For Peat’s Sake!

More fascinating investigations from our artist in residence David Chatton Barker…

Peat in Brief

Peat forms when plant material does not fully decay in acidic and anaerobic (absence of oxygen) conditions. It is composed mainly of wetland vegetation: principally bog plants including mosses, sedges, and shrubs. As it accumulates, the peat holds water. This slowly creates wetter conditions that allow the area of wetland to expand. Peatland features can include ponds, ridges, and raised bogs. Most modern peat bogs formed 12,000 years ago in high latitudes after the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. Peat usually accumulates slowly at the rate of about a millimetre per year. Depending on the agency, peat is not generally regarded as a renewable source of energy, due to its extraction rate in industrialised countries far exceeding its slow regrowth rate of 1 mm per year!

Film in Peat

Over the past two months a series of 35mm photographic negatives taken of Brown Wardle Hill have been laying buried in peat, several inches below the surface of the hill. Having experienced the best of winter’s conditions these negatives were recently excavated and left to be cleaned by the rain on a washing line. The resulting negatives have been scanned and a selection presented here as part of an ongoing investigation into the botanical-chemical reactions between analogue film and the earth’s substratum over varying periods of time. This process offers up a way of thinking and interacting with deep time (the concept of geologic time) and the way in which the earth’s geology is a slow organic environmental process, having fascinating results both aesthetically and metaphysically to our eyes and minds. The results from this two month exposure to the waterlogged peat has rendered the original imagery totally abstracted, an explosion of alchemical cosmic lichen patterns… newly revealed hidden landscapes to get lost in.

BWH PEAT negative 1 and 2

BWH PEAT negative 3,4, 5 and 6

Peat Fire & Pigments

Peat has a high carbon content and can burn under low moisture conditions. Once ignited by the presence of a heat source (e.g. a wildfire penetrating the subsurface), it smoulders. These smouldering fires can burn undetected for very long periods of time (months, years, and even centuries) propagating in a creeping fashion through the underground peat layer.

I recently found a passage within a book surveying the landscape around Whitworth which mentioned a peat fire removing much of the rich vegetation thriving on the moors and on Brown Wardle Hill.

‘The peat fires which swept the whole of the moors surrounding Whitworth Valley in the draught of 1921, caused much denudation from which the area has never really recovered. According to Mattley, Brown Wardle Hill which is due east of the boundary at 1,322 ft o.d was once covered with luxuriant heather, whimberry and bilberry, broom and gorse. Moor fowl were large and plentiful, hares and rabbits, foxes and badgers ran about the area in profusion. The fourteen week fire destroyed all this and although some heather, sparse grasses, rabbits, hare and a few fox have returned, the area hasn’t yet recovered, some 50 years later.”

1.Mattley, R.D Annals of Rochdale. James Clegg, The Aldine Press 1899.

This fairly common natural disaster seems particularly pertinent to our time, given the recent fires over the Lancashire moors. As a creative interpretation of the Brown Wardle Hill peat fire and the ecological reality of such disasters I created a pigment* using peat and illustrated the four ‘lost’ plants in a typical Victorian botanical fashion.

*Pigment box using stones, coal, sand and peat found on Brown Wardle Hill

In his comprehensive gazetteer Rochdale and The Vale Whitworth (Its moorlands, favourite nooks, green lanes, and scenery), William Robertson also speaks of Brown Wardle and the surrounding moors being “Luxuriantly covered with whimberry bushes, cranberry bushes, heath and rushes… the pasture land was divided by thorn hedges; and a large number of birch trees; the ‘the lord of the woods,” the long-surviving oak; the mountain ash, and the waving pine grew in the hedgerows. On the banks were wild strawberries, raspberries, primroses, blue-eyed violets and cowslips. He also mentions a fire, but one of human design. ‘The heath on the moorlands being set fire by mischievous persons, all were destroyed, and walls and stone flags had to be adopted.”

