or metalwork overseas.
The distribution of raw materials and tools in Britain was not unprecedented, and was a well known aspect of the Late Neolithic, where good quality flint from southern England (the uber-workable material for making small stone tools), and completed stone axe heads from Cumbria and north Wales, for example, had been conveyed from their geological sources to areas where they were unavailable. However, the linkages formed during the copper trade were new.
The copper trade probably started in response to local need, but by 1600BC it had upped its game to meet both a national and international need for bronze, which is made by the addition of tin. Tin is only available in a very small number of locations in southwest England, and the two, copper and tin, had to be brought together. Because the proportions of bronze were usually 90% copper to 10% tin, it made sense for the tin to be brought to the copper mining operation to be worked, and as a base for bronze mining the Great Orme became particularly successful. Given the relative locations of southwest England and the Great Orme, is is probable that the trade in tin was sea-based.
River routes showing how Group I shield-patterned palstaves made of Great Orme ores may have been distributed throughout Britain. Source: Williams and de Veslud 2019. Enlarge to see more detail
There is a question about why, at 1600BC the Great Orme was suddenly more productive than it had been before. One possibility is that other mines were exhausted at this time, some having been worked since the Chalcolithic and throughout most of the Early Bronze Age, but more data is required on this subject. Another is that It also needed a market for its products, and the development of the Acton Park industry (dating to around 1500-1400BC) created sufficient demand to sustain a well-placed mine with good connections to other areas.
As an economic enterprise, the Great Orme needed to ensure that its product arrived in the areas where there was demand. Using two types of data, a 2019 study investigated how Great Orme metals reached other parts of Britain and the continent. First, the researchers, Williams and Le Carlier de Veslud identified that a metalwork tradition known as Acton Park (named for its type site in Wrexham), made of Great Orme metals, was found in particular concentration in both the Fenlands of southeast England and in northeast Wales as far as its borders with England. The Fenlands help to demonstrate the reach of Great Orme metalwork to the east coast, whist the industry in northeast Wales presumably benefited from its relative proximity to the mine. A second object type, the Group I shield-pattern palstave, has also been used to help determine other locations where Great Orme metals were found, together with the routes that distributed them. The palstaves were found throughout most of Wales and southern Britain, as well as overseas, and the main concentrations seem to align with river systems, suggesting that the palstaves were distributed either by boat or by pack animals along river valleys.
Map at the visitor centre showing some of the European areas to which the Great Orme copper was sent
The presence of Great Orme copper and bronze overseas is particularly good evidence of sea-borne trade or exchange. Items such as the Voorhaut hoard from the Netherlands have been found as far away as Denmark and Sweden in the northeast, Poland in the east and in France, perhaps taken along the rivers Seine and the Loire in France.
In archaeology it is often unclear how both sides of an exchange may have operated. It is clear that metals were being manufactured and traded, but it is not quite as clear what the Great Orme miners were receiving in return. One possibility is that they were receiving livestock and cereals, but although this is certainly viable as one income stream, it seems to understate the value of the products being sold. Another option, which does not rule out the first, is that jet and amber, both of which are found in graves in north Wales were being sent west into Wales from the east coast, where these raw materials can be found, as prestige goods in return for Great Orme metals.
The only remaining bead, out of around 300, of a necklace of amber beads from the Mold Cape burial Bryn yr Ellyllon. British Museum 1852,0615.1. Source: British Museum
People are also often a little difficult to see clearly in archaeological data, but the metalwork industry of the Great Orme must have had more than miners and metallurgists to sustain it. It seems likely that when the processed metal and the finished artefacts were sent overseas, this must have involved middle-men who were not responsible for digging out the mines and smelting the ores, but were concerned with securing the tin from the southwest and sending the required products to wherever there was demand and payment. It has been suggested that the owner of the Mold Cape at Bryn yr Ellyllon near Mold, which included amber as well as gold, may have benefited from the wealth of the copper trade in order to be in a position to be buried with such luxurious objects, removing them from circulation in the living world.
As well as miners and middle-men there must have been additional people involved in the network who carried the metalwork from the Great Orme to where they were needed, perhaps returning with scrap metal for recasting. Although these people are usually, if not always impossible to identify with any confidence, they certainly existed. Some of them may have carried goods by pack animal, others by inland boats and coast-huggers, still others by vessels that were capable of crossing between England and the continent.
The end of copper mining in Britain
After the Early Bronze Age most of the copper mines went out of use in Britain and Ireland at around 1500-1600BC. The Great Orme was the exception, lasting until c.1300BC. As Richard Bradley says, it is not well understood why this and other changes in British mining occurred, “but they form part of a more general development in the distribution of metalwork which saw quite rapid oscillations between the use of insular copper and a greater dependence on Continental sources of supply.” A possibility suggested by Timberlake and Marshall in 2013 is that the decline in production, if not associated with the exhaustion of British mines, may have been the arrival of plenty of recycled metal from the continent, and particularly from The Alps at around 1400BC.
