The green fields and woods of rural Northamptonshire look as apparently immutable as much of the British countryside. Next to the remote farm of Blackgrounds, however, a thin layer of innocuous green pasture has been peeled back. Below the surface is revealed a cobbled Roman road, walls, wells, pathways and shops: a bustling, prosperous international settlement long lost to memory.
The town, its people and stories are emerging because it is part of the biggest-ever archaeological excavation in British history. It is one of more than 100 digs and investigations along the 134 miles of the HS2 high-speed rail route being built between London and Birmingham. Part of £900m of “enabling works” for the much-criticised project.
Other discoveries beneath this long swath of middle England include a neolithic timber henge aligned to the winter solstice near Wendover; Roman statues of a man, woman and child beneath an abandoned Norman church at Stoke Mandeville; and the body of captain Matthew Flinders, who led the first circumnavigation of Australia, one of more than 50,000 skeletons exhumed from a burial ground beside Euston in London.
My tour of Blackgrounds begins in a fuggy shipping container crowded with laptops, tools and new finds that is the site office for Mola, one of the commercial archaeology companies involved in digs for HS2. Since a law change in 1990 required developers to undertake rigorous archaeological investigations before construction work, a profession once seen as the preserve of the youngest sons of aristocrats (private income required) has been able to earn its keep outside academia.
“You’re standing next to two dead people,” says James West, project manager at Blackgrounds, as I change into the requisite fluorescent orange safety gear. Two black buckets are filled with carefully bagged bones, yellow from centuries in the soil. West first came to Blackgrounds in 2018 to dig some test trenches to assess what might be here. A Roman villa had been found nearby in the 1830s, but had been “very poorly dug and recorded” by a typical amateur Victorian excavation. But the name of the place was a clue that there could be more. The wider area’s soil is mostly pale brown, but Blackgrounds was named after its strikingly dark soil. This soil was created by people.
“There’s a really black deposit on top of everything – that’s the abandonment layer. It’s dark because of all the organic material – the wood and bones, it just leaches into everything,” says West. His test trenches revealed stonework, glass, metalwork, pottery. “I knew there was something special so I lobbied quite hard to get back here,” he says. What’s been discovered – an Iron Age settlement that subsequently became a prosperous Roman trading town – “has exceeded my expectations. The scale and the quality of finds is more than we thought. To find iron shackles and pottery decorated with hunting scenes and an undiscovered town in the middle of South Northamptonshire is a bit of a shock.”
The scale becomes apparent in the fields, as 70 archaeologists pick over the soil while the sound of drilling pierces the still winter air (it turns out to be a woodpecker on a nearby oak). There are yellow diggers (“big trowels”) removing top layers, followed by archaeologists with their builders’ wheelbarrows, pick-axes, and trowels, of course.
“If it’s all by hand we would be here for a very long time, but British archeology is really good because it’s still hand-digging and that gets a lot of people in,” says West. His team includes Spanish, Greek, French, German and Australian archeologists. “It’s one of the best jobs I’ve been on because there’s always something new to excavate and everyone who comes in has a different way of seeing things.”
The expanse of cobbles and neat kerbs that is the Roman road is “massive”, says West. “Most Roman roads are 4-5m wide at a push. To have one 10m wide is quite exciting.” The picture emerging is of the lost road connecting to the nearby Welsh Road, a beautiful old droving lane. In the town, the road would have been a “dual carriageway” so multiple carts could pull up and unload without causing a traffic jam. Alongside the road are the bases of large Roman walls displaying the kind of skilled stone masonry we might associate with a Norman cathedral. West says the town was well planned with walkways, retaining walls, markets and homes built in stone to chest-height with long-vanished wooden upper parts.
Finds include scale weights and bars – suggesting thriving trade – but also rings, necklaces, hair-pins, pottery from France decorated with a lion chasing a gazelle, and an iron leg shackle. These paint a picture, but also create further blank canvases. “Is the shackle for criminality or indentured slavery?” asks West. “We know the Romans kept enslaved people, but it’s very difficult to find evidence of it.”
The team has found more than 1,000 nails and 400 coins. Every find, no matter how trivial, is recorded on GPS. Its location – and depth – is crucial data. “On a normal site, if you find a coin it’s a special thing, whereas here there is something every day,” says West.
Right on cue, there’s a beep from the metal detector being swept across the soil by Phil Holt of Red River Archaeology. Is his detector good? “Well, it’s two grand,” Holt laughs. “It’s very good at depth and discrimination and it will tell me on a screen how deep it is. If it’s too deep, I’ll wait until the next context [layer of soil] comes off, so I can record the find in context.”
This beeping is caused by a coin. “There’s a lot of crud stuck to it so it’s hard to see,” says Holt, carefully removing soil. He likes coins because they can often pinpoint a date to within a decade: this one is third or fourth century, British minted. Most of Blackgrounds’ coins are late Roman, minted cheaply in Britain in the reign of Constantine II in the fourth century. Coins made statements. A Valentinian coin depicts the Emperor dragging a captive with him. “It’s propaganda. A lot of coins celebrate the conquering of people. Romans are like that.”
