With roots stretching deep into Fenland soil, archaeologist, author and Time Team star Francis Pryor MBE tells Louise Hoffman why Cambridge and its landscape mean so much to him
Top image by Flag Fen Archaeology Park
Sitting in the stove-warmed country kitchen of Francis Pryor MBE’s Fenland farmhouse, a tree-hidden haven in the vast expanse of dyke-sliced fields, it’s easy to see why he has made this landscape his home. As we settle down at the table with cups of pot-brewed tea and freshly baked biscuits, goldcrests and wrens dance in the viburnum outside the window; acres of garden cloaked in autumn colour unfurling beyond.
It was back in 1992 that Francis and his wife Maisie Taylor – both eminent archaeologists – bought the land here in the Lincolnshire Fens, on which to build a home and dedicate themselves to gardening and farming.
A passion for the former had been forged while living at their previous property, over the border in Cambridgeshire. But Francis’s bond with Cambridge and its surrounding landscape runs much, much deeper than that – quite literally to the bedrock.
Lifelong connections
“My relationship with Cambridgeshire began when I was a young child in the early 50s,” Francis begins. “I was brought up in north Hertfordshire, and the land where my family farmed was on the edge of the chalk hills that overlook East Anglia. You could see Cambridge in the far, far distance, and the Fens. It gave me a feel for the extent of the British landscape.
“The thing that struck me about the Fens wasn’t the wetness, but the richness, the fertility; the trees were luxuriant, the grass lovely and lush, and the cattle all looked fat. A fantastic landscape. It quite caught me up.”
The family made frequent trips into Cambridge during that time, as his uncle was a Fellow of Trinity – the college that Francis himself would go on to attend in 1964, reading archaeology. He admits, however, to not being entirely dedicated
to his studies!
“I spent most of my time organising the college’s May Ball. I persuaded the very famous cartoonist Carl Giles to do
the cover of the booklet that students received on arrival. It depicted Rab Butler, ex-foreign secretary and Master of Trinity, dancing outside the Great Gate with the cartoon character Grandma Giles. It was very successful!”
Francis’s student days also coincided with bands such as The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones exploding onto the modern music scene. “It was a great time to be in Cambridge; I was very lucky. We had some wild times!” he recalls.
But the other thing he liked most about the city – and especially his college – was the way that it accepted, and in fact encouraged, people to find their own way in life. “No one tried to persuade me to sit in a library studying books instead of going out on the archaeological digs I so loved. They were very understanding like that.
“In fact, it was one of my ex-tutors who, after I’d graduated, said: ‘You need to get away from here and do something on your own – if I were you, I’d cross the Atlantic and make your own mark in the world.’ So, I did. It was on his advice that
I went to Toronto and got a job at the Royal Ontario Museum.
“Two years later I was running a dig… in England… for the Royal Ontario Museum! So, it got me back here in the end, although I have never regretted crossing the Atlantic. It was a wonderful experience. And you see England from a new perspective when you come in with a load of Canadian students!” he laughs.
Fertile ground
The project that Francis embarked on for the museum was, you guessed it, in Cambridgeshire, allowing him to get back to Fenland soil – rich both in the growth he’d observed as a child and in archaeology.
With Peterborough New Town now in existence and construction of the bypass underway, the next area earmarked for development was what would become the eastern industry area of Peterborough, known as Fengate. But first, Francis’s team was tasked with excavating it.
“What we uncovered there, right on the edge of the Fen, were (at that time) the earliest fields ever discovered in northern Europe – going back pretty much to 2,000 BC,” he recalls.
“They were superbly well preserved – we even found animal footprints. And there were cattle droveways, sheep drives, little farmsteads and roundhouses – I mean, it was extraordinary.”
Then came one of the greatest discoveries of Francis’s career, and one he’s still renowned for. In fact, just days before we met, he’d unexpectedly heard his name mentioned in relation to this find on Radio 4’s Yesterday in Parliament programme, and a couple of weeks later he made a cameo on the BBC’s Look East.
The find in question? One of the most important archaeological sites in Cambridgeshire: the Bronze Age timber causeway and landscape at Flag Fen.
