Ferry Fryston Chariot Burial #FestivalofArchaeology

 Today marks the start of the Council for British Archaeology's #FestivalofArchaeology!

This year's theme is journeys, so we're digging deeper (get it...?) into our fantastic Ferry Fryston Iron Age chariot burial, on display at Castleford Museum.

The chariot was found when the A1 road at #Ferrybridge was being upgraded in 2003-2006.

It had been used for a burial, and a man's body had been carefully buried inside the chariot.

Radiocarbon dating suggests he was buried around 200 BC.

Iron Age chariot burials are rare, and only 21 have been found in Britain so far. This makes our Ferry Fryston one very special!

Even though the wood had almost completely rotted away and only corroded pieces of metal remain, it has taught us a lot about how Iron Age chariots were made and how they worked.

So, who was the man buried in the Ferry Fryston chariot?

Image shows part of the Ferry Fryston chariot display at Castleford Museum, with the skull of the man buried on the left, the brooch from his cloak second from left, and nave hoops from the chariot wheels

Archaeologists studied his skeleton and were able to find out the following things:

🧍‍ The man was aged 30-40, and had been buried lying on his back with his legs folded under him

🦷 Chemical analysis of his teeth suggests he was not local, but from East Yorkshire or even Scotland

💍 He was wearing a cloak pinned at the left shoulder by a brooch, with a round glass head that was originally red [this is the object second from the left]

🛡 Pieces of corroded metal suggest he may also have had a shield

What journeys do you think he would have taken to get here? What journeys was he being prepared for in both life and death?

The Chariot

Burials of Iron Age chariots like this are very rare, so ours is really important!

The chariot would have been mainly made out of wood, and even though this had almost completely rotted away and only corroded pieces of metal remain, it has taught us a lot about how Iron Age chariots were made and how they worked.

1) The large iron tyres would have given the wooden wheels strength to drive over rough ground. Chariots like these certainly weren't driving over planned tarmac roads like the A1 in Ferrybridge today where it was found!

2) These four strong iron bands are called nave hoops, and they would have held together the wheel hubs

3) These are linch pins, which stopped the wheels from falling off.

4) These wooden chariots were pulled by horses, which were controlled by a 'bit' in their mouths. This would have been attached to reins which ran through these terret rings to stop the reins from getting tangled.

What might the full chariot have looked like?

Well our experts think it would have looked like this...

What did you think? Were you close?

It would have been mostly made out of wood, likely with a square seat attached to the two large wheels where the rider would have sat.

This then had a long wooden beam stretching up to where two horses would have been attached to pull the chariot along.

The Burial

This picture shows a drawing of the Excavation Plan of the chariot, which is carefully drawn showing what was found and exactly where it was found. 

This is important, as it helps archaeologists to fill in the gaps of what hasn't survived in the ground (particularly the wood of the chariot) to build the bigger picture!

Down the middle of the diagram you can see the remains of and the indentation made by the original chariot. This is what was used by our experts to design what the full chariot might have looked like.

At the bottom, in the middle, you can see how the man's skeleton was found, with his legs bent behind him.

It also shows you where our items in the display case were found: wheel rings (1), the nave hoops (2-3 and 9-10), the linch pins (6), the terret rings (13 - 17), the horse bit (20) and the brooch would have been on/within the skeleton.

Can you imagine what it must have felt like to find this? Have you made any of your own archaeological discoveries?

Come and see the chariot in all its glory for yourself at Castleford Museum!

Opening hours (FREE ENTRY)

Monday	​9:30am - 5pm
​Tuesday	​9:30am - 5pm
​Wednesday	​Closed
​Thursday	​9:30am - 5pm
​Friday	​9:30am - 5pm
​Saturday	​9:30am - 4pm
​Sunday	​Closed

For lots more information about Roman Castleford. click here

Festival of Archaeology: Cannon at the castle

As we continue our Festival of Archaeology celebrations, we look back at a recent exciting archaeological discovery at Pontefract Castle that sheds light on the bombardment of the castle during the English Civil Wars.

Pontefract Castle sits on the edge of the medieval market town. Conservation work is being undertaken with the ambition of making Pontefract a key heritage destination within West Yorkshire. The £3.5m Heritage Lottery funded project is known as the Key to the North, after the title bestowed upon the castle by Edward I. During the project, workmen at the castle recovered seven cannonballs from a section of the castle’s curtain wall. The discovery includes:

A demi-cannon (normally around 6 3/4 inches in diameter, weighing 33.5lb)

 

A cannon petro (6 inches in diameter, weighing 24.5lb)

 

 

Two culverin (5.5 inches, 17.5lb)

 

Three basilisks (5 inches, 15lb)

One of the smaller cannonballs

Two of the basilisks

 

Pontefract Castle was besieged three times during the English Civil Wars but it never fell to military force and was one of the last castles to surrender during the wars. Cromwell even described the castle as one of England’s strongest inland garrisons. It was during the first of three sieges of the Civil Wars that these cannonballs were fired.