Final Comments
The above account is a description of the Bronze Age mines, and it was marvelous to read up about them. The copper mines at the Great Orme are one of the most vibrant places in Britain for getting a sense of people and their activities in our prehistoric past. Assuming that you are not claustrophobic and don’t mind being underground (about which more in “Visiting” below), this is a superb and revelatory experience. There is a strong sense of the lengths to which people in the Middle Bronze Age would go to supply the demand for copper. The sheer scale of the enterprise, as you literally rub shoulders with the past, is astounding. There is real feel of intimacy about the experience that is difficult to replicate at most other prehistoric sites in the UK. A visit is a powerful way of connecting with the miners, and a nearly unique insight into at least one aspect of Bronze Age living. Fabulous. Don’t miss it.
Visting
The beginning of Marine Drive, seen from the Llandudno pleasure pier
The Great Orme is one of a great many places of substantial interest in the area, and is easily fitted into a visit to the Llandudno and Conwy areas. Don’t miss Marine Drive, the road that runs around the Great Orme and allows you to get up close and personal with both the geology and the coastal scenery. If you like walking, the Great Orme has many footpaths, some of which take in other prehistoric sites as well as the nice little church of St Tudno, and if you like Medieval history the nearby Conwy Castle and the city walls along which you can walk, are simply brilliant. Conwy’s Elizabethan town-house Plas Mawr is one of Britain’s most remarkable Elizabethan survivors and is absolutely superb.
One of the Great Orme trams, also showing one of the cable car towers too. Photo taken just above the copper mine.
There is plenty of parking at the mines, but if you fancy taking the tram from Llandudno, which is a great option, the half way station is a five minute walk away. The mines are closed off-season so check the website for when they re-open. This year, 2024,they opened for the season on 16th March.
I visited at the end of March, not a peak time of year for visitors, and at 9.30am, which was opening time. I was literally there alone. By the time I returned to my car at 11.30am, having gone after my visit for a short walk to find a Neolithic burial site, it was beginning to get quite busy. There was what was a long stream of children being herded by adults headed for the visitor centre as I was driving away, and although I am sure that they had a splendid time, I’m very glad that I had made it out before they had made it in! If you don’t like crowds, I would suggest that avoiding school holidays and weekends would probably be a good idea.
Initially you go in via the visitor centre. The Visitor Centre is small but provides a very good introduction to the mines. There are information boards that do not go into great detail but still do an excellent job of introducing a complex subject, and there is a small cinema with a video running on a loop, which is a very helpful introduction to the mines. There are also relevant objects on display that provide a good insight into the job of the copper mines.
The visit to the mines is a circular route that includes both the inner mines and a walk above the open cast mines. In total, inside and out, it takes about 40 minutes. Initially the visit takes you underground, along the narrow horizontal shafts that were dug during the Bronze Age, with even smaller and narrower tunnels visible along the route, which would have been too small for adults to work.
A note on claustrophobia and people with uncertain footing. If you are not good in confined spaces, read on. When they give you a non-optional adjustable hard hat to take in this is not a silly precaution to make you feel like an explorer – the head shield is very necessary. I bumped my hard-hatted head several times against the tunnel tops, and was very glad of the protection. The photo on the left is Mum in 2005, (not the most flattering view) and you can see that her red hard hat was necessary in one of the shorter stretches of tunnel. Underfoot you can be confident of a good, even surface, but it can be wet because limestone drips continually after rain. Sensible footwear is required. There are help buttons positioned around the walk, so there is the ability to call for help in an emergency, but this is not a place for someone who dislikes confined spaces or is worried about underfoot conditions. There is a flight of around 35 steps at both start and finish.
When you emerge from the tunnels, you follow the wide path that takes you above the opencast mines where there are more information boards and videos to see about both the Bronze Age mines and the 19th century mining works that first discovered the evidence of the prehistoric mining works, and this gives you an insight into a completely different type of mining.
The route takes you back to the car park via the archaeological stores and the small gift shop. There was no information booklet for sale when I was there, and there were no general background books for sale either (unless my truffle-hound ability to sniff out books failed me). For anyone wanting to read up in advance, see my “Quick Wins” recommendations at the top of my list of Sources, just under the video below.
Sources
Quick wins
The list of books, papers and websites below shows the references that were used for this post, but that was a matter of cobbling together the story from many different sources. The official website for the Great Orme mines is a great resource for some very specific research papers but there is not a lot of background information.