“I found Flag Fen in 1982 when I was surveying drainage dykes. I knew there was likely to be something out in the depths of the fen there because the fields we had just discovered were all pointing at it. And then my foot hit a piece of wood,” he explains.
“I pulled it out of the ground, and it was oak – you don’t typically get oaks growing in wet fen – and the point of the post had been sharpened with a bronze axe, the blade about two inches. I immediately recognised it as a late Bronze Age socketed axe from around 900 BC because I had seen identical tool marks on wood in Holland, of that period. All the hair went up on the back of my neck!” he enthuses.
Returning to the site with his team of archaeologists, more and more posts were found, running along the edge of a dyke for a distance of around 80 metres. “At one point, they were covered by the Roman road that runs across the Fens, known as the Fen Causeway. We know that road was probably built in the 1st century AD, and the posts were about a metre below the bottom of it, separated by lots of peat and other soil that would have taken around 1,000 years to accumulate. So, that told me that the posts had to be Bronze Age,” Francis continues.
Having persuaded English Heritage to fund an excavation, initial work began that same year and continued right through until 1996, revealing the best part of ten acres of superbly preserved Bronze Age wood, along with bronze swords, daggers, spears and other items likely deposited as offerings to the waters – even a wooden bowl that still contained porridge.
“On the morning that the bowl was found, I’d cut my thumb before going down to the site. And I’ll never forget this: as I was very carefully removing some of the peat that was sticking to it, I noticed there was a fingerprint in the surface – a Bronze Age fingerprint – and that person, probably a lady since the thumb was far smaller than mine, had also cut her thumb!” he laughs. “That moment will stay with me for the rest of my life.”
People power
Another chapter of Francis’s career – and of archaeology in general – began during the period of Flag Fen’s excavation. Time Team: the beloved Channel 4 television series that brought (and in fact still brings, via YouTube and Patreon) live archaeology to the public in a way never seen before.
Presenter Sir Tony Robinson’s role was essentially to be a representative for the average person, narrating in layman’s terms to an audience of millions a host of exciting digs across the UK. The expert teams carrying out those digs included Phil Harding, Helen Geake, Carenza Lewis, Stewart Ainsworth, John Gater, Raksha Dave and many other archaeologists and specialists – headed up either by the late great Mick Aston or by Francis.
Flag Fen itself appeared on Time Team (as well as several other Cambridgeshire locations, such as Stilton, Chapel Head and Norman Cross) and it was the huge interest in the programme that inspired Francis to open the site to the public – establishing what is now Flag Fen Archaeology Park.
Here, visitors are able to explore a reconstructed prehistoric landscape and roundhouses, get up close to some of the site’s fascinating finds and even see a section of the excavated causeway. Not only that, but the park has recently unveiled a new exhibition that displays three of nine rare Bronze and Iron Age log boats that were unearthed in 2011 near Must Farm in Cambridgeshire (the others still being carefully preserved): a discovery of international importance.
The legacy of the land
Flag Fen is soon to be excavated once again, in a long-term project funded by Historic England, and it remains a huge source of pride for Francis. “But what I desperately hope is going to happen,” he adds, “is that people will start thinking about these very ancient sites – so well preserved, and that were once occupied by people who were just like us – as being a part of our history. Things don’t all start with William the Conqueror!”
Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Francis started writing popular books such as The Fens: Discovering England’s Ancient Depths. “I wanted to get across to the public how extraordinary prehistory is. It fired my imagination and hopefully will theirs too.”
It comes as no surprise, then, that when asked what the magic of the Fenland landscape is to him, Francis responds with certainty: “It’s the Fen people. You couldn’t meet nicer people than the farmers round here. I think it is because they understand the landscape that they’re living in; if you are closely involved with the land, it gives you a very special relationship with your neighbours. If there’s, say, flooding or bad weather, people will come round here and say ‘You alright boy?’,” he laughs. “They’ll do anything to help, and I’ll do the same for them. United we stand, divided we fall.”
Does he think the picture would have been much the same in prehistory, with those people who were just like us? “Oh absolutely. I can imagine what they’re talking about while sitting around that roundhouse fire drinking cups of mead!”