Peat pigment, botanical drawings by artist, on watercolour paper

Peat in Archaeology

Archaeologist and North West Projects Manager for Dig Ventures, Stuart Noon, offers up a fascinating insight into the importance of peat within archaeology and the landscape of the South Pennine Moors:

Peat has remarkable archaeological potential. In their undisturbed state at least, peat bogs are oxygen-free environments due to their saturation. These conditions are hostile to the microbes and fungi that would normally decay organic material such as the remains of plants, which are the principal constituents of the peat. The same anoxic conditions also offer protection from decay for organic archaeological remains. The vast majority of objects and structures used by our ancestors were made from organic materials (in particular wood). These are normally lost on dryland archaeological sites but can be preserved in peatlands.

Peat is immensely valuable as archives of past environments (palaeoenvironments). The manner in which peat accumulates means that the deposits have stratigraphic integrity, meaning that contained within each layer can be found macroscopic and microscopic remains of plants and other organisms that shed light on landscape change and biodiversity on timescales ranging from centuries to millennia. The high organic content of peat means that these records can be dated using the radiocarbon method.

The saturated conditions mean that even soft tissue can survive, including both skin and internal organs. Probably the best known archaeological finds are the remains of ‘bog bodies’ such as the famous prehistoric Tollund Man in Denmark, Lindow Man in the UK, or the more recent Irish discoveries of Clonycavan Man, Old Croghan Man and Ireland’s oldest known bog body, Cashel Man, dated to the Bronze Age.

The best known such records are probably pollen grains which provide evidence of past vegetation change. But evidence from other organic material can be used to reconstruct other past environmental processes. For example, single-celled organisms called testate amoebae, preserved in sub-fossil form, are highly sensitive to peatland hydrology and have been extensively used in recent years to reconstruct a history of climatic changes.

The potential of bogs to preserve both environmental and archaeological records means that they can be regarded as archives of ‘hidden landscapes’. The accumulating peat literally seals and protects evidence of human activity ranging from the macroscopic (in the form of archaeological sites, artefacts and larger plant and animal remains) through to the microscopic (pollen, testate amoebae and other remains) material that provides contextual evidence of environmental processes.

There has been extensive study of the palaeoenvironmental record from bogs and notable archaeological excavations of sites and artefacts, but there have been relatively few concerted attempts to integrate these approaches. In part this is because generating sufficient data to model the development of a bog in four dimensions (the fourth being time) is a formidable research challenge (https://phys.org/news/2018-09-bogsunique-history.html#jCp).

Lancashire and Greater Manchester has one of the highest concentrations of Mesolithic (c8000-4000 BCE) findspots in Britain known to underlie Holocene upland peat in the area (Cowell 1996, 21). It has been documented for over a century that lithic-artefacts can be found at the edges of eroding peat haggs on the high Pennine moorlands (Law and Horsfall 1882). The majority of artefacts have been recovered at the edge of patches of peat or in areas where erosion has exposed the original land surface. Very often the flints have been found within the peat, indicating that peat was already beginning to form by the Mesolithic period (Switsur and Jacob, 1975). Mesolithic sites are principally sited on hilltops and south-facing slopes, in areas providing good visibility and natural shelter overlooking spring-heads and water sources above the tree line around 360m (B Pearson, J Price, V Tanner and J Walker. 1981). From around 5000 BCE onwards, the tree canopy appears to have given way to scrubland, with patches of peat and grassland which would have been attractive animal species such as red and roe deer, aurochs or wild cattle, and wild pig and therefore to human-hunting groups (Barnes 1982, 86).

The peat deposits of the Spodden Valley area are of particular palaeoenvironmental interest possibly containing palaeobiological remains (pollen, insects, plant material etc), which could yield information about past climate, vegetation and land-use change. They also have the potential to preserve organic structural remains if waterlogged. During the late Mesolithic period mixed deciduous forest in the Rochdale area is indicated by pollen samples taken from sites at Dean Clough I, which yielded a radiocarbon date of 5645 +/- 140 bce (Barnes 1982, 86).

Neolithic arrow found on Brown Wardle Hill, circa 1897

Mesolithic artefacts on Crook Moor derive from horizons, dated c. 8300-5000 BC, sealed under the blanket peat (CFA Archaeology 2013). An excavation prior to a wind farm development on Scout Moor, including Knowl Moor, revealed evidence of probable birch tree remains within the peat indicating that they were growing at the point of peat inception, but the date of this is unknown (OA North 2005).

