Properties of ancient landscape: the present prehistoric in twentieth-century Breckland

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Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 68e93

Properties of ancient landscape: the present prehistoricin twentieth-century Breckland

David Matless

School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK

Abstract

The paper considers the presence of prehistory in the Breckland region of East Anglia in the twentiethcentury, addressing the ways in which ancient landscape became bound up with definitions of regional iden-tity and claims to cultural and/or archaeological authority, and contributing to debate over the animationof landscape. Sites considered include the flint mines of Grimes Graves, with its controversial mid-twentieth-century Neolithic ‘chalk goddess’, and the ancient trackways of the region. Grimes Graves and the Brandonflint-knapping industry focus discussion concerning the poetics of flint. Archaeological debate is set withinthe wider characterisation of Breckland as a ‘primitive’ landscape. While some found in prehistory equiva-lents for a progressive modernity, others found an escape from or antidote to a fallen modern world, a sen-sibility continued in recent imaginings of the ancient landscape. The paper concludes by exploring theparallel presence of the twentieth-century past in the region via selected monuments and relics.� 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Breckland; Landscape; Archaeology; Prehistory; Region; Flint

Excursions in prehistory

In 1961 the British Association for the Advancement of Science held their annual meeting inNor-wich. Excursions allowed the various sectional groups to take in the surrounding districts, and thetrips of Section H (Anthropology and Archaeology) included Breckland, a district of heath andForestry Commission woodland on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk. Delegates toured Brecklandon Saturday, 2 September in two coaches, leaving the Old Cattle Market in Norwich at 9.00 a.m.,

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69D. Matless / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 68e93

led by R. R. Clarke of the Castle Museum andMr A. B. Whittingham. The group stopped at a bar-row group at Little Cressingham, the flint mines at Grimes Graves (‘the party will have the oppor-tunity of descending two of the mine-shafts’), the flint-knapping workshops at Brandon (‘the onlyplace in Britain where this craft is still practised’), the medieval hunting lodge at Thetford Warren(where the packed lunch provided was to be eaten), and Thetford’s Cluniac priory ruins and An-cient House Museum. The group took tea as guests of the Mayor of Thetford, after which thecoaches passed the ‘Motte and Bailey Castle (Castle Hill)’ in the town. Attleborough Churchwas visited on the return journey, with the delegates due back in Norwich at 6.15 p.m.1

The British Association excursion took in the standard prehistoric archaeological sites of Breck-land, with the evidence of ancient mining and the continuing presence of flint knappers adding an an-thropological interest. This paper will take in many of the same sites (Fig. 1), considering the presenceof prehistory in Breckland in the twentieth century, and addressing the ways in which ancient land-scapes became bound up with definitions of regional identity and claims to cultural and/or archaeo-logical authority. The process is ongoing. The late twentieth century saw the traces of prehistorichuman activity in Breckland gathered into a narrative of ancient enchantment and fallen modernity,as in Hugh Lupton and Liz McGowan’s 1999 A Norfolk Songline: Walking the Peddars Way, wherea languageof aboriginal dreaming and songlines is projected throughBrecklandand adjoining regionsvia the trackway of the Peddars Way. Evocations of mythic landscape conjured through Lupton’sstories and poems andMcGowan’s photographs and sculptures are offset against a late twentieth cen-tury world of military training areas and trunk roads. The Peddars Way is worked into a prehistoricand historic current, occasionally shorted by modern lines of life but capable of resilience and of car-rying a counter-modern charge, able to reenchant theNorfolk landscape from its current fallen state.2

Such narratives might themselves be considered in more detail as devices for late or post-modernlandscape recovery. The perils of such language are that everything ancient is dragged into enchant-ment, the many histories and prosaic or poetic geographies of a track across eastern England over-determined as an inevitably inadequate shadow of a mythic structure projected from the other sideof the world, in this case the aboriginal Australian landscape made prominent in Britain via BruceChatwin’s 1987 bookThe Songlines.3 Thus the history and geography of the Breckland Battle Area,a contested space with some curious twentieth-century relics of its own, becomes simply a noise offfrom the valued prehistoric and historic past, while modern highways are by implication merelymiserable. A Norfolk Songline might be read as Chatwin’s posthumous revenge on the A47. Themajority of engagements with the present prehistoric in Breckland in the twentieth century, how-ever much they cultivated the weird and the eccentric, did not work through such oppositions ofenchantment and modernity, the spiritual and the prosaic. Rather we find a story of clashing forms

1 British Association for the Advancement of Science, Excursions Guide: Norwich 30th August to 6th September 1961,

Norwich, 1961, 53. Grimes Graves has been subject to a variety of spellings, the name often rendered as ‘Grime’sGraves’. The present paper here follows the convention of most current archaeological studies, but maintains previousvariants in quotations. On the B.A.A.S. see C. Withers, D. Finnegan and R. Higgitt, Geography’s other histories?

Geography and science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831ec.1933, Transactions of theInstitute of British Geographers 31 (2006) 433e451.

2 H. Lupton and L. McGowan, A Norfolk Songline: Walking the Peddars Way, Aylsham, 1999. See also Shirley

Toulson’s East Anglia: Walking the Ley Lines and Ancient Tracks, London, 1979.3 B. Chatwin, The Songlines, London, 1987.

Fig. 1. Map of Breckland showing sites mentioned in the text, from W. G. Clarke with R. R. Clarke, In Breckland Wilds, 1937, drawn

by J. M. Briggs.


of reason and differing aesthetics of the ancient. The more recent shapes of antagonism concerningthe presence of prehistory are less evident.

The cultures of archaeology and the antiquarian have received increasing attention, with narra-tives of history and prehistory shown to have been a key element in shaping various present land-scapes over recent centuries.4 Within geography Naylor and Harvey have explored the fieldcultures of antiquarianism, and the politics of national identity surrounding ancient heritage.5 Ac-knowledging scholarly enquiry as a cultural practice opens accounts of histories of archaeology andantiquarianism beyond, on the one hand, Whiggish accounts of gradual progress towards archaeo-logical enlightenment, and, on the other, accounts of alternative insight suppressed by professionalorthodoxy. The categorical boundary between the archaeological and antiquarian, the professionaland amateur, the orthodox andalternative, the speculative anddown-to-earth, becomes itself a topicfor investigation, a telling site for examining the cultural power of stories of the ancient and not soancient. Thus Ronald Hutton’s work draws out the cultural and scholarly possibilities of dialoguebetween sometimes mutually hostile camps researching ancient sites and pagan religion.6 Parallelthemes are addressed in this paper.

Other work in geography has echoed another strand of recent archaeology, the phenomenolog-ical investigations of ancient sites by Christopher Tilley, whose The Phenomenology of Landscapeand The Materiality of Stone anticipate and echo geographical concerns for the more-than-representational, the bodily engagement with landscape, and the materiality of the nonhumanworld. Tilley’s particular version of landscape phenomenology upholds the ‘expressive and poetic asopposed to the abstract and conceptual potency of words’, and takes the body as a transhistoricaland supracultural reference point for understanding landscape.7 Matthew Johnson comments onsuch work as a cultural practice in its own right, noting that it ‘owes more itself to Romanticistnotions than it cares to admit’. ‘Romantic’ is not used by Johnson as an insult, indeed the implica-tion is that reflection on all forms of investigation, romantic or otherwise, as cultural practice, mightproblematise claims to insight; Johnson’s Ideas of Landscape seeks a different cultural connectionbetween theoretical archaeology and the empiricist ‘English landscape tradition’.8 Such questionsresonate with the (re)emerging phenomenological geographies of landscape, notably John Wylie’s

4 Studies include S. Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination, London, 1989; R. Sweet, Antiquaries:

the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, London, 2004; B. Bender, Stonehenge: Making Space, Oxford,1998; C. Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, London, 1994; S. Smiles and S. Moser (Eds), Envisioning the Past: Archae-ology and the Image, Oxford, 2005. For a study taking a particular region (the Lake District) as a focus, seeM. Edmonds, Who said romance was dead?, Journal of Material Culture 11 (2006) 167e188.

5 S. Naylor, Collecting quoits: field cultures in the history of Cornish antiquarianism, Cultural Geographies 10 (2003)309e333; S. Naylor, The field, the museum and the lecture hall: the spaces of natural history in Victorian Cornwall,Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (2002) 494e513; D. Harvey, ‘National’ identities and the politics

of ancient heritage: continuity and change at ancient monuments in Britain and Ireland, c.1675e1850, Transactions ofthe Institute of British Geographers 28 (2003) 488e507.

6 R. Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, Oxford, 1993; R. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon:

a History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford, 1999; R. Hutton, The past and the post-modern challenge, The LeyHunter 125 (1996) 5e8.

