by Max Adams
At Howick, among the shifting dunes on Northumberland’s coast, the very fragile remains of a teepee-like structure were uncovered and excavated between 2000 and 2002. The shape and size of the dwelling were reconstructed from the traces of stake-holes, whose soil-stained fills were perfectly recognizable to the excavators after nine-and-a-half-thousand years. This house-like tent, or tent-like house, was circular in plan and formed from poles cut from young, probably coppiced ash trees—which shows that even in these early times, humans knew how to manage areas of woodland.
In 2010, however, Howick’s claim to be Britain’s first domestic housing development was outdone by the discoveries of a team from the University of York, excavating at a famous site called Star Carr, near Scarborough, on the north edge of the Vale of Pickering. This was once a large lake fed by glacial meltwaters from the North Yorkshire Moors and Wolds. The ‘house’ is similar to that at Howick, only several hundred years older, dating to perhaps 8500 BC. The inhabitants of Star Carr hunted deer, elk and wild boar and were able to trap and catch birds and fish from the waters of their lake. Their tools were made of flint and wood, and they worked leather with great skill.
Since then, there is another claimant. At Echline, near South Queensferry—the site of the new Forth River Crossing construction—archaeologists have recovered the remains of another Mesolithic ‘house’, also dating from the ninth millennium BC. One of the things that Mesolithic peoples shared was a deep love of hazelnuts, so dating these structures has been fortunately quite easy: hazelnut shells, carbonized in the remains of hearths, give pretty accurate dates using the radioactive isotope Carbon14, which is present in all living tissue and which decays at a predictable rate. One thing is for sure: some day, maybe in the near future, something even older will stake a claim to be our oldest house.
What these three candidates for Britain’s oldest house have in common (just in case you want to help in the search for the next one) is that they were all located close to water; in fact, very much along the coastal or estuarine waters, where, at all times of the year, shellfish and other marine resources—birds and seals, samphire, sea buckthorn and so on—offered a reliable subsistence when times were hard. Great swathes of Britain were covered by forests of aspen, birch, willow and Scots pine, perhaps so densely that inland areas were largely avoided by people. The first clearings were made not, I suspect, for dwelling, but to attract game, and much of the year’s cycle would have been based on following herds of deer up onto the high hills, where meadow grasses on the barer ground fed them and allowed hunters to track them more easily.
WILLOW
One of many native species of willow, the osier has traditionally been coppiced or pollarded for its withies: thin, pliable rods for making baskets and hurdles, often used as an alternative to the hazel.
House design runs in fashions. It’s a salutary and depressing thought that our modern houses, built by large-scale developers, only have to last twenty-five years, until the mortgage has been paid off; then they can be bulldozed and rebuilt to keep the construction industry going. Something wrong there, I fancy. A half-decent Bronze Age or Iron Age roundhouse built with hazel hurdles for walls, ash poles for rafters, and heather or reeds for the roof would easily outlast the average modern semi; and when it did fail, it could be rebuilt with local materials in a few weeks. The roundhouse served its purpose from the end of the third millennium BC until well into the Roman period: more than two-thousand years, during which time the design reached something close to perfection. It was built not from timber but using the underwood available from coppiced woodland, and poles and withies grown straight from an old stump, pretty nearly all of the same size: an unending production line. The economy of design and elegance in the engineering behind a roundhouse is breathtaking, and it is there to see in the many reconstructions in various parts of Britain—at Butser Farm in Hampshire, for example, where a full-scale prehistoric village runs as a long-term archaeological experiment.
Your eyes soon get used to the reduced light levels in a roundhouse. The circular shape begins to feel perfectly natural, with the hearth at the centre and sleeping areas, storage and chicken pens around the sides, drying and curing meat hanging in the rafters, and every single component replaceable or fixable with the tools of the woodsman: axe and adze, billhook and froe, twybil, knife and saw. One of many insights into early farming cultures comes from the realization that this kin-based, roundhouse-based society was, like the house itself, organized concentrically: hearth and extended family at the core.