The need for sampling cores through peat deposits has recently been identified in the Prehistoric Agenda Update for the North West. As is the need to better understand the distribution of prehistoric archaeology across the landscape along with the changing nature of the relationships between people and their environment during the prehistoric period and to examine existing archives to identify Mesolithic type sites (Ibid).

David’s investigation continues and if you press the Follow button for this blog you will receive an email letting you know when there is a new post.

March 19, 2019 1

The Famine Tower – Episode Two

If you enjoyed reading The Famine Tower – Episode One, the story doesn’t finish there… Our artist in residence, David Chatton Barker, delves deeper in Episode Two, sharing with you the only known evidence of the building of the ‘Tower of Babel’. You’ll also find a poem and fascinating film by David that celebrates the story.

A reminder… at the end of Episode One, David told us that the only known evidence he had discovered about the building of the tower was from a booklet of newspaper cuttings collected by a Rochdale amateur antiquarian named J. L. Maxim…

The three relevant paragraph clippings can be seen published here as a photocopy within my notebook, but as the text is quite small, here are the transcriptions. The first one gives the most detailed and revealing account.

(There is mention also of the lesser documented Colliery on the Wardle side of the hill.)

‘The surface stone was cleared out so late as 1863 by 30 or 40 men, chiefly mill operatives, who went up every day for many months together, if not by order, certainly with the consent of the Cotton Famine Relief Committee. Whether some of the stone so got was used for repairing the roads over the common I cannot now say, but I know that many tons were used for what should have been another Tower of Babel. It was built on the Lobden end of the summit the height of 28 feet, and allowing for the quality of the architects, was a seemingly substantial structure. I have visited its site to-day. “Alas! How art thou fallen” I exclaimed, as I gazed with disappointed eyes at the crumbled ruins. The ambitious project for scaling the clouds that way was soon defeated, not by confusion of the builders tongues, but by their withdrawal from the mills and the immediate action of the weather upon the pile. I had seen graceless boys roll some of the larger blocks of stone down the hill side on Sunday evenings, and the remaining portion of the “monumental column” is now a heap of shale, there or four feet high, and “frail as dust”’.

‘I did not visit the place again for some thirteen years, when the ‘Tower of Babel’ was being built, but in the interval I saw both carts and sledges bringing stone down and tipping it on the Wardle side of the hill, and out of this stone the colliery house at Cartridge Nook, as well as the railway thence to Lobden, was built. There must be numbers of people alive who can corroborate this.’

‘Again, he says, that so late as 1863 the surface stone was cleared out, and many tons used to build a cairn, 28ft high on the summit.’

There are elements in the notebook covering earth works, flint finds and old track ways on and around the hill that I will pick up and expand upon at a later date, when this project becomes focused primarily on the prehistory of the hill and surrounding moors of the Vale of Whitworth.

The construction is described as a ‘tower’, ‘column’ and as a ‘cairn’. Perhaps it could also have been known as a folly, had it stood the test of time, though a monument seems to give it more justice, considering its context (clearly? being built without function but as an act of solidarity for the suffering workers over UK and USA). A cairn at this period in time (and still to this day) was a common occurrence in the landscape for the moorland walkers over paths and hilltops; these piles of stones that act as markers, beacons, memorials are generally of unknown provenance which over time becomes a collective collaboration marking passers by and often traded as a symbol of luck… who doesn’t like to add a stone to these anonymously created and endless pieces of land art? As ever shifting and changing forms of lichen and moss emerge and their random arrangement altered by the elements and by hand, foot or hoof. A cairn can be seen as a human unification and appreciation of open spaces lesser touched and ravaged by the perpetual greed and dominance of industry and endless housing development. During the cotton famine and the industrial revolution in general, a trip out to the greener side of the smog and noise would have been a breath of (slightly) fresher air! There is today a large Cairn on the opposite side of the summit to where the Famine Tower was noted to have been built. Whether this was the true site of the original tower we may never know but its an impressive site nevertheless.