7 C. Tilley, The Materiality of Stone, Oxford, 2004, 28; C. Tilley A Phenomenology of Landscape, Oxford, 1994.8 M. Johnson, Ideas of Landscape, Oxford, 2006, 137; also D. Matless, Five objects, geographical subjects, in:

I. Cook, D. Crouch, S. Naylor and J. Ryan (Eds), Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns, Harlow, 2000, 335e358.

72 D. Matless / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 68e93

account of the charismatically ancient landscape of Glastonbury Tor. If, asWylie argues elsewhere,‘landscape is tension’,9 tension may be detected in his ownGlastonbury account. If the stated aim isto enfold the many cultural accounts making up the Glastonbury landscape within ‘the livedpractice and experience of that landscape’, to convey ‘their emergence and resonance within thesensuous, embodied context of ascending the Tor’, a phenomenological perspective effectively keepsthe field of culture at arm’s length.10

Wylie has, with Rose, called for such work to present the ‘animation’ of landscape, conveyinga ‘topographical richness’ overlooked and ‘sacrificed’ in network accounts of ‘topological com-plexity’, to demonstrate how landscape animates.11 The term ‘animate’ may however move in var-ious ways. The current paper may itself be considered an exercise in such landscape animation, inlarge part via historical investigation working through the texts and images left by past practi-tioners, and I return to such issues in conclusion. Tilley’s landscape phenomenology however con-veys a particular sense of, in Rose and Wylie’s term, ‘the elemental and affective’,12 via appeal toanimism as a mode of engagement with the world. Sweeping connection is made between ‘all in-digenous world views’ and Merleau-Ponty’s sense of ‘all perception involving a dynamic interplaybetween the perceiving body and that which it perceives. In this sense we are all primitive ani-mists’.13 If Tilley would seem to echo appeals to a Norfolk Songline, tapping supposed bedrocksof human experience crossing epochs and continents while implicitly or explicitly downplayingother modes of landscape connection (the distanced, the modern, the mediated), the approachtaken in the current paper might signal animation via a cultural historical geography of landscape,the eclectic aesthetics of the ancient and modern traced across many and varied practices, uncon-fined by assumptions concerning the modes of conduct which may or may not give privileged ac-cess to landscape’s animation. In that sense the paper parallels the performance of landscapeoffered by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in their collaborative project of archaeology andperformance studies, Theatre/Archaeology, where evocations of walking as songline (‘To travelthe land is to sing the world into being again’14) are but one element released into and taking theirplace within a complex rendering of landscape as cultural practice, at once affirmative and scep-tical, termed at one point a ‘critical romanticism e an attitude suspicious of any final account ofthings’.15

This paper explores how prehistory performs its presence via a specific regional cultural land-scape, moving through the ways in which Breckland has been defined through its prehistory, the

9 J. Wylie, Smoothlands: fragments/landscapes/fragments, Cultural Geographies 13 (2006) 458e465, quote 465. The

phrase also opens M. Rose and J. Wylie, Animating landscape, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(2006) 475e479.10 J. Wylie, An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor, Geoforum 33 (2002) 441e454, quote 443.11 Rose and Wylie, Animating landscape (note 9), 477; for parallel arguments see D. Matless, P. Merchant and

C. Watkins, Animal landscapes: otters and wildfowl in England 1945e1970, Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers 30 (2005) 191e205; H. Lorimer, Herding memories of human and animals, Environment and Planning

D: Society and Space 24 (2006) 497e518.12 Rose and Wylie, Animating landscape (note 9), 478.13 Tilley, Materiality (note 7), 21.14 M. Pearson and M. Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, London, 2001, 138.15 Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (note 14), 132.


versions of the ancient presented at Grimes Graves, and the presentation of regional identity inthe material of flint. The theme of ‘regional cultural landscape’, if familiar from earlier modesof geographical enquiry, might be usefully revisited given the comprehensive retheorisation ofeach of its constituent terms. A regional focus in part allows appreciation of how prehistoric de-bate plays within cultural and political argument concerning the meaning of landscape.16 A keytrope here is the common characterisation of Breckland as a ‘primitive’ space, a characterisationwhich through the twentieth century played an important role in making the region a kind of flatscreen for the projection of various schemes and fantasies of future development. Projections ofthe ancient past could similarly play on this regional definition. Thus in 1943 James WentworthDay described a wild and lonely Breckland:

16 Thdresseof lan

also H17 J.18 P.19 W20 W

A wide, empty land of lonely beauty, old as time. Flint-strewn heaths, dappled by rabbitscuts, rusty-red with bracken stretched for miles like waves of an autumn-coloured sea .They will tell you that on these wild warrens and lonely heaths ghosts of the Stone Age, grimshambling figures in woad and skins, haunt the great flint-pits under the white moon. Fewerpeople than almost anywhere in England live to the square mile on these ancient wastes.17

Emptiness crops up in another guise, rhetorically more modest but no less striking, in geogra-pher P. W. Bryan’s 1933 Man’s Adaptation of Nature: Studies of the Cultural Landscape, wherea discussion of ‘The Cultural Landscape of Shelter’, illustrated with maps of housing patterns,reaches its extreme in Breckland. On ‘Heathland West of Thetford, Norfolk’, nine dots barely dis-turb a white background. Adjacent Bryan offers a pure blank square, demonstrating: ‘9 SquareMiles of Country Without a Building’.18 This aesthetic geographical encounter with the regionas empty zone hangs in the background to the material considered here, with prehistory projectedas an era of relative high activity and regional importance compared to the present; although pres-ent day activities of forestry, military training, agricultural improvement and urban developmentwould in their own ways challenge the definition of Breckland as a region where today, nothingmuch happens.

Regional definition

Breckland is unusual in being a region named by an antiquarian. While the term ‘breck’ wascurrent as a label for the district in the mid-nineteenth century, meaning ‘a tract of heathland bro-ken up for cultivation from time to time and then allowed to revert to waste’,19 the name Breck-land was coined only in 1894 by W. G. Clarke, in an article for The Naturalists’ Journal entitled ‘ABreckland Ramble’.20 The term quickly stuck, and Clarke’s 1925 In Breckland Wilds was the first

e wider twentieth-century cultural history and geography of the region is beyond this paper, and will be ad-d in a further study of Breckland as regional cultural landscape. The best introduction, focusing on a key aspectd use, is K. Skipper and T. Williamson, Thetford Forest: Making a Landscape, 1922e1977, Norwich, 1997. See

. J. Mason and A. McClelland, Background to Breckland, Ely, 1994.W. Day, Farming Adventure, London, 1943, 186.W. Bryan, Man’s Adaptation of Nature: Studies of the Cultural Landscape, London, 1933, 141.

. G. Clarke with R. R. Clarke, In Breckland Wilds, Cambridge, 1937, 1.

. G. Clarke, A Breckland ramble, The Naturalists’ Journal 3 (1894) 90e92, 105e107.


topographical volume devoted to the area under this heading.21 The book has a frontispiece of theauthor, large cap on head and cigarette in mouth, beside a boy, possibly his son Rainbird. Thetwo stand behind an enormous gonnera plant (Fig. 2).

Clarke defines through words and photography a region of curious dry climate, singular historyand prehistory, and distinctive landscape, unlike anywhere else in England. The ‘primitive’ playsacross In Breckland Wilds, projecting back and forth between present, past and prehistoric, andgenerating ‘the call of the heathland’ to lure the visitor and help keep (fix/sustain) the resident intheir place: ‘Here we feel in touch with man in his early days, with all that is primitive and pre-historic . the heathland road on which one may wander for mile after mile through parish afterparish without seeing any human being, seems as though its only fitting user would be a skin-cladNeolithic hunter with his flint-tipped arrows’.22 Ability to heed the heath’s call marks out a capac-ity for discernment in landscape: ‘It fascinates but few, but those who have once come under itsspell are its slaves’.23 Clarke cites in support the most prominent literary heath of the time,Thomas Hardy’s Egdon, and its author’s claim to a landscape aesthetic ‘majestic without severity,impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonition, and grand in its simplicity’.24 In TheReturn of the Native Hardy suggested that for ‘the more thinking among mankind’ definitionsof beauty would rest upon such scenes: ‘Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct,to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charmingand fair’.25 Lying beneath Langmere pines in June, Clarke moves from present discernment tospeculate on ancient human landscape experience, allowing a capacity for emotional if not nar-rowly visual aesthetic appreciation: ‘Though probably without our aesthetic enjoyment of itsbeauties, prehistoric man loved the spot, and strewn all around are thousands of his potboilersand numerous flakes’.26

Clarke begins his chapter on ‘Prehistoric Times’ by stating: ‘Few districts in Europe have moreattractions to the archaeologist than Breckland’.27 A photograph of ‘Breckland Neolithic Imple-ments’ shows ten specimens of various shape, laid out on a white background as if in a display cab-inet. Clarke discusses implements’ correspondence to phases of prehistoric culture, with mostprominence given to the flint mines of Grimes Graves, ‘one of the most remarkable prehistoric sitesin Europe’.28 A further chapter on ‘Three Prehistoric Trackways’ covers the IcknieldWay, Peddar’sWay and Drove Road, in turn ‘national’, ‘provincial’ and ‘local’ roads. Trackways shape the visual

21 W. G. Clarke, In Breckland Wilds, London, 1925. See also W. G. Clarke, Norfolk and Suffolk, London, 1921; W. G.Clarke, Our Homeland Prehistoric Antiquities, London, 1922. In Breckland Wilds is organised by thematic chaptersrather than by chronology or district, with chapters eight (on ‘Three Prehistoric Trackways’) and twelve (‘Prehistoric

Times’) out of fourteen chapters devoted to prehistory. Others consider flora and fauna, towns and villages, local in-dustry and traditions, but the trope of the primitive runs throughout the book.22 Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 21), 34.23 Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 21), 31.24 Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 21), 35e36; Clarke is directly quoting the first chapter of Hardy’s 1878 The Return

of the Native, London, 1981, 4.25 Hardy, Return (note 24), 4; Hardy suggests that ‘ultimately, to the commonest tourist’, such spots might usurp to-

day’s destinations.26 Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 21), 91.27 Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 21), 176.28 Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 21), 185.

