Mudlarking
Page 6
I joined her one miserably cold and wet day in January. A small, capable woman with an easy manner, she took the long walk from the station to the river at speed, a confident air of urgency about her. As we walked she explained her approach to the foreshore and its contents. ‘People should know what’s coming out of the river so that its importance is appreciated and understood,’ she said. ‘After all, it’s not a discovery if you keep it to yourself.’ I nodded enthusiastically. My thoughts exactly.
We approached the foreshore through one of the last remaining salt marshes in the area. The winter-browned reeds and grasses rustled and startled wading birds rose in front of us as we gingerly felt our way through them, wary of sudden deep patches of mud. Then, as we neared the river, the forest came into view, and it was mind-boggling. There were two levels. We jumped off a low sharp bank onto the upper shelf – there were tangled roots of ancient alder trees everywhere, still gripping the mud in tight knots where they had once grown – but the lower shelf, which is closer to the water, is the most spectacular. We took another sharp step down, sinking into smooth thick silt. All around me, as far as I could see on either side, remains of trees were lying in the mud.
We had stepped into a tree graveyard, though the fallen trees looked as if they had floated down the river and been washed up on the last tide, momentarily caught in the silt before being carried away on the next one. These trees had once been part of a dark, dense woodland that had edged the river 6,000 years ago (they’ve been radiocarbon dated to around 4000 bc) and they have been lying here since the water levels suddenly rose and swamped them. ‘We’ve recorded oak, ash, elm and holly,’ Jane said, pointing out each of the different species to me. The longest and largest were the yew trees, some of which must have been almost thirty feet long. They had a ball of gnarled roots on one end, which reminded me of the large pear tree next to the farmhouse that had been uprooted by the Great Storm of 1987, and they were wrapped in bark. According to Jane they were still hard inside, just waterlogged and not rotten at all. This brought to mind more of what I’d read in Pepys’s diary when ancient wood was discovered at Blackwall further upstream: ‘And a yew tree he showed us (upon which, he says, the very ivy was taken up whole about it), which upon cutting with an addes, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is. They say, very much, but I do not know how hard a yew tree naturally is.’
While Jane counted trees, I set off across the mud to search for signs of the people who may have lived and hunted among them. Worked flints and early pottery have been found around the fallen trees at Erith as well as in the peat beds at Vauxhall, though in the hour I spent looking all I found was a round stone that had been crazed and cracked by the heat of a fire. I rolled it around in my pocket and pondered on it. I’d been told that stones were used to heat water. Perhaps this one had helped keep a cold family warm 6,000 years ago.
My wellington boots were heavy and clagged with mud and as I walked, each step released the strong silty essence of the river. The aromas that lift off the foreshore vary along its length. I never know if the smell will delight or offend me, or what mental switches it will flick. Mud and clay form the base notes, while the top notes change with the location, the weather and the time of year. On hot days, the foreshore emits a dank, bestial stink – pungent alkaline bursts of warm algae, rotten wood and wet sand that fill my nose and rest on my tongue. It is a smell with flavour and substance, thick and chewable. In the winter months, a steely, mineral tang is caught on the icy winds that blow downriver and leaves a taste of frozen stone in my mouth. Storms call up the sea, lifting a faintly saline scent from the river that grows brackish as the clouds darken and thunder gathers. Summer rain ignites dry mud, releasing a chalky dampness into the air.
Sometimes, I catch rich wafts as I cross a bridge or walk past the entrance to one of the damp passageways that lead to the river’s banks, but the full wealth of aromas can only really be appreciated from the foreshore itself. Sometimes the smell alone tells me where I am. At the tidal head, the river gives off the soft earthy scent of rotting leaves. On the Isle of Dogs, where the sand is dark with flakes of rust, the smell is hard and metallic. As the sun warms the thick strip of tar on the foreshore at Blackwall, the scent of sailing ships is conjured from the mud, while the oil-soaked sand at Woolwich releases traces of engines and machinery. At Erith and Vauxhall, when the tide is low, the fragrance of the foreshore is peaty and ancient. If time were odorous, it would smell like this.
