CRAFT AFTERNOONS FOR CHILDREN BACK IN MAY 2019

OPEN DAY FOR BUDDING ARCHAEOLOGISTS

WORMS, ASHES AND BONES; FROM DARWIN TO TODAY AT ABINGER

EMMA CORKE, former president of the Surrey Archaeological Society, gave the April talk about discoveries on the Iron Age and Roman site at Cocks Farm, Abinger. Her great great grandfather, Thomas Henry Farrer, bought Abinger Hall at Cocks Farm in 1875. His gardeners soon discovered the remains of a Roman building on the site and archaeological excavations in the following year uncovered six rooms, including one with a coarse-tessellated floor from Roman times.

   Farrer was friends with Charles Darwin, the founder of modern understanding about evolution of species, and Darwin’s son Horace married Farrer’s daughter Ida. In 1880 Horace produced a plan of the Cocks Farm site. Darwin himself was interested in investigating the role of earthworms in movement of ancient stone structures.

   Nothing more was done until a tree uprooted in the great storm of October 1987 was seen to have the corner of a stone-built room in its roots, together with painted wall-plaster and fine tesserae.

   Three years of excavation in 1995-97 by Surrey Archaeological Society found a large late-Roman building, which led to the site being declared a Scheduled Ancient Monument. So many questions remained that in 2009 English Heritage gave permission for five more years of excavation on the buildings, which has found a multi-phase, probably courtyard, villa.

   Meanwhile, geophysics in the surroundings led to the discovery of a Roman lime kiln (with a uniquely surviving entrance), a Roman field system, and an area of high disturbance on the top of the knoll above the villa. This is where archaeological efforts have been concentrated for the last five years. Several phases of Iron Age enclosures have been discovered, with storage pits and cremation deposits. Overlying them are many Roman features including farm buildings.

   The work has revealed artefacts from the Mesolithic period from 12,000 to 3000 BC onwards and provides evidence that the site was occupied and farmed continuously from the Neolithic through to the 19th century. Thirty  Iron  Age grain storage pits, one of them 3.4m in diameter, indicate that the site was the centre of a thriving network of farms in that era.

   It is clear that the owners in the Roman period were rich but we can only speculate who they were, how they made their money or how they used the villa. Were they pre-Roman British owners taking on the Roman style, foreigners who replaced them or what?  Did they make their money from farming or maybe from business in Londinium? Was this their permanent home or a country retreat? 

   We do know that they made several attempts to establish a vineyard on the site. In Roman society, anybody who was anybody produced their own wine. The Abinger vineyard probably never worked very well because the soil is greensand, not chalk, and not therefore ideal for grapes.

   The excavations have uncovered several smaller buildings, a lime kiln with some of the last load of lime still in place, and in the main villa the tessellated pavement, part of a bath house and an unheated summer dining room with a fine mosaic floor, sadly damaged when later occupants lit a fire on it.

   Over the years the team has found the remains of sacrificed animals and many human cremation burials, including one that used a Deverel-Rimbury Bronze Age pot already centuries old to hold remains. Other ritual deposits include complete and deliberately broken quern stones, some made from German lava stone. Quern stones were valuable items so these were substantial offerings. Roman pots discovered include ceramic beehives, imported storage jars and  some of a style not seen before now called OXSU (oxidised pottery from Surrey).

   Things are not always as they seem. The 2016 excavation revealed  five complete cattle skeletons, young animals and not butchered. The first guess was that they were an ancient sacrifice but carbon dating shows they were buried around the Tudor or Stuart periods. Possibly they died of rinderpest and were buried to protect the rest of the herd.