Fig. 2. ‘Portrait of the Author’, from W. G. Clarke, In Breckland Wilds, 1925, facing vii.


grammar of the book, in photographs and written descriptions conveying passage across the land-scape. The Drove Road forms the book’s frontispiece, a wide track, two ruts in the centre, betweenpines and silver birch, stretching with slight bends into indefinite distance: ‘entirely within the con-fines of Breckland,. in some respectsmore interesting than either of the twomore famous roads’.29

Clarke was a founding member in 1908 of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia (P.S.E.A.), andhis work combines antiquarian topographic convention with a sense of scientific investigation,marking out East Anglia in general, and Breckland in particular, as special for both the relicsof ancient people and the practice of prehistoric investigation. Alongside Clarke as joint secretaryof the P.S.E.A. was W. A. Dutt, prolific East Anglian topographer.30 Dutt’s 1906 Wild Life inEast Anglia called up Breckland as primitive space: ‘The district is too isolate and primitiveever to become popular with any great number of pleasure-seekers; . but a few lovers of solitude

29 Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 21), 126.30 Dutt was born in 1870, and had a journalistic career in Lowestoft and London before returning to Lowestoft due to

ill health, where he pursued topographical writing. Dutt’s work included Highways and Byways in East Anglia, London,1901; W. A. Dutt, The Norfolk Broads, London, 1903. He died in 1939. On the P.S.E.A. see J. E. Sainty and R. R.Clarke, A century of Norfolk prehistory, in P. Millican (Ed.) Norfolk Archaeology: the Centenary Volume, Norwich,

1946, 8e40; G. Clark, The Prehistoric Society: from East Anglia to the world, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society51 (1985) 1e13.


and untrodden ways have come under the spell of its enchantment’.31 Dutt’s account is structuredas a journey along the Drove Road, using the trope of a landscape unchanged until recent times.Walking triggers prehistoric reverie, as on a hot August day, not a soul in sight, Dutt rests beneaththe pines and imagines a more populated prehistoric time, a settlement of huts around Langmere,with patchy cultivated ground, smouldering fires, women and children in coarse linen or animalskins, the men returning from the hunt late in the day, workers shaping flints into arrowheads andaxes. Dutt writes as if describing a diorama, or one of Alan Sorrell’s later pictorial renderings ofancient life.32 Droves of great bustards feed, a coracle fisherman works the mere, wild oxenbrowse, and the landscape of extensive heath stretches for miles to distant woods ‘where thewolf lurks and the brown bear has its lair’.33 From here return the hunters, along with minerswho have been working flint underground. Folk and animals gather in the stockade for the night,and all soon sleep. Dutt, alone on the modern heath, describes the diurnal round of a busy pre-history. Imaginative environmental reconstruction of the ancient world could also shift into mys-tic connection to landscape, as on a summer night visit to an isolated barrow under a brightmoon: ‘From the top of the barrow the surface of the flint-strewn plateau showed white in themoonlight, as though it were strewn with the bleaching bones of the men whose chieftain, per-haps, was buried in the heart of the ancient mound’. Dutt spends an hour ‘on the lonely gravemound’, achieving a vitalistic sense of life, with ‘the renewal of life’ around the grave ‘the trueemblem of immortality’, the dead ‘still a part of the growing grass, the fragrant thyme’, the buriedwarrior having gone beyond ‘the husk of his life’ which lay in the mound: ‘Now he was one withthe moonlight and the breeze’. Dutt finishes with a passage from naturalist Richard Jefferies on‘the great and beautiful thought’ beyond philosophy, which may be present in ordinary leaves,grass, sky and fauna.34 The recesses of time spark connection to contemporary nature thought.

W. G. Clarke died in June 1925, just before the publication of In Breckland Wilds; in 1937a second edition was published, edited and revised by his son Rainbird (Fig. 3). The relationshipbetween the two volumes makes for a change in regional definition, and in the local presence ofprehistory. Roy Rainbird Clarke was born in Norwich in 1914, and died in 1963. Clarke went toCambridge as an undergraduate in 1932, founding the first undergraduate archaeological societythere, along with others including Glyn Daniel, later prominent in academic archaeology and whowould write Clarke’s obituary for Norfolk Archaeology. Clarke published an article on the flintknappers of Brandon in Antiquity while still a student,35 and after graduation worked at TauntonMuseum before returning to the Castle Museum Norwich as Deputy Curator in charge of archae-ology, and then as Director of Norwich Museums, in which capacity he would guide the BritishAssociation around Breckland in 1961. Grahame Clark’s May 1963 Times obituary stated that

31 W. A. Dutt, Wild Life in East Anglia, London, 1906, 59.32 Sorrell’s work features in D. Mellor, A Paradise Lost: the Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935e55, London,

1987. See also Smiles and Moser, Envisioning the Past (note 4).33 Dutt, Wild Life (note 31), 81.34 Dutt, Wild Life (note 31), 94e95; the quotation is from Jefferies’ essay ‘Meadow Thoughts’, published in his 1884

The Life of the Fields, Oxford, 1983, 56e66, quote 61: ‘There is something beyond the philosophies in the light, in thegrass-blades, the leaf, the grasshopper, the sparrow on the wall. Some day the great and beautiful thought which hovers

on the confines of the mind will at last alight. In that is hope, the whole sky is full of abounding hope’.35 R. Clarke, The flint-knapping industry at Brandon, Antiquity 9 (1935) 38e56.

Fig. 3. Cover of W. G. Clarke with R. R. Clarke, In Breckland Wilds, 1937, illustration by J. E. Ridler.


Clarke made the Castle ‘a model of what a good regional museum ought to be and do’.36 Clarkealso set up and ran the Norfolk Research Committee, and wrote the East Anglia volume in Dan-iel’s ‘Ancient Peoples and Places’ series.37

Rainbird Clarke was a very different presenter of Breckland to W.G., a scholarly archaeologistto his antiquarian father, and his revision of In Breckland Wilds signals both a new academic senseof prehistory and a strange psychology of authorship. Published when he was only 23, the book isin effect both homage to his father’s work and the statement of a different vision of the region,especially of its archaeology. Rainbird instituted new scientific accounts of botany and prehistory,while retaining his father’s words where subjective impressions of landscape were to be given. Theeffect is a strange collaboration of the subjective father and objective son, signifying an antiquar-ian poetics to be placed alongside archaeological science. This revision of course practises its ownregional and archaeological aesthetic, attending to the presence of prehistory in a manner which,in its view, progresses beyond the older antiquarian. The remaining presence of the father indi-cates an allowance for but policing of reverie: ‘Certain sections of a subjective nature havebeen retained . Whenever the personal experiences of the author are described they should beunderstood to refer to those of W. G. Clarke’.38

36 Quoted in G. Daniel, Roy Rainbird Clarke, Norfolk Archaeology 33 (1964) 240e241.37 R. R. Clarke, East Anglia, London, 1960.38 Clarke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), v. As in the first version of the book the text is thematic rather

than chronological, with chapters seven (on ‘Prehistoric Times’, incorporating those ‘subjective’ elements of his father’s

material) and eleven (on ‘Brandon and the Flint-Knapping Industry’) out of fifteen addressing prehistory. Rainbird alsoadds a chapter on recent forestry and agricultural development.