I’d quite lost track of time when I heard Jane calling me from a distance. I looked up and saw that the river had turned. It was creeping steadily in towards us and we would have to begin our journey home. I slipped and skidded to where Jane was waiting on the upper shelf and found a place where I could clamber up, digging my boots into muddy footholds. From up here, I stopped to take one last look at the trees as they were covered by the water again.
The fog had begun to roll in, obscuring the Dartford Crossing, the last bridge on the Thames. It was the same fog that had settled on the river since the first primordial trickle began to cut a course through the London clay and the forests I had been looking at covered its banks. The Thames is famous for its fogs, which creep silently over the channel and smother the foreshore, a great white cloud of damp river breath, thick and consuming, filling ears and covering eyes, curling down throats and settling on lungs. Thames fogs can feel unbearably claustrophobic, too intimate and too invasive, but they also offer comfort and security, a soft white pocket in which to escape from the world.
When the fog is very thick and visibility is down to no more than a few yards, the discernible space is all that exists; there is no city, no traffic, and not another soul. The only reminders of the world outside are occasional muffled sounds, damp and distorted, coming from every direction and from nowhere: the cry of lost seagulls; muted shouts from men on riverside building sites, their hammers padded and soft; and passing boats, horns sounding in the distance, invisible engines growing louder as they pass then fade away, leaving waves in their wake that lap at the foreshore like a dog worrying a wound.
Time stands still in the fog. With all modern points of reference obscured, the river is ageless, static and ghostly. The spirits of the foreshore rise up in the mist, just out of sight. Through the swirling whiteness a medieval fisherman pegs his fish traps to the riverbed, a Victorian scavenger wanders barefoot through the mud, and a Georgian shipwright checks the hull of his newly built ship. On the river, invisible galleons and sailing barges glide past, wherries are carried swiftly downstream on the retreating tide, and a phantom paddle steamer pushes through the currents. Thames fogs are quite literally the mists of time. They are daydreams manifested, swirling visions of the past.
TRIG LANE
The word treasure must surely be one of the most provocative in the English language, for there can be few of us who have not at some time in our lives dreamed of finding buried treasure.
Ivor Noël Hume, Treasure in the Thames (1956)
When people ask me where to start searching, I tell them to study old maps. They are the equivalent of treasure maps for mudlarks. At a glance they show where the city began, the places it was busiest and most populated. Where people worked and ships discharged their cargoes. The sites of old bridges, river stairs, causeways, warehouses, demolished palaces and great houses, quaysides, jetties and boatyards. These are the places where the river hungrily gobbled up the objects that were lost and discarded; where the city’s rubbish was dumped and where it was built into the busy parts of the foreshore to level and stabilise it.
I look at old maps with a magpie’s eyes, always thinking of where to search next. Even when I’m looking at old paintings, engravings and photographs of the river, I’m not looking at the main subjects in the foreground, I’m looking beyond them to the riverside for clues to what it once looked like: the tumbledown dwellings and warehouses that edge the waterside and the narrow alleys between them that lead to rickety w
ooden river stairs, the fully laden barges and ships that sit on the mud. All of these are clues to where there might be treasure.
I like the panorama maps, which are usually drawn from the south side facing north to the city, where London began. Visscher’s panoramic map, first published in Amsterdam in around 1616, is drawn from this angle. It measures six feet six inches and is the most detailed of all the early maps, which is astonishing since it is thought the Dutchman Claes Visscher never visited London and used old printed views for reference. Old St Paul’s, without its steeple, looms large in the centre and smoke curls from some of the houses that line the river. Small boats fill the water to the west of Old London Bridge: wherries carrying passengers, barges laden with high loads of hay and vessels with sails bob about between them – perhaps they are fishing boats. To the east of the bridge there are galleons in full sail. Some look as if they are moored in the centre of the river, which Visscher drew far wider than it was. Old London Bridge is depicted in exacting detail, with its row of tall, grand-looking houses and even the heads of traitors displayed on wooden stakes above the south entrance, where a man stands ready to drive his cattle beneath them and across the bridge.