One of the most remarkable archaeological excavations of the nineteenth century uncovered a complete Iron Age village perched on the edge of the Somerset marshes near Glastonbury: the so-called Lake Village. The preservation of the remains in damp, airless, waterlogged peat was marvellous: piles sunk deep into the mud for foundations; hazel hurdles two-thousand years old which had been used not only as walls but also as floors and working platforms. Not just houses either, but stables, cart sheds, granaries and threshing floors were excavated too, and brilliantly recorded. Seventy years later, a Cambridge scholar called David Clarke was able to reconstruct the way in which the village’s economy and social life worked by analysing the distribution of artefacts deposited there and the relationships of size and space within the village between the houses and their outbuildings. All this because, in the right conditions, wood will survive the predations of time and bacteria.
There must have been hundreds of such villages in Britain and Ireland, as there were across Europe. All relied on the consummate skill of prehistoric communities in tapping the resources of their woodlands without destroying them. A sense of what this sort of living was like can be appreciated at the Crannog Centre on Scotland’s Loch Tay: sit for a while, poised above the waters of the loch, in a roundhouse suspended on piles driven into the lake bed and reached by a wooden causeway from the shore. It is intimate, if not claustrophobic. The internal use of space is fascinating, mediated by the composition of a nuclear family, the concentric form of the structure and the needs of domestic and agricultural storage. At the centre, the social and cultural focus is the fire, which sits on a bed of stone; above are rafters working to a conical point, and suspended from these are tools, cloth, curing meats; elevated platforms provide bedding space, and partitions keep animals apart from looms, straw and food. Not luxurious, but domestically functional. The fug in there on a winter’s day must have been something to experience. But in summer—and these might have been exclusively summer dwellings, on a sort of transhumant trail—the sense of airy comfort is highly attractive. Even so, when leaving such a place you are inclined to scratch your head involuntarily at the thought of all the bugs and lice you would have had to share the space with.
Houses for the dead
A tombstone in Winslow, Maine, reads:
In Memory of Beza Wood. Departed this life Nov. 2nd 1837 Aged 45 years.
Here lies one Wood. Enclosed in wood, One Wood Within another.
The outer wood Is very good: We cannot prase the other.
The idea of making a container for a dead loved-one is ancient indeed—the first certain burials go as far back as a hundred-thousand years. Containers for the dead came, and come, in all shapes and sizes, from cinerary urns holding ashes (I was once, in my guise as a burial archaeologist, amazed to find myself looking at the urn bearing the remains of Vita Sackville West in the ancestral tomb of the Earls de la Warre at Withyham in Kent) to stone-lined cists, lead sarcophagi, mausolea and great shrines like St Peter’s in Rome. Wooden coffins go back well into prehistory, none of them more elaborate than the multi-shelled sarcophagi of the Egyptian pharaohs. But maybe the first was a log, split in half and hollowed out, not unlike a boat. And perhaps not coincidentally, many early medieval European kings were buried in ships, like King Raedwald of Sutton Hoo fame. The practice of the traditional Christian burial in an oak or elm coffin only became fashionable after the fourteenth century; but there are many f
ascinating burials from the early medieval period that blur the line between burial and architecture. The most famous early coffin, and probably the best-travelled, is that of St Cuthbert, the Northumbrian bishop who died and was buried on Lindisfarne in 687, then exhumed eleven years later and put into an oak coffin carved with runes, the Anglo-Saxon alphabet specifically designed to be carved into wood (its letters have no curves), and images of the Apostles. After the Viking raids of a century later, the monks of his community took their precious holy man, still in his coffin but carefully protected inside a hide-bound travelling chest, on a marathon journey of over a hundred miles, more than a century before it found its current resting-place in Durham Cathedral. It is a remarkable survival—one of the oldest wooden carved objects in England.