Rainbird follows W.G. in emphasising the richness of Breckland prehistory, but adds a note ofcaution deriving from the nature of the regional environment: ‘The embarrassing richness of ma-terial is offset by severe limitations in the information to be derived from it. The remains of allhuman cultures since the last glaciation are usually found in the thin surface soil and as this hasbeen blown hither and thither and tunnelled by rabbits in all directions, the relics of different pe-riods are often mixed inextricably’.39 Sandy confusion made Breckland an area with few pros-pects for excavation. While echoing W.G. in stating that ‘Immense numbers of flintimplements of all types have been found in almost every parish in Breckland’,40 Rainbirdadds: ‘This abundant material might be expected to furnish the greatest asset to the investiga-tor of the archaeology of the district. At present it remains a liability, however, for these sur-face tools cannot be assigned with certainty to any one culture. Not so many years ago theywere all classed as Neolithic’.41 The father appears a pioneer to be overtaken, not least atGrimes Graves.

Grimes Graves: the ancient modern and the chalk goddess

The flint mines of Grimes Graves were reworked by Rainbird Clarke and others as a sitefor the demonstration of modern scholarship, and the exhibition of ancient modernity. In InBreckland Wilds, and his 1963 Ministry of Public Building and Works guide to GrimesGraves, Clarke questioned earlier chronologies and typologies of mining, and stressed themore than local nature of the place: ‘the precise sequence of mining is a parochial problembeside the broad conclusion that Grime’s Graves was a trading centre where cultures metand perhaps fused’.42 Clarke followed the arguments of academic archaeologists GrahameClark and Stuart Piggott: ‘The mines were centres of flint-working on a commercial scalefar transcending the needs of the mining communities of their immediate neighbours’.43

Clarke’s Breckland work formed part of a restyling of archaeology beyond a supposedly in-sular regional antiquarianism, marked by the renaming of the P.S.E.A. as the Prehistoric So-ciety in 1937, with Clark and colleagues at Cambridge playing a key role.44 At Grimes Graves,Clarke sought to overtake the author of the 1936 official guide to the site, James Reid Moir,a prominent figure in regional archaeology, who had devoted a chapter of his 1927 The An-tiquity of Man in East Anglia to the Neolithic, with Grimes Graves a key subject. Moir’s

39 Clarke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), 57.40 Clarke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), 70; compare Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 21), 179.41 Clarke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), 71.42 Clarke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), 74; R. R. Clarke, Grime’s Graves, London, 1963.43 J. G. D. Clark, Prehistoric Europe, London, 1952, 180; S. Piggott, The Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles, Cam-

bridge, 1954; J. G. D. Clark and S. Piggott, The age of the British flint mines, Antiquity 7 (1933) 166e183. For recent

discussion of Neolithic flint mines, including Grimes Graves, see M. Barber, D. Field and P. Topping, The NeolithicFlint Mines of England, Swindon, 1999; P. Topping and M. Lynott (Eds) The Cultural Landscape of Prehistoric Mines,Oxford, 2005.44 Clark, The Prehistoric Society (note 30); P. J. Smith, ‘The coup’: how did the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia

become the Prehistoric Society?, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 65 (1999) 465e470.


controversial theories on the discovery of eoliths, or ‘dawn stones’, had suggested that workedflints placed human life in south-east England up to a million years ago; he upheld W. G. Clarkeas the first to find evidence of Pliocene ‘Tertiary man in England’.45 Moir practised a form ofarchaeological regional boosterism: ‘Thus, it is possible, that what is now England was thehome of the earliest men’.46 His account of ‘The Men of the Cromer Forest Bed’ begins mem-orably: ‘About 400,000 years ago great events were taking place in Norfolk’.47

Clarke had Moir in his sights when, without mentioning him by name, his 1963 guidenoted: ‘The Palaeolithic heresy which had bedevilled the Grime’s Graves problem for a gener-ation is now merely an episode in the history of antiquarian thought’.48 Grimes Graves be-comes instead the site for a progressive and orthodox advance on the antiquarian. Thetone in Clarke’s account is scientific and practical, in terms of both his own mode of enquiryand the ancient lives with which it is concerned. Grimes Graves emerges as the ancient mod-ern, a place of people who while naked and hairy (as Alan Sorrell’s guide illustrationsshowed), were industrial like us (in the mid-twentieth-century industrial age). Similarly LordHarlech’s Illustrated Regional Guide to Ancient Monuments for East Anglia and the Midlandsnoted: ‘In an area now being re-afforested by the Forestry Commission, the Ministry has beenconstituted guardian of about 30 acres which may be described as the ‘‘Sheffield of the StoneAge’’.49 Ancient people were, Harlech suggested, as dependent on flint as modern Britons wereon iron and steel. Doreen Wallace likewise worked the ancient and modern, finding at GrimesGraves a ‘Mesolithic and Neolithic arsenal’: ‘Thus and thus was the Birmingham of prehis-toric times.’50

The sense of prosaic ancient practicality extends to Clarke’s discussion of artistic relics, includ-ing the engravings of deer on flint found by excavator A. L. Armstrong, which Moir had claimedpushed back the prehistory of art to the early ‘Mousterian’ Paleolithic, with ‘these Norfolk draw-ings’ possibly ‘the most ancient of their kind hitherto discovered’.51 Clarke commented: ‘Huntingmagic need not necessarily be invoked . These engravings are often mere doodles and may reflectthe idle moments in the life of the miner or knapper rather than their spiritual aspirations’. Thered deer was ‘doubtless as common a sight for the miners as it is now for the official custodian ofGrime’s Graves’.52 Present and prehistoric experience connect in distinctly unmagical fashion via

45 J. R. Moir, The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia, Cambridge, 1927, 33; J. R. Moir, Grime’s Graves, London, 1936.On Moir see Smith, ‘The coup’ (note 44); Clark, The Prehistoric Society (note 30); A. Keith, James Reid Moir1879e1944, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 4 (1944) 733e745; D. K. Grayson, Eoliths, archaeologicalambiguity, and the generation of ‘middle-range’ research, in D. Meltzer, D. Fowler and J. Sabloff (Eds) American

Archaeology Past and Future, Washington, 1986, 77e133. The themes of Moir’s work resurface in recent studies iden-tifying humanly worked flints up to 700,000 years old on the Norfolk and Suffolk coast; W. Roebroeks, Archaeology:life on the Costa del Cromer, Nature 438 (2005) 921e922.46 Moir, Antiquity (note 45), 162.47 Moir, Antiquity (note 45), 39.48 Clarke, Grime’s Graves (note 42), 8.49 Lord Harlech, East Anglia and the Midlands, London, 1955, 11 (second edition, first published 1936). Harlech was

previously William Ormsby-Gore, Conservative minister and First Commissioner of Works 1931e36.50 D. Wallace and R. P. Bagnall-Oakeley, Norfolk, London, 1951, 22e3.51 Moir, Antiquity (note 45), 145.52 Clarke, Grime’s Graves (note 42), 23.


parallel scenes of provincial life. Barbara Green’s 1964 Young People’s Guide to Grime’s Graves,also produced for the Ministry, similarly noted: ‘Flint miners, like people to-day, filled in an idlemoment with doodling’.53 The title page of Green’s guide showed a boy exploring the tunnels ex-tending from the base of the mineshafts (Fig. 4), presenting the site as a venue for the youthfulappreciation of the ancient, nurturing a modern citizenship aware of the connections of pastand present. Green noted: ‘Old clothes are recommended for exploring these galleries as it is oftennecessary to wriggle on one’s stomach’.54 Health and safety concerns confine today’s descendingvisitor to the open area at the base of an access ladder.

The everyday realism of the ancient modern could not, however, account for another GrimesGraves find, described by Clarke:

53 B

G. Vahistor54 G55 C

lian VNorfo56 G57 Pi

There is definite evidence for the practice of some form of ritual or magic from at least two ofthe galleried pits. CanonGreenwell found a number of chalk carvings in the shaft he excavatedand among them was a representation of the glans of a human penis. A similar chalk phalluswas found on Floor 46 and yet another with chalk balls was discovered in 1939 at the entranceto a gallery at the base of Pit 15. The sexual significance of these is emphasised by the obviouslypregnant state of a female chalk figurine (4 1⁄4 inches high) found a few feet away on a chalkpedestal. In front of her lay a triangular heap of blocks of mined flint, with a chalk lump op-posite. The seven red deer antlers which lay on this heap, presumably as offerings, have alreadybeen noted as a possible indication of the number of those engaged in this pit.55

The 1939 discovery was made by site excavator A. L. Armstrong, and the figurine made herway into the collection of the British Museum. The ‘chalk goddess’ stars on the front cover ofClarke’s 1963 guide, a white figure on green background, a rather cheery and contented lookingcharacter welcoming the reader to the booklet and the site (Fig. 5). The figure also appears inGreen’s 1964 guide, though this account for young people omits the phallus, referring insteadto ‘other emblems of fertility’.56 Piggott’s 1954 The Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles reportedthe ‘extraordinary ritual deposit’, ‘this remarkable fertility assemblage’, and reproduced Arm-strong’s photograph of the ‘Chalk figurine (4 1⁄4 in. high) from shrine, pit 15, Grimes Graves FlintMines’: ‘this obvious shrine of an Earth Goddess may represent an appeal to the chthonic powersfor more abundant flint. At all events it constitutes one of the most dramatic documents of prim-itive religion in prehistoric Britain’.57

The goddess had a series of British outings in advance of this orthodox archaeological recognition.In late August 1939, Armstrong gave a talk to the anthropology section of the British Associationannual conference inDundee. TheDundeeAdvertiser of September 1st reported the ‘Miners’ Goddess

. Green, Young People’s Guide to Grime’s Graves, London, 1964, 10. On the doubtful status of these drawings see

rndell, Seeing things: A. L. Armstrong’s flint crust engravings, in Topping and Lynott, Cultural Landscape of Pre-ic Mines, 51e62.reen, Young People’s Guide (note 53), 15.

larke, Grime’s Graves (note 42), 22; Greenwell’s excavations were in 1868e70. On the history of the finds see Gil-arndell’s summary in I. Longworth, A. Herne, G. Varndell and S. Needham, Excavations at Grimes Graveslk 1972e1976, London, 1991, 103e105.

reen, Young People’s Guide (note 53).ggott, Neolithic Cultures (note 43), 42.