But the map I never tire of looking at is the Agas map, which was first printed about fifty-five years before Visscher’s on eight sheets from woodcut blocks. Its style is far simpler, and yet its details are still wonderfully precise. The view is the same, from the south looking north, but the perspective is higher and the roads are drawn in and labelled with their names. They are lined with rows of jumbled houses with tiny doors, gabled roofs and windows and cargo is piled up on the quayside. In the shallow water where Cannon Street Bridge is today, there is a man with what looks like a hoe and two packhorses or donkeys. I don’t know what he’s doing, perhaps he’s watering his beasts, or maybe he’s searching the mud. Whatever he’s doing, I’ve mudlarked his spot on many occasions. It’s on my patch.
There are names on this map that I recognise from structures and places associated with the foreshore: a road called ‘The Olde Swanne’ that gave its name to a set of stairs, now little more than a few wooden posts and a vanishing causeway near London Bridge; ‘Styllyarde’, the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century trading base of the Hanseatic League, a group of powerful German traders, which has lent its name to a passage beneath Cannon Street Bridge; ‘Thre Crans’, now the name of the riverside path where there was once a large wharf; and ‘Tryglane’, an insignificant-looking street that led down from Thames Street (now Upper Thames Street) to a river landing place, now known as Trig Lane Stairs.
The lane itself – and the original stairs of course – is gone. Like so many other ancient lanes, alleys and streets that were demolished and forgotten through fire, war and redevelopment, old Trig Lane has been wiped from the map. The modern Trig Lane is a short dead-end road lined with modern office buildings that is easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. It was created when the area was redeveloped and the old warehouses swept away in the 1970s and 80s, but the stairs are easy to see from the Millennium Bridge. They’re not so easy to find from the river path though, and you need to look carefully for the short flight of steps that take you up to a gap in the river wall. Trig Lane Stairs lead down steeply from here. They are a good solid set of modern river stairs, at first concrete until they are clear of the wall and then they are made of wood. Where they reach the foreshore there are large old timber planks and beams embedded in the mud, which are thought to be where older stairs, possibly eighteenth-century ones, once rested.
Remains of medieval river stairs were discovered in the 1970s, when the Museum of London dug along the bank and across what was Trig Lane before it was redeveloped. Over generations the riverfront has crept into the river and the medieval riverfront was about fifty feet further inland from where it is today. Land levels in the City of London have also risen, by roughly a foot every century, which means nineteenth-century remains are about one foot underground and Roman remains about twenty feet. As they dug down through the centuries, the archaeologists found evidence from all periods of history, then at ten to twelve feet beneath the twentieth-century land surface they found an entire medieval quayside: the large oak timbers that formed the quayside itself and the foundations of dwellings that were built along it. This was where the people of Trig Lane lived and worked, including members of the Tryg family, fishmongers after whom the street was named in around 1422. Before then it was variously known as Fish Lane, Fishelane, Lane Called Fischwarf and Lane Towards le Fysshwharfe.
A lot of ‘loose finds’ were retrieved from the site. They were found in the ‘fill’ that was dumped behind successive river walls and used to reclaim land from the river. To me, the list is both transporting and very familiar: string, iron chains, bone knife handles, iron knives, wooden bowls, barrel remains, iron bucket handles, fragments of an iron cauldron, the leg of a copper skillet, fragments of stone mortars, remains of two plaited fibre mats, part of a copper lantern, an iron box, roof tiles and slates, iron nails, ceramic finials, part of a ceramic louvre, a piece of stone moulding, four pieces of lead window cames, three candleholders, a large iron door pivot and two iron keys. The largest category of finds was personal accessories and items of clothing: nearly 300 shoes from one dump alone, as well as shoe pattens, leather straps and girdles, scabbards, fragments of silk cloth and braid, a hair net, a wooden comb, a bronze ear pick, two gold rings with red stones, a plain gold ring, a bronze ring, fragments of two jet bracelets, a wooden bead, a copper alloy thimble, a stone spindle whorl, a stone mortar, a pewter spoon, a brass book clasp, two bone gaming counters, two bone tuning pegs from a musical instrument, dress fittings, a copper belt mount, buckles, and countless coins, jettons and tokens.