Many early Irish saints were buried under house-like wooden shrines, which had holes made in them so that the faithful could touch the bones of the saint and be healed by them. When these bones were collected and distributed with other relics they were often kept in yew-wood reliquaries modelled on the wooden churches of the early fathers. Later, as with the tall wooden crosses of the period, the same shapes were translated into stone—an example of what is called skeuomorphism—crucks (like pairs of wishbones fashioned from split tree trunks), gables and all. In the same way, the original church on Lindisfarne, built in 635, was made of hewn oak planks and thatched, in ‘the Irish manner’ according to Bede. Later it was clad entirely in lead before being replaced with stone, which many of the Catholic faith believed was a more appropriate and glorious material within which to worship their god.
Confusingly, the tombstones in Tombstone, Arizona, are made of wood.
Firewood
The log fire is a simple pleasure that taps into our deep ancestral sensibilities like its polar twin, the fear of darkness and the great wildwood. Its seductive, dangerous display is like that of a wild beast, drawing us to it then repelling us with mortal fear. Fire gives one the feeling of belonging to a crowd, and yet at the same time there is a sense of being utterly alone, absorbed in one’s most intimate, private thoughts. The fire is the focus of story and song, of shared and individual memory, of collective knowledge. It stores the memories of whole cultures in its shifting, sensuous flames. No future press-button heating technology will prevent humans from being compelled by its fatal attractions.
Firewood has its own science. The English hearth in the form we recognize it today is a comparatively modern invention, conceived by the eccentric Count Rumford, who was also in part responsible for the founding of the Royal Institution in 1800. A man of many parts, he also gave us the first thermal underwear and the Baked Alaska. There is a theme here. Latent heat was his Big Idea. An early nineteenth-century wit described how, in marrying the wealthy widow of the French scientist, tax-collector and guillotine victim Antoine Lavoisier, Rumford was merely exploring a new means of keeping himself warm.
Before the arrival of the semi-enclosed hearth, designed to burn coal without filling a parlour with smoke, the inglenook fireplace is the instantly recognizable feature of many a country house. Its size has less to do with efficiency than with the woodsman’s measure of cordwood at four-foot lengths, so that logs need not be sawn or cut to put them on the domestic fire. I did once hear tell of a Yorkshire farmer who, having acquired some old telegraph poles (soaked in pitch, naturally), could not be bothered to cut them into lengths for his fire but fed them through his sitting-room window. The mind boggles. It amuses me to see the modern use of these fireplaces in pubs—and even more so in historical films—where the fire is held in an iron basket. As it happens, this is the worst way to burn wood, which combusts most efficiently with an overdraught (unlike coal, which requires the underdraught provided by a grate). Wood should be burnt on the ground, not in the air, and anyone with a modern clean-burning woodstove will find that it burns less wood and produces more heat if the grate is kept full of wood ash and the bottom vent shut once it is going.
Before the chimney was invented—one of the first (from the thirteenth century) still adorns Aydon Castle, a fortified Northumbrian manor house—smoke was allowed to rise up into the rafters and escape naturally through holes in the roof. Celia Fiennes, an intrepid seventeenth-century traveller on horseback through all the counties of England, described a typical Borders scene with her usual light comic touch and dry irony:
I was forced to take up in a poor Cottage wch was open to ye Thatch and no partitions but hurdles plaistered. Indeed ye Loft as they Called it wch was over the other roomes was shelter’d but wth a hurdle; here I was fforced to take up my abode and ye Landlady brought me out her best sheetes wch serv’d to secure my own sheetes from her dirty blanckets, and Indeed I had her fine sheete to spread over ye top of the Clothes; but noe sleepe Could I get, they burning turff and their Chimneys are sort of fflews or open tunnills, yt ye smoake does annoy the roomes.
In other dwellings, she remarked: ‘they have no Chimneys, their smoke Comes out all over the house and there are great holes in ye sides of their houses wch Letts out the smoake when they have been well smoaked in it’. No doubt such conditions were deleterious to the health of the inhabitants. But rural populations would take some small advantage, curing their hams, cheeses and bacon by hanging them above the domestic fire. The medieval Pyrenean village of Montaillou, much studied because of its heretics and because of the extraordinarily detailed records of its inhabitants’ daily lives, paints a sensuous, cosy, if incestuous picture of the foghana—the kitchen / living room where the fire always burned, bacon was always curing, and gossip was always being shared. (Is this where the word ‘fug’ comes from, I wonder?)