Fig. 4. Boy exploring flint mine at Grimes Graves, from title page of B. Green, Young People’s Guide to Grime’s Graves, 1964.


of 4000 Years Ago’, describing a meeting in St. Cuthbert’s Church Hall where ‘Mr Armstrong’s dis-coveries, result of three summers’ patient excavation, are on view’. Armstrong spoke on his July dis-covery, which he had ‘kept a secret for the B.A.’. The reporter noted: ‘The figurine of the goddess,about 3 in. in height, is a crudely-executed piece of sculpture, but there was laughter when MrArmstrong remarked e ‘‘and still it is an improvement on Epstein’s work in sculpture’’’.58 An imageof the figure emerged for another learned audience in 1949, when Rainbird Clarke held an evening‘conversazione’ at the Castle Museum Norwich for members of the Royal Archaeological Institute,during their Summer Congress. Clarke’s illustrated talk included a slide of ‘the hitherto unpublisheddiscovery by Mr A. L. Armstrong of a chalk goddess’. Clarke noted the unproductive pit and the al-tar: ‘The goddess was clearly a figure representing fertility’.59 It would seem that a replica of the figurewent before a much wider public two years later at the Festival of Britain exhibition on London’sSouth Bank site. Armstrong’s papers include an apparent display caption for the figure, describingthe finding of ‘The Grimes Graves Figurine of the Mother Goddess’, and its dimensions and charac-teristics.60 The Catalogue of Exhibits for the 1951 Exhibition includes within ‘The People of Britain’pavilion’s New Stone Age section, item D128, ‘Reproduction of figurine of fertility goddess’.61 Therewould seem to be no other candidates for this item, the replica chalk goddess sitting smiling besideflint tools, Neolithic pottery and a diorama of Neolithic life for the six million visitors to the site.

58 ‘Miner’s Goddess of 4000 Years Ago’, Dundee Advertiser, 1 September 1939; clipping held as item 15 in ArmstrongMSS2, British Museum. The typed index to the press clippings contains an interesting slip where the indexer (unknown)

has transcribed the headline as ‘Mother Goddess of 4000 Years Ago’. On the cultural politics surrounding Epstein’ssculpture see B. Taylor, Foreigners and Fascists: Patterns of Hostility to Modern Art in Britain before and after theFirst World War, in D. P. Corbett, Y. Halt and F. Russell (Eds) The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the

National Past 1880e1940, London, 2002, 169e198.59 Eastern Daily Press, 27 July 1949, clipping held as item 16 in Armstrong MSS2, British Museum.60 This forms part of item 14, ‘Report on Pit 15’, within Armstrong MSS1, British Museum, and is reproduced in full

by Varndell in Longworth et al, Excavations (note 55), 103.61 Festival of Britain, Catalogue of Exhibits, London, 1951, 115.

Fig. 5. Cover of R. R. Clarke, Grime’s Graves, 1963 official guide for visitors.


Hutton notes that only in 1986 did Piggott make public the suggestion that the goddess might bea forgery, that Armstrong’s sense of ancient artistry exceeding Epstein was contemporary sculpturein its own right. Within a book review essay for Antiquity, Piggott noted a picture of the goddess ina British Museum publication: ‘I think it is not irrelevant, 50 years after its finding in 1939, to drawattention towhat can only be called the unsatisfactory circumstanceswhich seemalways to have sur-rounded this find’. The excavation had never been formally published: ‘At the time of the discoveryandafter theWar, rumours persistently circulated that thewhole set-upwas a fake planted to deceivethe excavator,A. L.Armstrong, and indeedwhen Iwas about to publish one of the first photographsof the figurine (Piggott, 1954, Pl. iv), I was seriously warned that it might not be authentic’.62 Piggottalso suggested a re-examination of the engravings on flint found at Grimes Graves.

What did the Grimes Graves goddess signify to the mid-twentieth-century enquirer? Thatancient miners were superstitious like us as well as being industrial like us? That they werein touch with the earth mother? Hutton notes the arguments for a Neolithic age of the God-dess by mainstream archaeologists such as Glyn Daniel, O. G. S. Crawford and Gordon

62 S. Piggott, Early British craftsmen, Antiquity 60 (1986) 189e192, quote 190; Hutton, Triumph of the Moon (note 6),38e39; Hutton, Pagan Religions (note 6), 43e44.


Childe: ‘Whether or not there ever was an Age of the Goddess in Neolithic Europe, there cer-tainly was one among European intellectuals between 1951 and 1963’.63 Clarke and Green reg-ister Piggott’s analysis of an offering made in a shaft sparse in flint: ‘This assemblage stronglysuggests the propitiation of an ‘‘Earth Goddess’’ combined with an appeal for more abundantor better-quality flint in the next pit’.64 Clarke includes a ritual drawing by Alan Sorrell,miners presenting their antler picks to the goddess.65 While however the term goddess is de-ployed here, its containment within quotation marks signals that in some ways the chalk ob-ject, described in matter-of-fact language, becomes for the site guides simply one moreaccoutrement of ancient mining, along with the antler picks and deer doodles. Neither Clarkenor Green engage in further goddess speculation, effectively projecting a modern distinction ofsacred and practical onto the ancient mines, with the discovery that yes, indeed, these peoplewere religious and/or superstitious like us. With their lack of geological nous they could beexcused gestures which, while evidently futile to us, made sense in their own terms. For an-cient people, they were as reasonable and modern as could be expected, living in this Sheffieldof the Stone Age.

The goddess took another flight, however, in the work of Jacquetta Hawkes, whose 1945Early Britain, for the popular Collins ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, saw the figure as confirminglinks between New Stone Age British megalithic culture and Mediterranean civilisation and its‘Earth Mother goddess’. The chalk goddess indicated ‘a cult of fertility, the earth mother,death and rebirth’.66 Hawkes developed the association of ‘the Great Goddess of EarthMother and the attendant male god who is her son or lover’ in her 1951 book A Land, influ-enced by Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Carving in chalk would ‘at all times have re-called the flesh of the White Goddess’, and in Grimes Graves ‘the goddess was discoveredenthroned above a pile of antlers on which rested a chalk-carved phallus’. Here was ‘OurLady of the Flint Mines’, being asked to cure ‘sterility’ in this failed pit: ‘It is worth meditat-ing on this story, for it perfectly represents the unity of life these people enjoyed. They wereconfident that by carving the symbols of a woman and a phallus and rendering the appropri-ate ritual words, movements, and offerings, they could ensure an increase of flint just as read-ily as their fellows could multiply their calves and lambs’.67 This is less an ancient modernthan a world we have lost, and a quality that we might seek to regain, a unity of life andcloseness to earth. Another Neolithic achieves presence. Hawkes described the visitor’s en-counter with the goddess pit in her 1951 Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments inEngland and Wales: ‘This pit has now been roofed and visitors can look into the shrinewith a cast of the cult objects in their original positions. In so doing they will be looking,however darkly, deep into the experience of prehistoric forebears’. This, combined with access

63 Hutton, Triumph of the Moon (note 6), 280.64 Clarke, Grime’s Graves (note 42).65 Clarke, Grime’s Graves (note 42), 20; also in Green, Young People’s Guide (note 53), 12.66 J. Hawkes, Early Britain, London, 1945, 17; also J. Hawkes and C. Hawkes, Prehistoric Britain, London, 1948, 39,

and in the subsequent 1958 Penguin edition of the same book, 51.67 J. Hawkes, A Land, London, 1951, 128. Hawkes’ book appeared in Festival year; her archaeological trowel was the

first item (B101) in the catalogue of exhibits in the ‘People of Britain’ pavilion at the Festival of Britain; Festival ofBritain, Catalogue of Exhibits (note 61), 113.


to another shaft, made for something special for ‘the traveller who has reached this remoteNorfolk heath . Shrine and flint-miner together certainly make this a place to be visitedby all those who hope to establish imaginative contact with the past’.68 At some point theentire display was removed, perhaps due to it being deemed far too imaginative given thehints of forgery.69 It could however be asked what was lost for the visitor with the display’sremoval. If the goddess no longer carries the archaeological field, and even if this was onlyever a twentieth-century carved lump, the maintenance of a display concerning a chalk god-dess of doubtful provenance might allow a differently expanded sense of the presentprehistoric.

