Episode Two: Unearthing History

How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line.

This episode, ‘Unearthing History’, explores everything archaeology. HS2’s archaeology programme is a once-in-a-generation opportunity that will allow us to reveal over 10,000 years of British history.

As Europe’s biggest dig, HS2’s archaeology programme has provided fascinating insight and discoveries into the lives of the people and communities who made modern Britain.

Guests

• Helen Wass, HS2 Head of Historic Environment
• Mike Court, HS2 Lead of Historic Environment
• Dr Rachel Wood, Former Archaeological Manager on HS2

Mike explains the Historic Environmental Research Delivery Strategy (HERDS) plan which developed the focus of the field work and asking the big landscape questions.

Rachel describes the 20 sites she was responsible for including St Mary’s Church and the whole host incredible discoveries.

Helen looks at the future of the sites with the post excavation process and how the focus will shift to a wider picture. Why the discoveries were there? What were the Romans doing? How has the landscape changed through to the Victorian time?

Episode Two – Unearthing History (transcript)

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Episode transcript

This is a transcript of episode two of HS2’s How to build a railway podcast, first published on 7 March 2023.

Fran Scott: I’m Fran Scott and this is How to Build a Railway. This episode we are going to travel back many thousands of years into Britain’s history.

We’re talking about archaeology.

High Speed 2 is an effort to reshape and reimagine the country’s rail network. A project of this magnitude does not come along very often, and just as it is built upon the legacy of the past, it offers us the opportunity to delve into that past.

When it comes to building a railway, there is a lot of work that needs to be done before the construction can begin. These are called enabling works.

0:50

Helen Wass: So there’s all the advanced archaeological works, along with ecological works habitat creation, alongside the utility diversions, early highways work, early landscape working so that embankments are created, and trees are planted in an earlier stage to later on, maybe shield a view, rather than waiting for that construction to happen. And we can’t build the railway until all the environmental works are undertaken.

Fran Scott: While these may seem like steps that delay the building from starting, these steps can provide massive benefits and in the case of archaeology a much greater understanding of our past.

1:29

Rachel Wood: In terms of the archaeological opportunity HS2 was huge.

And so we are getting to learn things across all periods of history all the way through prehistory, all the way through the you know, the Roman, Saxon, mediaeval post mediaeval periods right up to the modern day, about sections of the country that we wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise, we’ve got to learn.

Fran Scott: For any construction project there are requirements around archaeological concerns.

All archaeological work starts with a desk-based assessment

2:15

Mike Court: So you look at existing information, other archaeological projects that have happened nearby, written sources, documentary sources, and try and figure out what’s there without putting a spade in the ground.

Fran Scott: This is Mike Court, HS2 lead of historic environment.

2:30

Rachel Wood: That is where you look at all the existing information through things like the Historic Environment records, that has all previous archaeological excavations listed on it, as well as all archaeological finds that we know of. And it’s all plotted on a map as well. So you can physically see that relation between what you’re reading about and the scheme that you’re looking at building or the client is looking at building

Fran Scott: And this is Dr Rachel Wood, one of the archaeological managers on HS2.

If there are any known sites of archaeological interest in the area it will likely lead to some non-intrusive geophysical surveying of the site.

3:11

Rachel Wood: If that geophysics is then looking promising if there’s a lot of features on there or potential features, we then go to trial trenching, which is a bit like, so geophysics is a bit like x-raying the ground ,trial trenching is a bit like keyhole surgery, you get a little peek under the soil.

Fran Scott: Then you have to make a decision based on the historical importance of what you find.

3:34

Rachel Wood: If all you find is a Roman field system, you don’t really need to progress that beyond trial trenching, because it’s just another field system, it’s some ditches surrounding some fields, and ultimately progressing that to mitigation and getting, you know, the, the cost to the client is not going to contribute to the archaeological knowledge, knowing it’s there, and knowing it’s Roman is enough. But equally, if you find, you know, the edge of a settlement or things that look like buildings, or you know, something else that we didn’t know, was there that, you know, possibly a graveyard or something a bit more complex.

Fran Scott: And it gets way more complex when the project you’re working on isn’t a new car park or housing project, but an entire railway spanning over 200 miles and what would come to be the biggest archaeology project in Europe.

