Old Sarum is a wonderful monument and as it as it stands at the moment sits above
Salisbury, it's big, it's attractive, it's easy to get to, it's a very important
sort of community space and public space, people use it a lot.
The site goes back at least into the late Iron Age, so we're looking at two
and a half thousand years roughly there, but there's every possibility that it
extends further back into time than that, because of its location it's quite
likely that it was a... that there was an early Iron Age fort there and it's
also quite possible that there might be some of the earlier very enigmatic
prehistoric monuments hidden in amongst all of that; we know that there the
valley to the north is every single little reentrant in that valley has a is
pockmarked with barrows if you look at in photographs and so on and there's a
long barrow just to the north, so there's there's a possibility that there
might be some really quite interesting stuff within the within the site, but
that's why we're looking at the landscape, not just the monument itself;
if we start with the landscape outside we'll start to build up a better answer
to that question and there certainly there are archaeological remains in the
immediate environs which go back you know five or six thousand years.
Although it's a village now with a hill fort above it both things have
urban elements and there was a Roman town in Stratford and there's a huge
monument in Old Sarum itself and it's the the origins part of the origin story
of Salisbury, it's also in a sense part of the origin story of England, of
Britain, because it's there that William the Conqueror pays off his army, meets
all the landowners and it's more than likely there but he's first presented
with the Doomsday Book so there's there's a huge sort of heart of the
English story there already and and then all of the the foundation myth of
Salisbury stuff is very interesting and it's just it's a it's a hill full of
deep time and the landscape around it I would say, without being remotely scared
of hyperbole, it's it's the equal of any archaeological landscape in Europe, it is
perhaps not as well-preserved as some, but it has all of the elements of a
tremendously interesting landscape and I think that our Old Sarum Landscapes
project, will start to tease out that detail which is otherwise you know we
think of Stonehenge, for example, as being utterly unique but I think to an extent
it is but I think largely its unique in the sense that people just keep looking
at it, so of course we find lots of things, wherever you go you find
extraordinary stuff and I think what I find exciting about that is just how
full the landscape is and there in all that Old Sarum we have this this this
hill fort, we have a Roman town, we've got medieval settlements, shrunken medieval
settlements, got churches there's just a huge amount of material in that
landscape which I think we're going to get a great deal out of looking at.
The projects been ongoing now for about sort of three years but these things are
a very slow build and most of the work, in fact I think realistically, all of the
work of the moments been done by Southampton University by Kris
Strutt and Dom Barker where they've been doing the geophysical survey first of
all within the hill fort itself and in the in the environs of the of the
scheduled ancient monument and the things that they have turned up really
have completely changed the narrative of Old Sarum,
which is extremely gratifying because all of us who've been involved in this
had been saying for years there are ideas about Old Sarum were had to be
false and the the sort of the received wisdom up until about a year ago last
Thursday, was that it was largely empty, there's just a castle, the Cathedral, some
stuff and nobody would have lived there because it would have been far too hot
in the summer and cold in the winter and it all would've been a bit rubbish. So all of
the settlement had to be outside it and on the hillsides and what they've shown
is that the inside of the hill fort is absolutely full of material; walls and
buildings and things that look like they might well be industrial hearths and
that kind of thing, there's a great there's a what looks like a either a
parade ground or a marketplace as a big open area and there are structures which
look very much like the churches which are also that there are I think there's
four churches that we can't locate up there and we think we've got at least
one of those in the geophysics that Dom and Kris and students did over
the last couple of summers, so it was hugely thrilling, absolutely thrilling
stuff. There's a medieval hospice of St. John a leper the hospital, we know where
that is now because of a Wessex water pipeline, but there are others within the
within the curtilage of the monument and what's supposedly the township of Old
Sarum and we just don't know where they are, they might be earlier dedications of
the churches that exist today, or they are completely separate buildings and
some of them like St Ethelreda it's quite and St. Peter
they're very early dedications, so they're probably quite small buildings.
What we can build with with the Landscapes Project is really quite
exciting, but it's not just Southampton University students who are going to be
involved, there are also going to be volunteers from the local community and we
think that as we as we develop more funds as much as anything else but more
of a story and more of a narrative that we want to pursue, we're going to be
we're going to be keen to start involving other groups and bringing them
into archaeology and so on and history; so we're going to be looking at first of
all therapeutic archaeology for our ex-servicemen the Operation Nightingale
Breaking Ground Heritage those guys we'll we want to be bringing them in, but not
just those guys, there are other groups, there are youth groups within Salisbury
that, surprisingly for a Cathedral City, there's two of probably the most
disadvantaged wards in the county there, so archaeology is intensely therapeutic
for a lot of people and we want to make more of that and really make it
something that really is something that benefits the local community and and and
advances people's agendas really, rather than it just being about us becoming "big
men and women" who, actually we want to see it becoming something which the the
whole community can enjoy.