Over the years I have found at least half of these objects myself on the foreshore, many of them on the stretch between London Bridge and Trig Lane, which is usually where I finish up at the end of a tide. I always start mudlarking this stretch as close to London Bridge as I can and approach Trig Lane from the east, travelling upstream. If I start from Trig Lane it doesn’t work as well, since I have to wait for the tide to let me through a pinch point before I can begin searching. Timing can be tricky and if I’m to give each spot my full attention I have to arrive just as the foreshore is starting to show by the river wall. The first area to surface is a low hump of rubble, conveniently situated at the bottom of a long ladder that’s bolted to the river wall. There are ladders like this at frequent intervals along both sides of the river and I avoid them whenever I can because they scare me, but sometimes the lure of a particularly elusive part of foreshore, or the need to maximise the time I have to search it, is too great to resist. And nothing plunges you into the past quite like a terrifying descent down a thin runged ladder, bolted to a thirty-foot wall.
I’m terrified of falling. Missing a rung, my hands slipping in the wet, a moment of silence then landing with a sickening thud on the rubble below, the tide claiming me as one of its treasures. I never look down and I prepare for my descent fastidiously. I tighten my rucksack, tie up the loose straps and tuck in my clothes, anything that might catch, tangle or trip. I wipe my hands again and again on my jeans, making sure they are dry before I inch across to the top, grip the cold metal and swing a leg out.
Some ladders are twisted and loose, rusted dangerously thin with missing rungs, or end too high. I only use the ones I’m sure about – with one exception. This particular ladder leads to an exclusive and otherwise inaccessible part of the foreshore. I’m not telling you where it is, of course, but suffice to say the finds are good because so few people can get there. I had been warned by another mudlark that the end of the ladder had rusted away and that it was eight feet short of the foreshore, so the first time I went I took a stepladder with me, which I lowered into place with a rope and tied off on the top rung. Although this worked quite well, I knew that carrying a stepladder with me to the river every time I went wasn’t going to be practical, so I trawled the I
nternet for inventive alternatives. Eventually I found myself on a climbing website where I found something called an ‘etrier’ – ‘a short ladder made of webbing that packs neatly into a small pouch no larger than a bag of sugar’. Teamed with a substantial climbing carabiner I can now get down to this special part of the foreshore whenever I like and it has become another of my regular ‘patches’.
Climbing back up ladders, with the ground departing unseen behind me, is always easier than climbing down. As important as access routes are for getting onto the foreshore, they are even more vital for getting off it again. The tide can turn quickly and it is easy to lose track of distance and time, so keeping a safe exit route in sight is essential.
The ladder that will take me down onto the foreshore today is safe, but very high. I grope for the first rung and shuffle my bottom round, only heaving myself on when I am sure I have a secure hold. Then I steady myself and take a few deep breaths before I start my slow descent, one rung at a time, hand over hand, foot over foot, every move carefully placed, each one another step away from the noise of the city, the screaming children, the looming deadline and next week’s meetings. I drop below the high-tide mark. The wall is still damp from the retreating tide. About halfway down, the grey granite turns bright green with algae and the smell of fresh mud wafts up to meet me. I descend through a thin cloud of tiny flies that tickle my nose and buzz against my eyelashes then step off the last rung of the ladder onto a hump of rubble. My journey into another world is complete.
I quickly gear up as soon as I’m down there, impatient to start searching. I pull my filthy, permanently damp black knee pads out of my rucksack and strap them on. Then I snap on a pair of latex gloves, clip my finds bag around my waist, tuck my hair out of my eyes and I’m ready to start. There is a lot of rubble at the top of this part of the foreshore that sometimes catches larger finds. A few years ago, I stepped off the ladder almost on top of an eighteenth-century cosmetic set, which had caught between two bricks. It was a silver tube, about the length of my little finger, plain and battered as if someone had trodden on it centuries ago, but its lid wasn’t damaged and it unscrewed easily. Inside, neatly packed by whoever had lost it, was a tiny spoon, for removing earwax, and a tooth scraper that looked like a miniature rake without the prongs. Both were cut from a thin sheet of silver and each had a pointed end, useful for picking dirt out from under fingernails and as a toothpick. By the seventeenth century people were aware of plaque, which they called ‘scale’, and were encouraged by their doctors to scrape their teeth frequently. Little cosmetic sets often included ear picks, tweezers, toothpicks and nail scrapers and were popular with the Romans through to the Victorians.