Double axe section

Axe hammer

Tudor dress hook found by metal detectorist

archaEology AT THE FAIRLYNCH

Archaeology is detective work. It helps to fill in the gaps in what we know about us and the people who came before us, especially when written records are not available, are biased or have never existed.
 
Written history only began 2000 years ago in these islands and we need archaeology to tell us what happened before that. At Fairlynch we have an artefact found in the town that is so old, it wasn’t even made by the same species as us!

​Some highlights of our collection include flint tools from the Early Palaeolithic to the Neolithic; from the Bronze Age a fine axe-hammer and objects from a burnt mound; Iron Age and Roman ceramic fragments and coins and archaeological finds from local gardens - all of which shed light on the story of our town.
 
There are also objects from nearby excavations on the Pebblebed Heaths and Otterton Point.

Prehistory

• ​PALAEOLITHIC
• ​MESOLITHIC
• ​NEOLITHIC
• FLINT TOOLS

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BEFORE c. 9,500 BC

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, reached northwest Europe 30 – 40,000 years ago during the Pleistocene era. Before that our corner of the world was visited by other hominids, some of which may have been direct ancestors and some not. Recent research has confirmed there was some cross breeding between H.sapiens and Neanderthals, before the Neanderthals died out. The knapper of our hand-axe may have been one of the species Homo heidelbergensis or the related Homo rhodesiensis around 250,000 – 300,000 years ago. Those hominids may have been ancestors of the Neanderthals.
 
Different hominid species have been visiting these shores – between the ice ages – for up to a million years. In Happisburgh in Norfolk, recently found hominid footprints are estimated to be over 800,000 years old. Palaeolithic sites are rare though, because these people were nomadic hunter-gatherers, always on the move and leaving little trace.

c. 9,500 – 4,000 BC

The Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) period is defined as that following the last major ice age, when people began to explore the islands of Britain revealed by the retreating glaciers, but before they settled in one location to farm. Woodland grew up and was colonised by deer and boar and beavers lived in the rivers. Unlike their predecessors, whose stone tools were usually quite chunky, Mesolithic hunters began to make flint tools based on small, thin blades known as microliths, sometimes hafting several of them together to produce composite tools such as harpoons, arrowheads or sickles. They also made flint adzes. These people were nomadic, but may have followed an annual pattern, camping beside wetlands for part of the year and following migrating herds at other times. Traces of Mesolithic people are very scarce in East Devon but we have a few microliths in our collection.

c. 4,000 – 2,400 BC

Scraper

​Around 6,000 years ago migrating people from Europe brought domesticated animals and crops such as wheat and barley to Britain. They began to clear woodland, made permanent houses and stock-proof boundaries, and they established territories, sometimes marking them with large tombs and stone monuments. These people were the first makers and users of pottery too.
 
Most of the flint tools in our collection were made in the Neolithic and their distribution is a good indicator of where settlements were established by the first farmers. The most commonly found type of tool is the scraper. Neolithic people would have used these for cleaning animal skins and for processing wood. Some tools were knapped rapidly but others required many hours of work and considerable skill. Neolithic axeheads were polished and smoothed into objects of beauty as well as utility. Leaf-shaped arrowheads were flaked with precision to form transparently-thin and symmetrical lethal weapons.

Hand axe

Barbed and tanged arrowhead

We have space to show only a small fraction of the stone tools in our collection. The oldest is a hand axe dating from the Lower Palaeolithic era, long before modern Homo sapiens had evolved. Its maker and user, perhaps around 300,000 years ago, was probably a hominid known as Homo heidelbergensis. A large group of similar tools have been found in river gravels near Broom, north of Axminster and can be seen at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

​The hand axe is made of chert, a stone similar to flint, which for many thousands of years was the preferred stone for tool making because of the predictable way it fractured when knapped by experts. Tools were manufactured by striking the brittle, glassy stone with a hard hammerstone (our local quartzite pebbles are ideal for this job) or applying pressure indirectly with an antler. In our collection we have arrowheads, scrapers, piercers and knives. Originally razor sharp, they often survive in the soil relatively undamaged and from these tools and their distribution we can hazard a guess about where prehistoric people lived. Unsurprisingly, it is often in the same locations where we choose to live today!
 
Specialist archaeologists can date chert and flint tools by their shape and method of production. Some types of tools, like the hand axe, remained in production for thousands of years, while others, like the distinctive barbed and tanged arrowhead were introduced by a wave of migrants and date to within roughly 500 years (c. 2300-1800 BC)

visit RAMM website

LATER PREHISTORY & ROMANS

• BRONZE AGE
• ​IRON AGE
• ​ROMAN

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c. 2400 – 800BC

Axe hammer

Jacobs Well

Stakes from the burnt mound at Jacob’s Well

Carter’s ‘Godling’ from the burnt mound at Jacob’s Well

Another wave of migration around 4,400 years ago introduced metallurgy to Britain. The first migrant metal workers are known as the ‘Beaker People’ because they were buried with distinctive pottery vessels. In the southwest we had both copper and tin ore – the raw materials for making bronze - and at first it would have been possible to collect it easily from the ground surface, so it’s likely Dartmoor would have been busy in the Bronze Age. Unfortunately for archaeologists, subsequent mining activity has completely obliterated traces of the earliest metal processing.
 
George Carter and Professor Chris Tilley excavated several Bronze Age landscape features in our immediate area and some of their finds are on display at Fairlynch. Among the most interesting are the sharpened stakes and flaked stone from the middle of a burnt mound at Jacob’s Well. Carter speculated the stone was a ‘Godling’ worshipped at a shrine there. We also have a particularly fine axe-hammer made from picrite stone from Shropshire, but found in Otterton. Some experts have speculated this type of tool could have been used to crush metal ore. A waterlogged example found in the Netherlands had an exceptionally long wooden haft. Our axe-hammer dates from c. 1,700 – 1,500 BC.