Different species of wood burn differently. Softwoods like pine or spruce burn quite hot but not for long; birch burns very hot and bright but can spit; apple smells the best of any wood; beech and oak burn longest and hottest. And ash, as is commonly known, is one of the few woods (another is holly) whose fat reserves, stored over winter as oleaceous oils, allow it to be burned green; that is to say, as soon as it is cut. Generally firewood must lose eighty or so per cent of its water content to burn efficiently. Place an unseasoned log on a fire and you will see and hear it hissing as the water in its vessels boils and turns to steam. It is a waste of energy.
Firewood is much more fashionable a fuel now than it was even twenty years ago. Modern stoves are efficient and produce little ash; what they do produce is very good for the garden, a natural fertilizer. Ultra-clean-burning stoves, up to eighty per-cent efficient, can even be used in Smoke Control zones in cities and towns. Wood is a carbon-neutral fuel, meaning that so long as we do not reduce the area of land under trees, there is a balance between the amount of carbon it stores when growing and releases on burning. It used to be said that a large family home required seven acres of coppice wood to heat it over a year, burning softwoods in spring and autumn, hardwoods in winter. Now, given that we can run radiators off wood-burners, heat our water and even combine wood burning with solar panels, wood is not such an unrealistic fuel—much more pleasant and less damaging than coal. A pity, then, that many of the substantial woodland owners won’t use their trees to create a local, sustainable firewood source.
You don’t have to be wealthy to acquire an efficient wood-burning stove: they can be made from old oil drums, gas bottles or recycled iron or steel plates; I have known safes to be used. In towns and cities where pollution controls apply, stoves quite rightly have to pass stringent emissions tests, and building regulations mean that safe installation is a legal and moral requirement. Even so, I reckon that anyone with some spare savings might, these days, think of investing in a parcel of woodland solely for the fuel security it provides. Besides, as every woodsman knows, wood warms you three times: when you cut it, when you stack it and when you burn it.
At home with Saint Columba
Abbot Adomnan’s seventh-century Life of Columba is full of woody details about his saintly predecessor’s times. There are many sea voyages made in cur
raghs, the traditional sea-going vessel of the Western Isles and Ireland, and coracles. There are stories that testify to the bravery and toughness of these early Christian warriors: pines and oak trees hauled overland and then brought by raft to the island, providing timber for a longship and a great house. On another occasion, twelve curraghs were used to tow oak timbers from the mouth of Loch Shiel. Another tale, of a thief in the forest eating stolen meat from a wooden grill, reminds us just how reliant people were on objects made from wood that we would now expect to be made in metal. Most are invisible to the archaeologist, except under very rare circumstances. Columba—Colm Cille—was known to spend much of his time writing in a raised wooden hut: a pole-building, perhaps. At times a canopy of branches was used to protect the saint from crowds. And I dare say that any number of wooden crosses were erected by monks, pilgrims and the faithful. None of these survives; but a friend of mine, Martin Hopkins, recently discovered in a cemetery in County Donegal a very early cross, incised in stone but with the shape of a sharp point at the base, like a stake.
Archaeologists excavating near the ruins of Colm Cille’s monastery on Iona found evidence for wood-turning, which shows how self-sufficient the monks were. ‘Wasters’—the nobs of wood that hold a bowl on the lathe while it is being turned, and which are sawn off when the bowl is complete—were found in abundance. The monks would also have made tool handles, spoons and other implements on their lathes. What makes the bowl-turning so significant is that some of the bowls made here (generally of alder wood) were copies of exotic ceramic pots that occasionally turn up on archaeological sites along the Atlantic coasts of the British Isles during the so-called Dark Ages. (Skeuomorphism, again, but in reverse.) These bowls, known by the distinctly unsexy term ‘E-ware’, are evidence that trade continued between Britain, Ireland and the Continent in the centuries after the end of the Roman Empire.