I find a fascinating convergence between our prehistoric ancestors living, (let’s say 10,000 years ago) who constructed their ‘megalithic (lithic meaning stone) monuments’ and this story of idle out-of-work hands constructing a monument also out of stone for a time when solidarity was connecting people over the Atlantic during the Cotton Famine. Many megaliths and menhirs (single standing stones) still remain, now revered and often marked out by brown heritage signs, but then how many ancient constructions have fallen to ruin by human hand of naivety or stupidity? Standing in the way of agricultural progress and the movement of the plough? Or simply seen as building materials for newly administered land enclosure acts and finding new homes within dry stone walls, animal enclosures, churches, roads and dwellings. Perhaps now we look back more than forward at what we may have lost as a bridge to out ancestral past? And, of course, ultimately in time mother earth gradually reclaims these ruins as her prodigal children return back into her embryonic mineral belly.

Fast forward 120 years to the same moors and another group construct, this time, a wooden horse, (of Troy?), a mere distance of 200 meters away from the Famine Tower’s initial emerging. This radical, traveling theatre group known as The Horse and Bamboo had been regular collaborators with the Whitworth Fair, which had been set up 10 years prior by Walter Lloyd (more on him to come) and for some twenty years was merged with the annual Rush-bearing Festival. (The famous Rushcart still happens every September in Whitworth.) The Wooden horse was built to a height of almost 28 feet, and ceremoniously burnt at the end of the festival.

It seems strange that so far no more mention of the Famine/Babel Tower can be found, other than these scant reports within a notebook from over 100 years ago. Surely more people saw this tower being built? When it was completed, surely it was written in a diary or sketched in a notebook, painted by a local artist? Perhaps a record does exist in a dusty attic or back of a crowded drawer? From such little evidence you could almost say it never happened but as the story came from three different perspectives/accounts and published in a newspaper, surely it must be true!? (Of course newspapers never print fiction!) Either way this wonderful creative act has been buried under the annals of time, unearthed by my own restless interest for more happenings, as a fascinating piece of moor-lore, here to inspire and remind us of harder times and powerful acts of collaboration, devotion and togetherness. For now it seemed fitting to me to remember this event through a poem or memorial written in true Lancashire dialect (something else disappearing), as a lasting monument in rhyme.

The Famine Tower

Here is an owd buzz, a seemin for now…

Twas the year of 1863 in Lancashire

When the distress came frabbin o’er th’Adlantic sea

Call’t “cotton famine” id war, ‘tween thee and me

Under ratey blackened welkins of flying shuttles in’t gowden valley

Not by order but by will, thirty playin’ workers gather from yon Whit’uth Mill

Threopin for a time when solidarity stud stronger still

Them fowk ascended peat and moss to th’ fur summit of Breawn Wardle Hill

Verra many tons of stone war browt up bi hoof and fut

Upon the bosom of theer land,

There stud up in’t cleawds, a tower known as Babel

Fur a hope as we’d all be as wun

Not takken long by th’ elements t’faw

Twenty eight feet high, a bit more than just tall

Defeated not by t’confusion o’tungs

But by withdrawal from the hills back to t’mills

Reclaimed in a short while, by t’earth,

Th’ body from which wus took

Our wood, stone, cob and luck!

Our gumption elders built a message for us t’read through time

Perhaps best remembered throo verse

As a monument in rhyme

By David Chatton Barker

This short film is an ‘anniversary of the monument’ charting 156 years since 1863 when the original tower was built. 156 stones found on the summit of Brown Wardle Hill were each photographed and animated. Ageless stones that may or may not have been part of the original tower. The poem is read aloud by Broadside ballad singer Jennifer Reid during a snowy day on the south Pennine moors.

Toward the end of 2016, after finding out about both the Famine Tower and the conception of my son Rowan, I began the timeless act of building a Cairn on the summit of Brown Wardle Hill. Each time I ascended I would have a stone in hand and over time I noticed stones added by others. Over a year later it had lain fallen and strewn about the grass, whether by human, animal or motocross bike I know not, but I began to reconstruct the cairn (with a wider foundation) during late summer and it remains standing happily. I intend to develop another lasting sculptural gesture for the Famine Tower in spring/summer 2019.

Interested by this? Read more about the project here!

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February 20, 2019 1