When it came to planning all the archaeological work on HS2, Mike Court and Helen Wass, HS2’s Head of Historic Environment were delivering against the Heritage Memorandum.

4:42

Helen Wass: The Heritage Memorandum is the Secretary of State’s commitment to the historic environment. And in that document, it’s only about seven or so pages long, it has all the hooks on which we have to follow. So developing Historic Environment Research and delivery strategy to deliver on those commitments, engage with our stakeholders, so largely local authority, archaeologists, Conservation Officers, Historic England, engage with communities, and then develop a whole series of technical standards and practices so that we can undertake our works consistently from one end of the route to another, engage competent professionals. And of course, adhere to all the checks and balances and the legal requirements that we have in the act.

5:52

Mike Court: It’s very much sort of the first stage of the protection of Historic Environment on a project like this, and it’s very, very high level. So it basically says, the project will look after Historic Environment, which is archaeology and historic buildings, by the way. And then from there, we have to develop all of the other ways that’s achieved.

Fran Scott: So with a document laying out what was expected of HS2 when it came to protecting the historic environment, Mike and Helen had to come up with a plan of action.

It’s not possible to do archaeological field work along the entire 134 miles of phase 1, so Mike and Helen developed a plan to decide where the most important areas of archaeological interest were along the route. The plan was called the Historic Environmental Research Delivery Strategy (or: Herds).

6:31

Mike Court: What the HERDS does is it takes the requirements in the heritage memorandum, and it translates them into something that our specialist contractors can use to decide how they’re going to do archaeology, and why they’re going to do archaeology. And I suppose to go right back to the very beginning, high speed 2 is absolutely massive.

And so, Helen, in talking to lots of other very clever people decided that the way to do that was to understand on the route of high speed what we understand, and what we don’t understand and to develop a sort of a list of questions that can answer those gaps in knowledge.

Fran Scott: High Speed 2 covers huge stretches of the country: different landscapes, different geologies, and thousands of years of human history.

Developing the questions that would shape the focus of the field works wasn’t a job that Helen and Mike could handle on their own.

7:30

Mike Court: When we were developing HERDS, we very quickly realised that we couldn’t come up with all the answers ourselves. And we needed to go out to as transparent and diverse a group of people as possible, mostly to find out what was important to them.

7:47

Helen Wass: We needed to ensure that our stakeholders understood that we had questions to answer to but also a job to do. Actually, we’re building a railway. It might be the biggest archaeological project ever. But we are still building a railway with taxpayers’ money. But the academic process and the research process has been really vigorous.

Fran Scott: So after a lot of consultation with, Historic England, Local authorities, local archaeology groups, academics, contractors and communities, they had a list of questions that could help focus the field work.

8:24

Mike Court: On a project like high speed two, you’re building through a huge landscape on you. So you can ask landscape level questions. Whereas on a smaller project, you can’t really do that you can only ask local questions, which also interesting. But so you can think about what people were doing in the past across the whole time, the whole of the country, really, for me, the bigger questions are the landscape level questions, more interesting questions like?

What happened when we moved from, say, the Iron Age into the Roman period? How do people cope with that transition? At the end of the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, settlements got a lot smaller, the population reduced. Why is that? You know, the bigger questions you can look at if you’re doing a number of sites across the whole country, which you can’t really answer as easily with a smaller site.

Fran Scott: But one major challenge they faced was getting access to the land they wanted to investigate.

9:23

Helen Wass: Before the project went to Parliament, supported by an environmental statement, access to land was by negotiation. So working with our land and property team, they negotiated with landowners to whether or not we could get there to do non-intrusive survey work. So this is any technique which is basically walking onto somebody’s often farmer’s fields. And certainly on Phase One landowners were, let’s say sceptical and reluctant to allow access.

9:54

Mike Court: But that’s quite an early part of our role here, actually was communicating that and helping the land and property team to speak to people whose land we’re going on to help them understand that we weren’t pillaging their land essentially, that archaeological information is about learning and about knowledge.

Fran Scott: Now with access to the land and a plan of what they wanted to investigate, Mike and Helen had to bring archaeologists from all over the country to begin their fieldwork.

