Many times Justin, Luke, Danny and I had driven past these woods wondering what secrets they held. They marked, after all, the British front line and the jumping off point for the Irish 36th Ulster Division during the Battle of the Somme. You can see their memorial at the Ulster Tower directly north of the red circle. We would return to excavate the trenches here again and again in the woods over the following years, thanks mainly to the Somme Association's purchase of the land. It was during one of these sojourns that I 'found' a gas battery with my mattock blade...
Two of these Gas Canisters were empty, two were full. It was Russian roulette with a mattock... After this trip we were commissioned by YAP Films of Canada to make a Battlefield Archaeology series, 'Finding the Fallen' (AKA Trench Detectives). We worked on several sites for this show, the first two at Forward Cottage and Bixschoote were outside of Ypres. as these sites were running concurrently I only worked at Forward Cottage:
You can quite clearly see X Track Cemetery to the east of the site. We always seem to be in close proximity to the dead when working in France. Because of the Flanders clay this site yielded really well preserved trench lines and artefacts, I even found a load of bullets that had been preserved in oil and looked like they'd only been dropped yesterday, not ninety years previously... The next site we worked on was at Beaumont Hamel:
We were literally outside the fence of the Canadian Memorial Park, the trenches of the park ran straight under the fence so it was quite easy to site our excavation trenches... In the satellite image the park is the large expanse to the west of the marked site. You can just about pick out the lines of the 'preserved' trenches in the park. This was a memorable site, not only for the ability to match trenches in the ground to named trenches on maps, but also for the discovery of our first latrine, still in situ (or shitu...):
Sometimes my job is shit...
The final site we worked on for this project was at Auchey-Les-Mines near Lille:
The smaller of the two circles shows where I started excavating the edge of one of the mine craters, one of several blown under the German Hohenzollem Redoubt during the Battle of Loos. The second larger circle shows where the excavation was moved to when we discovered a mass grave of German soldiers. Again further work led to the identification of one of the men, a certain Gefreiter Leopold Rothärmel of the 9th Coy, 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. This identification shows the importance of the work we do. This was a very difficult excavation, we worked in teams of four and took it in turns to work through the night, sleeping for an hour then working for an hour. We'd had looters on the site the previous night so thought it better to stay to deter further interference. It was probably the toughest (not just physically; psychologically as well) but one of the greatest things I have ever done. We were finished with this project but I wasn't finished with France, there is more to come later...
I'd left Ireland and had a job with the Cotswold Archaeological Trust. I was initially supposed to be going to work in Worcester, but instead despite my protestations I was thrust into Mid-Wales, to Four Crosses, close to Oswestry:
There was nothing wrong with site or the crew, all of whom were good eggs (Sam turned out not to be, but that is a different story...). I do remember Ian's method of trying to seduce Sam by eating his birthday cake whilst getting in her face with it. Not a very pleasant prospect: a hairy Viking reenactor with his beard covered in chocolate cake cracking onto you... The worst thing about this site was the cunt that owned the accommodation we were staying in; Cedric. He was a cunt of the highest order, ex-army wanker, a life-long career that had never seen him rise higher than Sergeant. There's something that works well in the army hierarchy that keeps the scum low. If you open the Oxford English Dictionary on the definition of 'Cunt', there is a full size picture of Cedric. He blamed me for his faulty cheap kettle that nearly burned my flat down. He wouldn't allow me to use his laundry room during the weekend so I could wash my work clothes and I had to get a taxi the eight miles to Oswestry since there is NO FUCKING PUBLIC TRANSPORT IN THAT SHITHOLE OF A LANDFILL THAT MASQUERADES AS A PRINCIPALITY THAT IS WALES!!! I hope he's dead.
Straight after the job finished in Four Crosses, I was herded out to Worcester to the original job I had been lined up to do:
As I have covered in a previous post, myself and the other lads were kept in a farm cottage about twenty miles outside of Worcester, the only bus we could get to site was one that got us into the city about an hour before work, or fifteen minutes after work started. Guess which bus we took? We would arrive fifteen minutes after everyone else, but to be honest the five of us did more work than the rest of the site put together anyway. One day the fuckhole (who's name I forget) who was running the site, had the audacity to ask me if we could all try to get in on time one morning. I reeled for a second and and rather than let fly a barrage along the lines of 'If Cotswold want to put us up in fucking house within the fucking boundaries of the fucking city rather than the next fucking county, then I'd be more than fucking happy to come into fucking work on time, as it is we are living in the middle of fucking nowhere so have little fucking choice about what fucking time the fucking bus arrives. Would you like me to have a word with the fucking transport department that organises the fucking bus routes and see if they can't get a more fucking convenient fucking bus timetable for you?' I merely explained the situation. I used words a five year old could understand with barely concealed rage.
How it feels to try to talk common sense to Archaeology Managers...
It was also in Worcester that I met Boba Fett, or at least the guy who dresses up like him in the Star Wars films: Jeremy Bulloch. He was signing in the local comic book store, so I took along a book for him to sign for a friend's birthday present (I swear, it wasn't for me...). At a loss for anything to talk to him about, I asked him if the voice in the Empire Strikes Back was his or not. He started giving me this massive discourse on what language the character was going to talk in and what he was going to say. After about fifteen minutes of this nerd barrage I was just wishing for a simple yes or no. After the heady excitement of Worcester I was Wales bound again. Cotswold had the big pipeline project that was trumpeted by the Welsh. Little realising that the pipeline was being built to pipe gas OUT of Wales, not into it. The dumb-backwards-sheepshagging-cousin-marrying-schoolchildren-burying wankers that the Welsh are.
Again the amount of pissy little sites which only had one post hole in a strip that was 20km long that we worked on along this route of the pipeline would be impossible to identify, so here is a picture of South Wales and our approximate position at any one given time... One memorable moment from this job was when Allan stayed over in the accommodation with me one weekend instead of going back to Cirencester, like the rest of the crew. On the Sunday evening, before everyone else returned, we rigged up a pair of trousers with boots attached and hung it from the stairwell to make it look like one of us had committed suicide... By the start of 2006 I'd had enough of living in company accommodation and moved up north to York to move in with Helena and Kelly. I also landed myself a job with Humber Archaeology in Beverly:
There was a guy on this site called Andy (not Frudd, another Andy) who always had a better story than anyone else. I was talking about the Watchmen comic one time, Andy was good mates with Alan Moore, they used to go drinking all the time. I mentioned Hawkwind, Andy had been their roadie through the seventies. We talked about the landings on the moon, Andy had singlehandedly attacked Mars and conquered the Martians... Nothing was free from his boasting. I wondered how an illustrious life as Andy's could end with such an ignoble end as scraping mud with a trowel and living in a Bed and Breakfast?
Andy, if it smells like it, then it probably is...
The site finished with Humber and money beckoned, money in the form of Network Archaeology. I'm going to leave this one until next time as it's a good one for stories of madness...