Flint

Running through Breckland’s present prehistory is a poetics of flint, with geology, industry andcraft worked together through a specific stone. Flint is presented as sign of regional identity, sub-stance for distinctive work, fabric for regional building, collectible object, and vehicle foridiosyncrasy.

In 1941 the Geographical Magazine published three essays by H. J. Massingham on ‘EnglishEarth and English Buildings’, each taking a rock type as productive of cultural regionalism.The second considered chalk, and within this the place of flint as building stone: ‘it has a longercontinuity for human use than any other stone in the world. From the uncreate to the flower ofcraftsmanship the chain is unbroken’.70 Massingham noted Grimes Graves, and the ‘richly forma-tive part’ played by flint in ‘the development of the local genius’ in East Anglia.71 In his 1942memoir Remembrance Massingham described tramping over the Brecks after the first world

68 J. Hawkes, A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales, London, 1951, 244.69 The chain of events here is uncertain. Hawkes’ description of the display remained in the 1973 second edition of h

Guide (A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales, London, 1973, 249), though the displais not mentioned in reports of the 1972e1976 excavations; Longworth et al, Excavations (note 55). Likewise neithClarke’s 1963 guide nor Green in 1964 mention Hawkes’ ‘cast of the cult objects’, though both note a display of antle

upon an altar of flint blocks within a fenced off area in the shaft, with the goddess removed to the British MuseumClarke comments: ‘Where the fence touches the side of the shaft was formerly the chalk pedestal on which the figurinof the ‘‘goddess’’ was found’; Grime’s Graves (note 42), 29. This would suggest that by 1973 Hawkes’ account had bcome inaccurate but was not amended. If her 1951 account is accurate then it would seem the goddess returned to th

site in replica for a period between the end of the war and 1963, perhaps the same replica exhibited at the Festival oBritain. By 1993 the English Heritage site guide by Green included a photograph of ‘chalk figurine of woman’, bunoted doubt concerning the ‘curious assemblage’, which may have been ‘created and added to the site as a hoax

B. Green, Grime’s Graves, London, 1993, 19. Varndell gives a full account of the story of the production of a replicon site shortly after the discovery by Armstrong’s close friend Ethel Rudkin, later known for her work on Lincolnshifolklore, and the estrangement between the two which this caused. Rudkin retained the figure in secret at her home nea

Scunthorpe. Varndell notes the continuing ‘miasma’ surrounding the discovery; Longworth et al, Excavations (note 55105.70 H. J. Massingham, English earth and English buildings II: chalk, Geographical Magazine 14 (1) (1941e1942

November 1941, 12e25, quote 15.71 Massingham, English earth (note 70), 16.

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war with W. G. Clarke, ‘that great scholar of nature of whom I was later to write a memoir’:‘flowers and birds and the flints of prehistoric man became to me what candles, altar and the voiceof the officiating priest are to the devout’.72 Massingham recalled a mid-1930s journey to Norfolkto construct a philosophy of flint:

72 Hto intr

Massithat Cwalkin

view osomet73 M74 B.75 M

But that word ‘flint’ is two things: it is a cross-section of some few billenia in world-history,and it is a symbol of regional England. A nodule of flint is a geological memoir, an introduc-tion to botanical ecology, a palaeozoic treatise, a geographical and industrial grammar ofprehistoric man, a road-itinerary, a mining manual, a course in the technique of Roman mu-ral construction, a chapter of mediaeval aesthetics, an extract from ecclesiastical history, a di-gest of the development of local genius, a tractate upon the line of division between ancientand modern, a fairy-tale and a local guide-book. If the Foraminifera of Cretaceous seas pro-liferated into a wondrous variety of forms during life, they have rendered an even more re-markable account of themselves after death.

Massingham aimed ‘to plot out a landscape of time from a chunk of flint’, beginning with it‘lying on the ground among the unenclosed sandy wilds of Breckland’, and following it thoughGrimes Graves and modern Brandon and across the Gothic churches of Norfolk.73

Flint as poetic object, as source of pleasure, as regional symbol, is a common feature of Breck-land accounts of all types. Grahame Clark characterised himself as a ‘passionate connoisseur’ offlints when young, inspired by figures in the P.S.E.A. whose chief preoccupation was the collectionand classification of flint implements.74 James Reid Moir’s works especially are crammed with me-ticulous drawings of flint implements, and The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia began with an ac-count of ‘The Pleasures of Flint Hunting’, a pursuit entailing communion with nature and thepast, if not with fellow humans:

The collecting of the flint implements, and other relics, of prehistoric man is, essentially, anopen air branch of science, for the sites where men now congregate are often far removedfrom those occupied by the people of the Stone Age, and thus it is that those who followthe trail of the ancient hunters of the remote past, find themselves, frequently, in the wildand unvisited places of Nature.75

The landscapes highlighted to draw in the prospective reader and collector are the north-eastcoast of Norfolk, and the Breckland heaths.

. J. Massingham, Remembrance, London, 1942, 48. Massingham had written a five-page memorial ‘Appreciation’oduce W. G. Clarke’s In Breckland Wilds (note 21), viiexi, praising the ‘monarch of prehistory in East Anglia’, xi.

ngham was then an affiliate of the diffusionist school tracing all things prehistoric to ancient Egypt, and stressedlarke being ‘a local specialist upon his native country’ (ix) did not prevent him being open to wider ideas. Whileg with the author Massingham queried Clarke’s ‘orthodox’ view of the neolithic, positing instead his diffusionist

f civilised and peaceful colonists from the Eastern Mediterranean: ‘he astonished me by thinking there might behing in it’ (xi).assingham, Remembrance (note 72), 88e90.

Fagan, Grahame Clark: an Intellectual Life of an Archaeologist, Boulder, 2001, 1.oir, Antiquity (note 45), 1.


Flint similarly shaped the work of Olive Cook, whose 1956Breckland volume in publisher RobertHale’s ‘Regional Books’ series recounted her own finds, including the most exciting, ‘not becauseof its intrinsic worth, but because of the occasion’, on ploughed land along the track of Santon Streeton a summer evening, after an hour’s search:

76 OwaterW. G77 C78 C

I came upon a button scraper, a lustrous little object exquisitely chipped. It was one of thosemagic, life-enhancing moments which, though rarely recorded, mean far more in the devel-opment of a human spirit than the facts of birth, marriage and death. It is difficult to conveyexactly what I felt. My pleasure did not depend only on the discovery of the scraper, but itwas as though all that moved me and had moved me at other times in the beauty of this placewas concentrated in the instant when I took the flint into my hands. I was aware of the greatantiquity of the lonely spot where I stood; and I felt as I clasped the implement that I hadestablished contact with the hand that had fashioned it. I thought of all the uses to whichflint had since been put in Breckland and how it had so largely shaped the character ofthe district.76

The account appears opposite a photograph of a lonely trackway between Cockley Cley andSouth Pickenham. Topographic writing conveys a record of rare experience fostered throughtouch as well as vision, a gesture of going beyond detachment into a select sensibility of landscape.

After describing her flint find Cook moves on to part of Breckland’s ‘attraction of strangeness’,the two surviving ‘modern flintknappers’ of Brandon, who provide the town’s ‘characteristicsound, the sound of clear, precise tapping which on every weekday of the year can be heard com-ing from the yard behind the Flintknappers’ Arms’. Cultural value here lies in this being a soundboth workaday and historic, a craft noise lending geographical distinction: ‘It is a sound whichhas echoed, if not from exactly that spot, in that parish for thousands of years. It is the noisemade by the flintknappers as they ply the trade of their Neolithic forebears, a trade followed no-where else in England’. The flint’s ‘outlandish forms’ trigger contemporary moderneprimitive artassociations: ‘The curving shapes that Henry Moore loves are among them’.77 Rounded pebbles,tree trunks, gulls, swans, oxen, cats, sea-lions, fish, Apollo and a ship’s figurehead are conjuredup. The knappers of Brandon, and the miners of the surviving pits at nearby Lingheath, also be-come signs of present prehistory themselves. W. G. Clarke noted the theory, posited at the BritishAssociation in 1880, that modern knappers were ‘lineal descendants’ of Neolithic people: ‘descen-dants of the pre-Celtic race of the Neolithic Age, distinguished by being short and swarthy, withblack hair and eyes, and long, narrow heads’.78 Clarke relished the specialist language of miningand knapping, a craft dialect making the ancient present:

To talk with a man working 40 or 50 feet below the surface, dimly visible in the darkness bythe fitful glimmer of a solitary candle, with no other human being in sight, is to be

. Cook, Breckland, London, 1956, 17. Cook’s treatment of the region is thematic, with sections on flint, sand and

. Five chapters address flint, with one covering ‘Prehistoric Flints’ and another ‘Modern Flintknappers’. As in

. Clarke’s work, the trope of the primitive informs her whole regional account.

ook, Breckland (note 76), 18e19.larke, Norfolk and Suffolk (note 21), 107.