10:27

Mike Court: At peak, we had over 1,000 archaeologists working, which is a huge amount, a large percentage, actually, of the archaeological industry. And we had over 60 sites running at one point. But we try and stagger the way that we do archaeological work so that we don’t have everybody working together all at the same time and run out of people.

Fran Scott: The route was broken up into sections and each section was run by an archaeological manager, like Dr Rachel Wood

10:58

Rachel Wood: So the patch of HS2 I was responsible for, roughly ran from a place called Great Missenden up to Stoke Mandeville, and that’s just south of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

Fran Scott: In Dr Woods patch there were around 20 sites that went forward from a geophysical survey to trial trenching.

11:17

Rachel Wood: And they ranged from a surprise, Anglo Saxon burial ground at Wendover, that we did not know was there. You know, archaeology happens that way. Sometimes you really don’t know what you’re going to find till you put spade in the ground a lot of the time.

And I also had the Wellock farm site, which we found, that was a whole monumental landscape running from the Neolithic, all the way through to the Roman period. And we had a Neolithic circle, reminiscent of Stonehenge but made of wood, which was, that was a, you know, slightly surreal moment when I got that phone call. And it also had Bronze Age burials, there was a Roman lead coffin burial there, but there was also an Iron Age and later Saxon looking kind of area was an area of settlement just next to it as well.

So that was more of a trying to understand how the pathway that runs through that site connected everything together and looking at the long use of that site through I mean, that’s several thousand years’ worth of history, right there.

Fran Scott: You can find links to more information on these wonderful sites and discoveries in the show notes.

But perhaps the most interesting archaeological site on phase one of HS2 was St Mary’s church.

12:40

Rachel Wood: It is a demolished mediaeval church that sits just outside of Stoke Mandeville village near Aylesbury. And it was built in around 1080. So not long after the Norman Conquest at all, and it had a long life as a parish church. And then, by the late 1800s, the villagers were clearly a bit tired of tracking the kind of couple of kilometres outside of the village centre for their Sunday sermons every week. And they had a new church built in the village.

Fran Scott: The old church was left to fall apart. Windows fell out, the roof caved in and part of the tower fell down. By 1966 it was deemed too dangerous to leave standing, so the Royal Engineers were brought in to pull the disused church down.

13:28

Rachel Wood: And there it remained, it was surrounded by, the churchyard was surrounded by an iron wrought iron fence. And it’s some trees and was, broadly speaking, an overgrown churchyard

Fran Scott: The old St Mary’s church had always been a bit of a mystery. Why had it been built so far out of the village?

13:48

Rachel Wood: There were two kinds of logical explanations for that. One, was it actually a chapel built as part of a memorial estate, so belong to the big posh house of the local lord, or was Stoke Mandeville village in a different place now, to what it used to be had the village once been around the church, and as you know, with time shifted slightly.

Fran Scott: With important questions to be answered the St Mary’s site moved forward to trial trenching.

14:19

Rachel Wood: So we found the church sits on a kind of three sided island. So the field that it’s in is got streams along three sides of it that come to a confluence, so the streams meet just to the north of where the church is.

In that kind of rectangle of land, the church and churchyard sit in the middle with the church itself, just on top of a slight, very slight bump. And all of this is at the bottom of a very shallow valley, which contributes to making it wet. Within the three-sided island but immediately around the church, we found a very large ditched enclosure. And the ditch was big enough for the archaeologists digging it to describe it as a moat. It’s not a moat around the castle.

Fran Scott: Basically it was the archaeologists’ way of saying: “this is a really big ditch”. Big enough to be considered defensive.

15:16

Rachel Wood: It’s not like a drainage ditch or anything like that. And the Bishop of Lincoln is known to have had a tax collection centre, near Aylesbury. And in those days, taxes were often collected as tithes. So people will bring their grain contribution, etc, and drop it off. And that’s essentially what we think we have here, we think we have the Bishop of Lincoln’s type collection centre, just outside of Stoke Mandeville, which is just outside of Aylesbury.

Fran Scott: St Mary’s Church began as a small chapel that was used by a representative of the Bishop of Lincoln to collect taxes from the locals.

