Historical Archaeology at Ovenstone Miner’s Cottages

Sheila Newtonwith thanks to Dr Jane Webster

The limits of history

• What are primary sources?• Who wrote them?• Did everyone write or get written about in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?• Who didn’t?• Women, children, working classes, slaves• But writing isn’t the only document!

Material culture documents• We document

ourselves through the things we make, buy and use

• What are your documents?

• People in the past documented themselves through objects as well as words

The site and finds

• ‘Rubbish’ from the midden (rubbish tip) made by families living at Ovenstone, Northumberland in the 19th century

• What resources can we use to date and identify these objects?

• What can they tell us about the people who made and used them?

Ovenstone miners’ cottages

• Grasslees Valley• Near Elsdon,

Northumberland• Within

Northumberland National Park

What can be seen today?

• Low walls of a line of stone cottages…

• Surrounded by a banked enclosure and a large rubbish tip (midden)

• In the past this was a flourishing community, supplying coal for a nearby tile manufacturing site.  

• Evidence of coal mining lies all around the site, from the bell pits spreading north west and south east to the lumps of coal littering the area.

Bell Pitwww.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk

Documentary evidence

• Earliest written records 1770s

• Census returns in the 1800s show a thriving community, 1841 three families, headed by George and Thomas Proudlock and John Telford

• Four mining families living and working the site by 1851

• The later half of the 19th century shows a gradual decline in the site - the houses were abandoned in the 1880s and Ovenstone is not mentioned in the 1881 census

Feb 2007: 3 day dig

• Three trial trenches across the midden

• 1m grid surface collection over midden

• To assess its extent and depth

• To see if it had clear stratigraphic layers

• To see what was in it!• And a gridded walk-over

survey across the whole midden

June 2007: bigger excavation

• Excavation of the central house row

• Local archaeology group with the help of NNP staff and The Archaeological Practice, Newcastle (Richard Carlton)

View of houses 1 (foreground) and 2

Flagstone floors in both

Detailed view of house 2 fireplace

Summary of excavation findings

• 2 phases to cottage block:• Earliest and most

substantial at W end, starting later C18th

• Houses 2 and 3 built onto east end of House I c. 1830

• At this point mining of the bell pits began in earnest, and tile works built soon after

• ?Earlier structural remains to W of House 1

• 1871 census last ref. to miners living here

The findsAssemblage mid-late C19thCeramic categories: • Coarse red earthenware• Buff & yellow glazed wares• Whitewares –some with transfer

prints (‘willow pattern’), some with sponged decoration, some with Methodist tracts

• Clay pipes

What else is in the bags?• Sort through your bags and put

material into the groups above• How might it be possible to

identify the producers and date some of these objects?

• What do they tell us about life at Ovenstone?

Identifying the finds• Primitive Methodist

ceramics – dateable• Hurd Collection -

http://www.mountzionhalifax.org.uk/

• Sunderland manufacturers

Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his maker

(Proverbs 17.5)

Makers’ marks

• GR Turnbull and John Wood: Stepney Bank Pottery (Newcastle) 1860s

• Maling: Sunderland 1762-1963• Scotts of Sunderland• JA Carr• http://www.beamishcollections.com/

Recognisable wares

• Sunderland Lustreware

• Spongewares – cheapest was to get decorated pottery in this period

• Scottish examples are sometimes easy to identify: but NE examples not well studied

Bo’ness and Britannia Spongeware

Smoking pipes

• Clay pipes – many made by Tennants, Berwick (TW): dateable 1840s-1870s

• What else?