HS2 is much criticised for its conquering of the countryside but archaeologists are adamant that without all the earth-moving it creates, these kinds of discoveries would not be made. “Nobody would have known this was here,” says Holt. “We’re making new discoveries all the time. It’s recorded well and saved for future reference.”
“If HS2 wasn’t being done there wouldn’t have been any work in this area,” adds West. “Commercial archeology is preparation for building work. If the land is going to be used for something else, I’d like to go in and understand what’s there so people after me can understand it. What we’re doing is going to be looked at for generations.”
Blackgrounds still has further treasures to reveal. The road will be removed to examine what lies beneath – usually a trove of lost objects. West is particularly excited by a beautifully preserved stone well. They will soon dig down to its bottom. “This is the cherry on top,” he says. There will be more coins, votive offerings and dead animals, he predicts. “We did find a dead person in the bottom of one once. He didn’t go in voluntarily.”
The dead provide particularly intriguing puzzles from the past. In low-ceilinged offices on an Oxford industrial estate, archaeologists for Copa, a consortium of archaeology companies assembled to meet the demands of HS2, are poring over finds from another HS2 sight – Fleet Marston, a deserted medieval village west of Aylesbury. Here, they found another undiscovered Roman town with two cemeteries containing the remains of 325 people. Once again, there are clues in placenames: a nearby farm, Putlows, could refer to bodies “put low”.
Annsofie Witkin, an osteoarchaeologist, is examining the skeleton of a woman in her early 20s. Much is written in our bones, from patterns revealing chronic infections to clues about lifestyles. The bones of an 18-year-old found at Fleet Marston reveal he was suffering from a lung infection. “We cannot say how he died unless we find a knife stuck in his back, but we can find evidence that alludes to it,” she says.
The woman has good teeth while the fusing of certain bones reveals she was over 19 and under 28. She was 5ft 7in, but was already showing signs of osteoarthritis in her wrists: she had laboured, hard, from a young age.
“What is quite unique about this burial is it is a deviant practice within the Roman burial tradition.” Witkin pauses. “She was decapitated after death.” Decapitation in Roman burials is “extremely rare, if unheard of on the continent,” says Witkin. In Roman Britain, it constitutes around 2.8% of all inhumations. At Fleet Marston, 10% are decapitated. “Somehow, I don’t think all of them would be due to crime,” says Witkin.
The woman’s head was found placed over her feet. Beside her was buried a 34-week-old foetal child. “We don’t yet know if it’s hers or not,” says Witkin, who hopes DNA analysis will solve that mystery. Cuts on the vertebrae reveal the woman was decapitated from the front with a fine blade; it took six cuts for her head to be severed. “It could suggest it was someone who was not well practised at this. One is very shallow. Perhaps it’s a hesitation cut. Perhaps it’s a family member or close relative who has to do this. Perhaps it was a traumatic miscarriage and they are distraught.”
As the archaeologists point out, there is so much more to discover even after their reports are written (an HS2 spokesperson says it intends to ensure that finds are displayed, both in local and national museums). Isotope analysis of bones from Fleet Marston, for instance, could detect mineral traces within them and show where people were born and raised, revealing patterns of mobility across Roman Britain and its empire.
Individual mysteries are compelling, but the archaeologists are excited by the big data collectively generated. “Getting the human stories is really important, but because of the number of burials they all contribute towards something bigger because we can draw the data from other sites and see trends in Roman-era population and health across a much wider area,” says Edward Biddulph, a senior project manager for Copa.
Richard Brown, another Copa project manager, brings up a map of Buckinghamshire on his computer screen. It looks busy and well-peopled, but the roads and towns are all Roman. “HS2 is starting to populate this map of Roman Britain,” he says. The “new” town of Fleet Marston, at a crossroads of Roman roads, is one big example.
The significance of the HS2 excavations is their sheer quantity, argues Brown. “Quantity is good. HS2 saw this coming and prepared for it: how the archaeology is addressed and where the sites are. It’s well planned so we have time to do the job properly and everything else – the big data – comes from that. We can start drawing conclusions from these large bodies of data because of the scale of it.”
At Blackgrounds, the finds are providing further evidence of a blending of Iron Age and Roman cultures rather than a traditional conquest and replacement narrative. “The big research question is what evidence is there of a transition from Iron Age to Roman? We’ve answered that question pretty thoroughly,” says West. “We think they are still using the old ways, taking the good bits from the Romans, but still keeping their identity as Iron Age people.”
At Fleet Marston, the significance of the decapitations and the status – Christian or not – of the burials is the big question. Richard Brown says, “Drawing conclusions about early Christianity or them not being Christian is not possible. It’s often the same with archeology: it’s about masses of data rather than specific, single headline-grabbing finds. It’s nice that it’s not fixed and known.” He smiles. “I’d be out of a job if it’s all known.”