15:54

Rachel Wood: It was a two-cell structure, which means it had a nave and chancel. The name has been the bit where everybody sits and chancel being the bit where the altar was. And then over the years that got added to altered, you know, the Victorians put a porch on, you know, back in the 1600s, they added a tower and things like that. So yeah, that alone was quite a surprise. But the surprises didn’t end there.

Fran Scott: Now they moved from trial trenching the site to a process known as ‘mitigation’.

16:26

Rachel Wood: If trial trenching is like keyhole surgery, then mitigation is open surgery.

So the mitigation is open area excavation we take off all the topsoil and subsoil across that defined area, excavate all of the features that are that can be seen so pits post holes, ditches trackways any if there’s any graves there, obviously, the post holes and things could also take the form of buildings, we excavate all of that we collect all the data, that’s written records, digital records, we fly drones, we scan everything, we create 3d models, but we also collect all the artefacts as well as any and all, you know, pottery, animal bone.

Obviously, any human remains that may be there are any bits of, you know, things like beads that might have been jewellery, or metal pins, like brooches, things like that. We collect it all. And then archaeology is inherently a destructive act, once you dig it, you can never put it back the way it originally was. And so we record by record, we preserve by record.

So all of that information is then the representation of that archaeological site. It means that it can be reinterpreted in many years to come.

Fran Scott: The mitigation at the St Mary’s site wasn’t just for the church but also the surrounding valley.

And during that work it was discovered the valley had been home to a settlement for a very long time

18:00

Rachel Wood: The mitigation work showed that that was quite a long-lived settlement, it appears to have been quite wealthy, there’s some very fancy pottery that’s been found quite a lot of it. Some of it that’s come over from the continent, things like Samian ware, which is very well known Roman pottery from what is now France. And that had an Iron Age predecessor. In terms of an iron age settlement existing there before the Roman period, we think it was probably continuously occupied.

So we can see that there’s people living in this little shallow valley or on the sides of it for quite a long period of time before the Normans appeared, and the Bishop of Lincoln built his lovely church. And what we were not expecting was to find anything underneath the church.

Fran Scott: The mitigation work on St Mary’s church started with taking a 3D scan of everything that remained, including some walls and bits of flooring. Then Rachel and her team started taking the church apart backwards through time.

19:09

Rachel Wood: So we took off what remained of the last thing that was added to the building first. So you quite literally excavate backwards through time. And that left us with the very, very bottom of the foundations is all that was left of it, of the normal outline of the church. And we photographed at each stage and scanned at each stage.

When we got to the point where we could see the normal foundations and it’s a flint structure. Maybe the walls are made of Flint rather than brick or anything like that. And it sits on this kind of chalky, compacted raft, almost a rectangular raft that they’ve put, you know, on the landscape to kind of flatten it out, as I mentioned that it sits on a bit of a rise. So they flattened that out, built the church and go on from there. But once we got on, we have to excavate down to kind of untouched natural ground, it’s the only way to be sure that you’ve removed all of the archaeology. So we couldn’t stop at the normal foundations, we had to keep going.

Fran Scott: So they continued excavating past the church’s foundations, removing the base of the wall.

20:19

Rachel Wood: And we could see that these flint walls and the chalk raft was sat on the northern side of the church, they were sat directly on top of the remains of another wall. Again, it was just the very, very base of it, it was kind of you know, one flintstone tall. And that wall was about a metre wide. And as we got further, we could see that there was a square chalk raft under the kind of West End of the nave of the Norman church, pretty much centrally on top of where this mound was. And as we got bit further, we could see that there was a circular ditch surrounding this square building.

Fran Scott: They continued to dig, removing the remnants of the mediaeval church, until they came across a different building beneath.

21:11

Rachel Wood: And we were looking at a square building that had what looked like something called Terra Sigillata. It’s essentially Roman concrete. It is used, you know, in flooring, they break up pieces of building material and set it and it’s it forms a type of very kind of pink concrete, it’s very recognisable.

You could see the shape of the structure from this chalk raft, the surrounding soil being clay, so that stood out quite obviously.

Fran Scott: They had stumbled across a Roman building that was knocked down to build a Norman church on top of it. But they still didn’t know what type of building it was. That was until they started removing the rubble.