79 Cl80 Cl81 Cl

Linghimplic171e182 Cl83 Cl84 Cl85 Cl86 Cl


transported to prehistoric times, to the days of the troglodytes. Some of the terms used ac-centuate this archaic atmosphere.79

Rainbird Clarke’s revised In Breckland Wilds instituted a new chapter on the knappers’workshops at Brandon, detailing their techniques with precision: ‘The archaeologist owesa debt of gratitude to the consummate skill of the knappers for initiation into the mysteriesof flint working’.80 Clarke also described the mines: ‘On Lingheath to-day hundreds and per-haps thousands of crescent-mounds of grey and disintegrated chalk dominate the landscape.Two pits only now remain open e one in process of exploitation and a fresh shaft sunk bythe last surviving miner e Ashley, a septuaginarian’81 (Fig. 6). Clarke ended his chapter,and his related Antiquity paper, by suggesting the end was nigh: ‘This unique domestic industryis already languishing into decay. Soon it will perish and be numbered among the bygonehandicrafts of rural England, leaving only the tradition of its age-long secrets’.82 Clarke imag-ined a human link via ‘inherited skill’ to the workers of Grimes Graves: ‘It thus seems prob-able, and the unusual physical features of some of the knappers support this view, that workersof flint have lingered in and around Brandon from prehistoric times, devoting their attention tothe needs of each passing age and transmitting their inherited skill and acquired knowledgeto succeeding generations’.83

W. G. Clarke also noted another way in which the knappers made the prehistoric present: ‘Theknappers are also capable of furnishing an unlimited supply of ‘‘prehistoric relics’’.84 RainbirdClarke suggested a seemingly civic-minded ability to ‘fabricate excellent imitations of prehistoricflint implements for schools and museums’,85 though his Antiquity article noted fabrication earn-ing the knappers ‘notoriety in the eyes of prehistorians, for though arrow-heads, axes and scrapersof Brandon make rarely deceive the expert, they are calculated to entrap the wary amateur’.86 Theattitude to such fabrication is itself indicative of contest over the virtues of engagement with theancient past. If Rainbird Clarke puts down errant entrapping knappers, Cook relishes their abilityto deceive, highlighting incongruities which problematise senses of authentic local tradition, andemphasising the distant flintlock markets in Thailand and the USA which sustain this Brecklandpractice. Cook notes the past production of ‘genuine prehistoric relics’ by a nineteenth-centuryknapper known as ‘Flint Jack’: ‘it is certain that much of his handiwork still reposes undetectedin museums and in private collections of Neolithic flints’. Honest skills of imitation, signifying thecontinuity of a crafty tradition, are practised by the current knappers: ‘If he has a spare momentMr Drewery will hammer out an arrow-head fit to place beside the work of any Neolithic artist,

arke, Norfolk and Suffolk (note 21), 111.arke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), 124; also Clarke, The flint-knapping industry (note 35).arke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), 119; see also Clarke, Norfolk and Suffolk (note 21), 108. On the

eath mines see also D. Field, Eighteenth and nineteenth-century gunflint mines at Brandon, England, and theirations for prehistoric mining in Europe, in Topping and Lynott, Cultural Landscape of Prehistoric Mines,80.

arke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), 125.arke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19), 124.arke, Norfolk and Suffolk (note 21), 119.

arke with Clarke, In Breckland Wilds (note 19).arke, The flint-knapping industry (note 35), 56.

Fig. 6. ‘Lingheath Flint-Pits, Brandon. Ashley, probably the last Surviving Miner’, from W. G. Clarke with R. R. Clarke, In Breckland

Wilds, 1937, facing 118, photograph by E. Cecil Curwen, 1933.


and if he is pleased with his visitor he will present him with a little dark, flint heart of his ownknapping’.87

In Cook’s work, and in that of Dutt, we find a reflexivity with regard to the present prehistoricwhich can at times put everything in enigmatic and musing suspension, while at the same time high-lighting the capacity of the author to recognise authenticity even when delighting in the inauthentic.Imitation thrills only because youknowyouare not being taken in. In his 1901Highways andBywaysin East AngliaDutt practises a sensibility which while revelling in yarns and legends (‘I am an incur-ably sentimental traveller’88), also keeps a wary eye on those who try to take the traveller in, and di-rects a superior eye to those taken in before. Dutt begins his account of Breckland with a downbeatvisit to a rainy Brandon (‘on a dull wet day it is so utterly dismal that words cannot describe it’89),with the monotonous tapping of the knappers and the difficulties of finding Grimes Graves amidconfusing trackways and nettle-covered ground. Dutt is happy to undercut ideas of continuity be-tween the specialist language ofNeolithic andmodern knappers, but appreciates the latter’s capacityfor ancient imitation, describing the accomplishments of ‘Flint Jack’ and the current Brandon knap-pers: ‘Many a stone axe and arrow-head treasured by amateur collectors was, fifty years ago, repos-ing unfashioned in its nodule of flint’.90 Flint offers an occasion for delightful deceit alongside the

87 Cook, Breckland (note 76), 21e22. Cook’s account is thereby more complex than the celebration of local craft in thework of Massingham; see T. Harrod, The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century, New Haven, 1999; D. Matless,Landscape and Englishness, London, 1998. Cook’s appreciation of such crafty practice is also evident in her contribu-

tions, with her husband photographer Edwin Smith, to the annual Saturday Book in the 1950s and 1960s, which cel-ebrated cultural eccentricity.88 Dutt, Highways and Byways (note 30), 4.89 Dutt, Highways and Byways (note 30), 328.90 Dutt, Highways and Byways (note 30), 332; on Flint Jack see also Clarke, Norfolk and Suffolk (note 21).


tracing of bedrock values.Dutt notes that excavations atGrimesGraves have undercut the imitationbusiness, providing genuine ancient implements to satisfy collectors’ demands.

The sense of prehistory folding in complex ways into present practice stretches to the character-isation of antiquarians. Cook describes the photograph of W. G. Clarke beside a gonnera: ‘As oneof his friends said, he was physically not unlike the Neolithic inhabitants of Breckland’, with some‘subtle instinct’ for finding their remains.91 Clarke’s uncanny prehistoric presence extended to hisdomestic habits: ‘Upon nearer acquaintance the passion of W. G. Clarke for the Breckland heathsseems justified. It is easy to understand his reluctance to spend a night away from the warren andto appreciate the spirit which led him to shave with a prehistoric flint implement he found nearBrandon’.92 Breckland becomes a region named by a man himself almost Neolithic.

Past presence

After tea with the Thetfordmayor, the 1961 British Association Section H excursionists returnedto their coaches for the journey home, passing the town’s ‘Motte and Bailey Castle (Castle Hill)’,a mound 80 feet high within two earth ramparts and ditches. Whether Rainbird Clarke gavecommentary to guide observation is unclear, but there were various stories available, and not allposited medieval motte and bailey origin. In 1951 Doreen Wallace presented Castle Hill as a site‘about whose history nothing is known for certain’.93 Wallace discussed theories of a fortified si-te raised by the Normans or Ancient Britons, noting that excavations had found no traces ofstonework: ‘It is just an outsize mound with two fosses and two valla’. There was also anothertheory:

91 Co92 Co93 W94 W

Markto Alf

discuscount

There is a suggestion that it was not a fortification at all, but an ancient British observatory.Identifying with the name of Bel, the Phoenician sun-god, a large number of places called‘Bell’ in the vicinity, the ingenious progenitor of this theory then took a bearing e I don’tpretend to understand this, but there are many who will e and found that in a line thirty-three miles long and cutting through the Thetford mound, there were five places called‘Bell’ in the alignment of the rising sun at the winter solstice and the setting sun at midsum-mer. There can be no dispute, he says, that from these places flared in days of yore the Mid-summer votive fires to Bel the sun-god. That is as may be, but why would an observatoryneed two fosses and two valla?Well, there it stands, a massive enigma; and it is pleasant to reflect that archaeologists stillhave something to puzzle them.94

ok, Breckland (note 76), 170.ok, Breckland (note 76), 9.allace and Bagnall-Oakeley, Norfolk (note 50), 17.

allace and Bagnall-Oakeley, Norfolk (note 50), 18e19; Wallace may here be alluding to Dutt, whose The Ancient-Stones of East Anglia: Their Origin and Folklore, Lowestoft, 1926, included studies of alignment and connectionsred Watkins’ ley-line theory via these ‘Norfolk and Suffolk Megaliths’, 6. Dutt may be referring to Castle Hill in

sing ‘the artificial mount known as Bell Hill . one of the unexplained mysteries of the district’, alongside ac-s of ‘Bell’ place names, alignments and fire worship, 25.