Whilst many museums up and down the country have metal shot of various sizes in their collections, the Pontefract Castle discovery is very unusual. Most cannonballs have either been found somewhere in the ground of a fort or castle site or their surroundings, meaning that they either missed their target or have lost the context of where they were fired from. In contrast, the Pontefract Castle cannonballs were found embedded in the wall that they were aimed at. And thanks to a diary kept during the wars, we can even give a possible date for when they were fired.

The workman who found the first cannonball

The hole where one of the cannonball was removed from the wall

Nathan Drake, a “gentleman volunteer” of the garrison within the castle, kept a diary of the sieges. In the diary he records that between the 17th and 21st January 1644, 1363 shots were fired at the castle. He identifies that the shots were fired from cannon placed within the back yard of a Mr Lumne's property and were aimed at the Piper Tower. It seems likely that this is true as the balls were recovered from the curtain wall just to the side of the location of the Piper Tower. 

Excavating the Civil Wars alterations to the Piper Tower

Drake records no other instance of a cannon firing from this location, although he does record that on another occasion powder stored at Mr Lumne’s house was ignited by a shot from the castle. From other entries about events at Mr Lumne’s house, it can be calculated that the house was located on the route of the siege works, somewhere around the top of Horsefair and the bottom of Salter Row.

All of this means we know the location of the gun, the probable date it was fired, the size of the shot fired, and where the shots ended up. From this we get a very real impression of the power of these guns.

It has been previously calculated that as much as 18lb of black powder would be used to fire a 32lb shot (the demi-cannon we have weighs roughly 32lb), and that the effective range of such a gun would be around 490 metres. The distance from the probable location of Mr Lumne’s house to the castle wall is about 480 metres. This means that the gun was placed as far away as possible from the castle to avoid being shot at by musket, but close enough for the weapon to be effective. The balls ended up nearly a metre into the solid castle wall, a terrifying prospect for the besieged soldiers.

It is amazing to think that, after that five day period when so many shots were fired with no doubt many more than seven penetrating this section of wall, anything at all remained of the castle at the end of the wars. However, not only did the castle survive the wars, but the only section of the castle wall to collapse was the Piper Tower (the subject of this bombardment). Drake records that the tower collapsed on the 19th January, with 78 shots being fired that morning. Although little remains of the Piper Tower today, the curtain wall that made up the outer edge of the tower still stands to around 5 metres high on the outside, hardly making the collapse a major breach.

The remains of the Piper Tower today

In one final twist to the story, Mr Lumne was an alderman of Pontefract and was a member of the castle’s garrison. He was no doubt watching on as his property was requisitioned by the army and used to bombard the castle he was held up in.

Festival of Archaeology: Chasing walls

For the Festival of Archaeology this week, we need your help! Find out how you can get involved in some practical archaeology and help us to better understand our local environment.

Victorian archaeologists are sometimes called wall chasers. This is a little rude and refers to how they were sometimes only interested in finding ruined buildings and less concerned with the artefacts that reveal what life was like in the past. For this project though, we are going to join them in their quest for wall hunting and see if we can map all the walls in Pontefract that are made from medieval stone.

What do we mean by medieval stone - isn’t all stone much older?

We are looking for walls that are made from stone that might have been taken from one of Pontefract’s medieval buildings. The most likely buildings that stones might have come from are the castle, St John’s Priory, St Richard’s Friary, or one of the three medieval hospitals on Micklegate. We should see a cluster of medieval stone walls around those sites, but do we? That’s where you come in.

We want you to go out with your mobile phones and help us map all the walls. You can send us the location of the walls using the app, What3words. The app is free to download and use, and splits the whole world up into one metre squares named with three normal words.

We want to know about any wall that looks old and has stones in it - it doesn’t have to be all stone (as long as the stone isn’t just on the top.) The stone needs to look weathered (rounded or flat, or dished.) Here are two examples. One is just stone and the other very worn stone that has been partially rendered and mixed with bricks. It could even be a dry stone wall - that’s a wall that isn’t fixed together with mortar.

Example of a wall with mixed stone and brick, as well as a render repair

An example of a wall with infilled features - note the colour of the stone.

We're not asking you to be certain (we will check them later); we don’t want you to leave the footpath or other public area; and we don’t want photos of the wall (unless it’s on your land and we can’t see it ourselves to verify it later.)


We just want:

One set of What3words per wall 

Only walls in Pontefract 

Only walls that are visible from public land or on your own property

This screen shot shows what the app looks like - you can have map view or aerial photography, and it can centre on your location. The location of our second example here is at 'mile.kicks.nobody'. It’s that simple!


You can send your locations in one at a time or as a list, either using Twitter, Facebook or as an email to: museumslearning@wakefield.gov.uk.

With your help we will then hopefully be able to display the results in October when (fingers crossed) the Festival of Archaeology returns.