21:59

Rachel Wood: And I will not forget the day I got the phone call about this. I was working in an Acomb office ready to go down to site the following day to do my regular site visits. And I actually got a text message with a picture. And as the archaeologists had been removing the rubble, they’ve been trained to look for architectural pieces as part of our work with the church. So things that are obviously square or look like a window or could have been a column, anything like that.

Fran Scott: One of the archaeologists in her team noticed a very flat rectangular piece amongst the rubble and so they picked it up and turned it over.

22:37

Rachel Wood: And there was a pair of finely carved shoulders, no head, just a pair of shoulders, robed in what looked to everyone involved like a toga, a pair of shoulders wearing a toga. And this is what I got a picture of, via text message swiftly followed by a phone call, saying you will never guess what we found. None of us could quite believe it.

An hour later, I got another phone call, saying You really will not believe it this time. And they’d found a head, a finely carved head of a woman. She’s quite clearly like a woman. She’s got very ornate hair style, really fine features and she just looks Roman.

Fran Scott: The first thing the archaeologists checked was: do the shoulders match the head?

23:33

Rachel Wood: The answer was no. When you stood her head on the pair of shoulders, her chin was too far down and her head was at the wrong angle. She was looking at the floor and so we said, Oh, well, that’s a shame that they don’t match. But hey, if we would have been happy just with the shoulders, that is a once in a career find.

Fran Scott: Despite the head and shoulders not matching, it was an incredible find, which would help uncover what kind of building the Romans had built there.

24:00

Rachel Wood: I went for my site visit the next day. And we found another pair of shoulders and another head. Again, shoulders in a toga, this time the head was of a man who was a bit more worn than the woman and the male head fit the first pair of shoulders, and the female head fit the second pair of shoulders. We also found the head of a child, all made out of stone, I should say. And all finely carved, the male head and the child’s head were very heavily weathered a lot, the features were a bit damaged. And we also found an amazing hexagonal glass, jug or bottle, quite large. All of the points towards the square structure having been a Roman mausoleum, or tomb, the statues presumably representing people who were buried in the tomb.

So we have what looks to be the burial ground of the people who were living on the hill, just on the side of the valley, we have their mausoleum, presumably, of the wealthy owners of that property and some of their family.

Fran Scott: The team would never have imagined that the building and its attending finds would have survived the construction of a Norman Church, the tax collection centre around it, the digging of the ditch…

25:21

Rachel Wood: All the structural additions to that church all the way from, you know, the 11th century through to the 19th century when it finally went out of use, plus, all of the burials in the churchyard, we excavated just over 3,000 in situ burials, but there would have been more, you know, periods of church clearance, things like that had removed some of them, all of that ground disturbance and yet preserved under the church in a greater condition than we could have ever anticipated, was this Roman mausoleum, with these just amazing statues.

Fran Scott: Across the length of Phase 1 of HS2 amazing archaeological discoveries have been made. Like at the Wendover Saxon Site. Trial trenching revealed five graves with what they believed to be some Iron Age artefacts.

26:17

Rachel Wood: We tested them and did find human remains in a couple of them. One had what looked like a possible spear or knife and one had what looked like a bracelet. And it was all looking very Iron Age along with all the pottery and things that we’d had out.

Some of the other pits and post holes were then covered over and protected until all the various licences and legal paperwork can be obtained. And then in the mitigation stage, we found 141 individuals

And these people are not Iron Age, they are Anglo Saxons. And more than that they are Anglo Saxons from right around the turn of the century. So that period immediately after the end of Roman administration, we have a cemetery burial ground of people who lived then they were buried with an absolute wealth of objects.

Fran Scott: Anglo Saxon cemeteries that have previously been discovered are considerably smaller, usually around 20-30 individuals and it was a minority of people who were found buried with various items.

27:27

Rachel Wood: So normally, when you find one, you might find, you know, two or three or five individuals that are clearly the wealthier ones. They’re the ones buried with all the posh stuff all the best jewellery, somebody might have a sword or shield or something like that. But they’re definitely in the minority of the cemetery population.

The Wendover site it was the opposite. Three quarters of the individuals buried there had all this amazing stuff buried with them. So it’s the complete opposite. We assume these are the Anglo Saxons of Wendover.

We didn’t have any hint of Saxon settlement at the site. And the nearest known one is Wendover.