If you want to read up about Bronze Age mining and the Great Orme’s Head in advance and don’t have the time or inclination to your own cobbling, here are a couple of recommendations. Shire always does a good job of finding authors who can present a lot of information succinctly and informatively, and William O’Brien’s Bronze Age Copper Mining in Britain and Ireland is no exception, being both short and stuffed full of very digestible information about the Great Orme and several other mines, although just a little out of date having been published in 1996. There is a very good summary of the Great Orme mines in Steve Burrow’s well-illustrated and informative 2011 book Shadowlands, an introduction to Wales for the period 3000-1500BC (don’t be put off by the silly title – it is a National Museum of Wales publication, excellently researched, well written and well worth reading from beginning to end). Another good summary of the Great Orme can be found in Frances Lynch’s chapter in Prehistoric Wales published in 2000. The best detailed single reference for anyone who has academic leanings is the really excellent but seriously expensive Boom and Bust in Bronze Age Britain: The Great Orme Copper Mine and European Trade by R. Alan Williams (Archaeopress 2023), based on his PhD research at the Great Orme, but you can get the gist of some of his ideas in the 2019 Antiquity paper, Boom and bust in Bronze Age Britain by R. Alan Williams and Cécile Le Carlier de Veslud, which is currently available to read online free of charge: https://tinyurl.com/2d54yhax. Full details of all the above are shown below, in alphabetical order by author’s surname.
Books and papers
Where publications are available to read free of charge online I have provided the URL but do bear in mind the web address can change and that sometimes papers are taken down, so if you want to keep a copy of any paper, I recommend that you download and save it.
James, Sîan E. 2011. The economic, social and environmental implications of faunal remains from the Bronze Age Copper Mines at Great Orme, North Wales. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Liverpool, March 2011. Great Orme research page https://www.greatormemines.info/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Sian-James.pdf
Johnson, Neal. 2017. Early Bronze Age Barrows of the Anglo-Welsh Border. BAR British Series 632
Johnston, Robert. 2008. Later Prehistoric Landscapes and Inhabitation. In (ed.) Pollard, Joshua. Prehistoric Britain. Blackwell, p.268-287
Lynch, F. 2000. The Later Neolithic and Earlier Bronze Age. In. Lynch, F., Aldhouse-Green, S., and Davies, J.L. (eds.) Prehistoric Wales. Sutton Publishing, p.79-138
O’Brien, William. 1996. Bronze Age Copper Mining in Britain and Ireland. Shire Archaeology. [Concentrates mainly on the site of Mount Gabriel, southwest Ireland]
Wager, Emma and Ottaway, Barbara 2019. Optimal versus minimal preservation: two case studies of Bronze Age ore processing sites. Historical Metallurgy 52(1) for 2018 (published 2019) p.22–32 https://hmsjournal.org/index.php/home/article/download/31/29/29
Williams, Alan R. 2023. Boom and Bust in Bronze Age Britain. The Great Orme Copper Mine and the European Trade. Archaeopress
Williams, C.J. 1995, A History of the Great Orme Mines from the Bronze Age to the Victorian Age. A Monograph of British Mining no.52. Northern Mine Research Society
Many thanks to Aleta Doran, Artist in Residence at Chester Cathedral for today’s introduction to stained glass artist Trena Cox, who was based in Chester for most of her long career. Aleta is a brilliant and engaging presenter, currently working hard on the upcoming Trena Cox exhibition, which she is curating. Although this was organized specially for Chester Archaeological Society, Aleta is doing more presentations during the Heritage Festival and if you get the chance to attend, do go. It will give you a completely new insight into the world of 20th Century stained glass, as well as introducing you to a really creative part of the cathedral’s history. I’ll keep this relatively short so as not to spoil the event for those of you who have tickets.
The big window in the slype shows the child Christ on one river bank, and St Christopher on the other. This is very unconventional, as Christ is usually depicted being carried across the water on the shoulders of St Christopher. Aleta described how this window clearly demonstrates many of the features of Trena Cox’s work, with the beautifully executed details of both figures, the surrounding landscape and the flowers, birds and animals that sit at the feet of the two figures. Also typical are the portrait-style faces, which seem incredibly life-like. The colouring of the glass, as in all her work, is vibrantly jewel-like and the background semi-opaque glass concentrates the eye on colours whilst allowing in light. There are many emblems of international pilgrimage, known from badges purchased from the Middle Ages by pilgrims to commemorate their achievements. As well as many others, these include St Thomas of Canterbury, St James of Santiago de Compostella, and of course Chester Cathedral’s own St Werburgh herself, her symbol being five geese in a basket. It is a rich and symbol-laden piece that rewards time taken to appreciate it.
The cloister used to open out onto the garth, with a stone arcade forming a corridor with the buildings that surround the cloister. In 1920 Dean Frank Bennet was appointed as the new head of the cathedral, and decided to take measures to improve the cathedral’s fortunes. In order to glaze the arcade that surrounded the garth, the dean decided to raise public funds. It is thought that some funds were raised by allowing donors for the cloister glass to add commemorations to loved ones in panes withing the windows, which survive today. Each window represents a saint, religious festival or holy day. Trena Cox contributed eight panels in two adjacent sections of the cloister, showing eight different saints. In one set of four, the two at the top are Hugh Lupus who founded the abbey and St Werburgh’s mother St Ermengild In the lower section are St Thomas Becket and King Henry II. In the other set, the two figures at the top are Abbot Witchurch and Ralph Higden and the two below King Alfred and St Piegmund. Aleta talked us through the significance of each of these saints, and why there were chosen. These are much smaller and therefore much simpler compositions, but again the colours are vibrant, and the faces resemble portraiture.
Based in Churton 