Poet and topographer Edward Thomas similarly puzzled over Castle Hill in 1913: ‘It was likea personification of stupid enormous time’.95

Wallace’s phrase: ‘I don’t pretend to understand this, but there are many who will’, could betaken in different ways, as a confession of inability in a field where others have expertise, or asa resistance to foolish explanation where others will readily pretend to understand. The presentprehistoric in twentieth-century Breckland indeed shows credibility and credulity as categorieswith a culturally complex overlap. This paper has been concerned with attempts to fathomtime, whether enormous, stupid or otherwise, with events and objects from before historical re-cord figured as remotely enchanted, anciently modern, deeply traditional, marvellously primitive.The properties by which the ancient achieves presence and animates present landscape are variedin their temporality and their politics. For some, notably Olive Cook, the trope of Breckland asprimitive could be set against modern development and state action, whether in forestry, militarytraining or the London overspill growth of Thetford. For others the ancient could stand as ananticipation of the modern e the Sheffield of the Stone Age e to be maintained through publicownership and maintenance. The ancient as precursor to the modern might also have registeredhad Breckland been chosen in the 1960s competition for a site for the CERN nuclear accelerator;Mundford was the UK government’s proposed site, but lost out in European competition toGeneva. While some opposed the CERN plan as destructive of regional landscape and identity,other narratives could have drawn a direct line from Grimes Graves to CERN. Thus Goldsmithand Shaw’s 1977 story of CERN, Europe’s Giant Accelerator, reflected on the origins of physicsthrough a drawing of a hairy and naked Stone Age man smashing flints: ‘The high energy phys-icist is continuing a pattern of research that goes back to Stone Age man . When he was smash-ing together his flints, he was accelerating one mass to a high energy, projecting it against a target,and analysing the collision products’.96 Had Mundford won out a visitor centre might have drawnlinks between ancient and modern residents.

To return to the questions of landscape animation raised earlier, this paper has pursued the ‘ele-mental and affective’ via historical enquiry, showing how such matters emerge via cultural practice;whether the thoughts prompted via a touch of flint, the dioramatic imaginings of ancient life, thewhite goddess conjured in a chalk lump, or the citizenship to be nurtured in a crawling boy. If land-scape is deserving of animation, cultural andhistorical enquiry offer ameans to that end. The effect isnot to thereby confine elementality or affect via historical contextualisation, but rather, in demon-strating and appreciating their cultural work, to affirm those categories as themselves historicallyand geographically relational. Twentieth-century ancient Breckland indeed also shows sensibilitieswary of the romantic or affected. Hawkes’ revered transnational white goddess cohabits with Rain-bird Clarke and Barbara Green’s regional scepticism, while Cook’s profound flint reverie happensalongside her relish of its craftily deceitful knapping. If, inWylie’s terms, landscape is ‘the material-ities and sensibilities with which we see’,97 cultural enquiry signals the many ways landscape may beanimated, the sceptical alongside the reverential, the satirical with the profound.

95 E. Thomas, The Icknield Way, London, 1913, 88.96 M. Goldsmith and E. Shaw, Europe’s Giant Accelerator, London, 1977, 5.97 J. Wylie, Depths and folds: on landscape and the gazing subject, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24

(2006) 519e535, quote 531.


In Theatre/Archaeology, after critiquing Tilley’s unproblematically pastoral aesthetic of ancientlandscape, Pearson and Shanks set up landscape as ‘a field of process and relationship, a contra-dictory nexus, itself to be explored’, and address, via a study of ruined farmsteads in a west Walesplantation, the issues of ‘modes of visiting and the character of ruin’.98 Researching the propertiesof ancient Breckland landscape has entailed a fieldworking of the material concerned, whether ontrackways, in mineshafts (descending today and tunnel-crawling as a boy), or in the study roomsof the British Museum, the goddess brought up from storage. Pearson and Shanks posit a ‘theoryof ruin’ as ‘an ecology of interpenetration between past and present, with the visit treated as a per-formative event which witnesses absence’.99 Paralleling their study, this paper ends with an excur-sion through twentieth-century Breckland stones and monuments, items themselves beginning totake on the aspect of distant time (Fig. 7).

In 1956 Olive Cook reflected on the recent military past:

98 Pe99 Pe

deer h100 C101 H

P. Wr

Thoughts of ghosts are encouraged by the appearance of an abandoned training camp. Rot-ting huts, empty hangars and concrete runways loom dismally out of the mist. The concreteruthlessly covers an ancient tumulus marked on the map; but distress at such an outragegives way to confidence in the vitality of the wilderness as the hard surface of the runwayis seen to be rent by great fissures and cracks, through which already furze, fern and heatherare forcing their way.100

New stones break up, and the violence done to older mounds is countered for Cook by nature’sresilient energy. Today such sites carry the old stones of sixty years ago. East Wretham Heathnature reserve includes the remains of a wartime airfield, its runway presented by the NorfolkWildlife Trust as a choice site for the take off of the stone curlew, iconic bird of Breckland. Atthe meeting point of concrete roads and runways stands a low concrete stump, relic of somekind of turning post, a sign of international endeavour by Czech or American or British pilotswhich shaped and continues to shape the region and the wider world. The nearby military BattleArea between Thetford and Watton remains a site of social contention through villages forciblyabandoned in wartime, though is valued by ecologists as a zone where Breckland nature has beenmaintained.101 Mock stone and concrete structures mimic the command posts and roadblocks ofNorthern Ireland, while a mock village apes a settlement of the North German Plain, projected asthe likely Cold war battleground. Alongside Grimes Graves, the Drove Road and the PeddarsWay, twentieth-century relics occupy the region, a cultural landscape demanding more than sim-ply setting in negative against an enchanted ancient songline.

Elsewhere on theWretham reserve is a memorial stone toDr Sydney Long (1870e1939), founderof the Norfolk Naturalists Trust. The stone was set up against a view over Langmere to an island ofpines, but trees have grown behind the stone, its setting changed and, from the perspective of itsdesigners, diminished. Tricks of nature and absent management play around the monuments to

arson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (note 14), 154.

arson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (note 14). See also Lorimer, Herding memories (note 11), on recent rein-erding relics in the Cairngorm landscape.ook, Breckland (note 76), 70.

. Perry and E. Perry, Tottington: a Lost Village in Norfolk, Wymondham, 1999. For a parallel Dorset study seeight, The Village That Died for England, London, 1995.

Fig. 7. Twentieth-century Breckland monuments and relics, photographed in 2002: the runway at East Wretham airfield (top and

bottom left), the Sydney Long monument at Langmere (top right), the Petch memorial bench at Thompson Common (bottom right).


twentieth-century endeavour, whether behind Long’s monument or through the Wretham runway.A few miles north at Thompson Common, in a post-glacial relic landscape of heathland with pingopools, a bench stands in memory of C. P. Petch, co-author of the 1968 Flora of Norfolk and eco-logist of Breckland.102 The bench provided the walker with a restful spot to look over a pingo; untilbushes and briars grew such that the bench looks only a few feet into thick plant life. Sitting onPetch’s bench today, perhaps musing on ecological succession, is comical, at least for a moment.Twentieth-century relics of wood and stone may grow as enigmatic as anything produced by FlintJack or planted by a goddess carver, their stories telling in a region’s cultural landscape.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Charles Watkins and Paul Merchant for collaboration on earlier research on the re-gion, to Adam Stout and Peter Topping for comments on this and relatedmaterial, to CliveWilkins-Jones of Norfolk and Norwich Millenium Library for information on the life of Dutt, and to

102 C. P. Petch and E. L. Swann, Flora of Norfolk, Norwich, 1968.


Gillian Varndell of the British Museum for information on and access to the Grimes Graves figu-rine and the papers of A. L. Armstrong. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a confer-ence on the cultural reception of prehistoric monuments, organised by Ronald Hutton and JoanneParker at the University of Bristol in April 2006. Thanks to those who contributed to discussionthere, and to three referees who provided valuable comments on an earlier version for JHG.

Documents

Properties of ancient landscape: the present prehistoric in twentieth-century Breckland