So we think we’re looking at the wealthiest set of Saxon Wendover, but the objects date from the fifth century all the way through to the early sevens. And we had some really amazing things: thousands of beads, we did have one sword, I would have felt very cheated excavating a Saxon cemetery without at least one sword.

Fran Scott: And who wouldn’t feel cheated without a sword?

28:30

Rachel Wood: We also had a woman who was buried with the most beautiful complete bowl. It’s a complete glass bowl, and it dates to right around 480. So right around the turn of the fifth century, so that is a Roman bowl.

This lady was also buried with these little silver silvered disks. That look that have been made to look like shield’s complete with a low copper alloy strap on the back of them. And the specialists tell us that they would have formed some sort of necklace decoration or maybe a belt decoration in that region.

If that interpretation is correct, and stylistically they are dated to the early seventh century.

So with one individual, you have two objects buried with that one person that were made as much as 200 years apart.

That is an absolutely fascinating story. And I would love to know more about it.

Fran Scott: Both ends of phase one of HS2, London, Euston and Birmingham Curzon Street were also home to archaeological discoveries.

At Euston, St James’ Burial Ground was excavated and uncovered 40,000 human remains including Captain Matthew Flinders, the explorer who led the first circumnavigation of Australia and is also credited with giving Australia its name.

And in Birmingham what is believed to be the first ever railway roundhouse which opened in 1837.

But even after all the excavations are complete and new artefacts unearthed, that is only half of the work for the archaeologists on HS2.

30:15

Mike Court: The process of understanding what it is that we’ve been digging out for the last six or seven years is a process that almost takes as long as the actual excavation, the post excavation and analysis where you do the science where you do the research where you try and just figuring out what on earth all these people were doing in the Roman period is something that we’re just starting next year.

30:37

Helen Wass: Even though we’ve been able to tell some amazing stories so far, the analysis over the next five to 10 years will really give us extra detail, extra layers of understanding. So it will change those stories for maybe focusing not just on the amazing Roman statues that we found in St. Mary’s, but a wider picture of why they were there, what the Romans were doing, and then how that landscape changed through to the sort of normal Victorian time.

Fran Scott: HS2 is making sure that the huge amount of data being collected through the archaeological process is accessible and that the artefacts that were found are preserved and available for future study.

31:24

Helen Wass: All of our digital materials are being curated for the long term by the archaeology data service. So that’s a trusted repository. So they will migrate all of the software and material so that if you want to come and access it in 10 years, 20 years time and remove technologies, they will migrate that forward. And then that is an open access data source, whether it’s photographs, databases, Excel, spreadsheet, Word documents, you will be able to go in there.

Fran Scott: The archaeological work has unearthed some unexpected and amazing discoveries that will teach us new things about how people used to live in Britain. But the scale and importance placed on the archaeological work on HS2 has also shown how far archaeology has come in construction.

32:19

Helen Wass: It’s planned works. We’ve actually got time in our programme, from all the sort of surveys and research that we’ve done. And we say, this is what we’re going to do here for this long with this many people for this much money. And then we’ll be done. Thank you very much.

I think the fact that Mike and I have both been on the project for about 10 years, says a lot about the investment. And we have environmental colleagues who have been on the project equally long, or they’ve been people in both whether it’s air quality, landscape ecology, who invest their time and effort to plan that work so that when the right way does come, then we’ve done what we need to do for the environment.

Fran Scott: Next time on How to Build a Railway…

33:13

Richard Crathern: You assume the owners have pretty good idea of what they are, and they’ve just been lost over the years.

Laura Hughes: A very, very complex built environment.

Carl Ainley: We have to sort of open up a joint bay which might be the size of a double decker bus.

Dave Thomas: To be able to build a fully detailed three-dimensional map of all of the services that lie underground.

Dave Thomas: Quite visionary and I think it’s still something that is evolving and emerging.

Jonathan Gammon: 70 million pounds […] was put in my hands by Her Majesty’s Treasury.

Laura Hughes: A very, very complex built environment.

Jonathan Gammon: The best Christmas present I’ve ever had.

Fran Scott: Your host has been me Fran Scott Thanks to our guests Dr. Rachel Wood, Helen Wass and Mike Court.

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