​Carter had found some Beaker pottery sherds and a barbed and tanged arrowhead in a mound on the Pebblebed Heaths and these can be seen at Fairlynch, on loan from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter. You can also read about the extraordinary pebble pavements on Aylesbeare Common. These are possibly a unique kind of Bronze Age monument: constructed out of coloured quartzite pebbles and shaped to resemble axe heads, they lie close by the two large Bronze Age burial mounds on the summit of the hill in the RSPB reserve.
 
During the Bronze Age period the wheel was invented and horses were reintroduced to Britain.

​c. 800 BC – AD 43

Garden trench and metre

Iron Age sherd

Woodbury outer ditch

Woodbury rampart steps

​Although iron ore is plentiful the metal could not be extracted until people could construct furnaces to raise the temperature sufficiently for smelting. Copper and tin are smelted at a lower temperature, so bronze technology developed before iron.
 
Once the people had iron tools and weapons the archaeology suggests that territorial issues became more important. Hillforts were built all over the country: Maiden Castle near Dorchester is perhaps the best-known example in the south of England www.english-heritage.org.uk . Our nearest hillfort is Woodbury Castle on the Pebblebed Heaths www.pebblebedheaths.org.uk and it has some impressive banks and ditches, but there is no evidence that it was ever attacked. However, anyone sailing up the River Exe would have seen it looking formidable, silhouetted on the eastern horizon.
 
The everyday purpose of hillforts is unclear. The huge effort required to construct the ramparts and ditches by hand suggests the threat of attack was real and terrifying, but these monuments rarely have a water source so they could not have supported a large sheltering population or a herd of cattle for very long. Probably the act of building them brought the community together and they acted as tribal centres for feasting and storing agricultural surplus. They may have housed elite families. They could also be used to protect stock if the neighbours came raiding!
 
In the years before the Roman invasion the area west of the River Axe (broadly Devon and Cornwall) was said to be the territory of the Dumnonii tribe. To the east were the Durotriges, with Maiden Castle and other impressive hillforts.
 
As there was no written language in Britain the scant information we have comes from Roman historians. Gaius Iulius Solinus, writing in the 3rd century AD said that Dumnonians preferred barter to using coins and it is true that no Dumnonian money has been found, while across the Axe in Dorset, metal detectorists frequently find Iron Age coins of the Durotriges tribe.
 
Here in Budleigh Salterton we are near the edge of ancient Dumnonia but an archaeological test pit in a back garden here contained Late Iron Age pottery sherds from at least three different sources and one of them was firmly in Durotrigean territory. Perhaps the two tribes managed to get along most of the time. You can see the sherds and all the later pottery evidence from the test pit at Fairlynch.

c. AD 43 – 410

Roman building at Otterton Point

Tegulae and imbrices

Prehistory in Britain begins to peter out with Julius Caesar’s brief Roman invasion in 55 BC and is over in AD 43. The Romans liked to write stuff down.

In 1989 an archaeologist named Stewart Brown was walking the South West Coast Path when he noticed fragments of Roman tiles in the ploughed field. A subsequent excavation revealed the well-preserved stone walls of a 3rd century farmstead one metre under the ground surface. No villa building was discovered. It may still lie under another part of the fields or perhaps it was closer to the cliff edge and it has been eroded into the sea.
 
On loan from RAMM we have examples of the clay roof tiles (tegulae and imbrices) that once covered the barn and kept the harvest dry. From the same dig we also have sherds of local pottery as well as Samian ware imported from Gaul, showing the people of Otterton Point, despite living on the edge of the empire, thought of themselves as Roman and embraced a Romanised lifestyle.

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our own pioneering archaeologist
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GEORGE CARTER ​(1886 - 1974) 

​George Edward Lovelace Carter (1886 – 1974) was the son of a local builder who studied Geography and Modern History at Oxford, joined the Indian Civil Service and became interested in Ethnography and Archaeology while posted to Sindh. In 1926 he brought his family home, qualified as a barrister at Gray’s Inn but did not practice, instead taking up the reins of the family business in Exmouth.
 
He became an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist and geologist and from the 1930s until the 1960s he investigated prehistoric lumps and bumps in the region, developing ideas that brought him into conflict with the recognized experts of the day...

read more about George

the beginnings of the fairlynch
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PRISCILLA CARTER ​(1920 - 2013)

Priscilla Carter helped her father with his excavations in the 1930s and became fascinated by archaeology, appreciating the value of his finds and observations and founding the Fairlynch archaeology collection with his material. In 2008 she made Carter’s notes and drawings available to Professor Chris Tilley of UCL and the Pebblebeds Project was born. Carter’s excavations were revisited and complementary excavations were undertaken, resulting in exciting new discoveries on Colaton Raleigh and Aylesbeare Commons and recognition of Jacob’s Well.

Carter’s contribution to the study of Devon’s archaeology was often dismissed in his own time, but he is now recognised as one of its pioneers...

read more about Priscilla

​GEORGE EDWARD LOVELACE CARTER (1886 - 1974) ​

Excavating pebble pavements

Carter’s experiment bottle

Carter platform dig

...George thought there were strong similarities between the arrangement of pebble mounds and pavements he uncovered on the Pebblebed Heaths and ancient funerary and sacrificial monuments he had observed in Sindh. Speculating that the Devon monuments had been made by descendents of migrants from Iran and Northern India, he ascribed them to the Druids and dated them to around 2000 years ago.
 
Some of the monuments he investigated were actually almost twice as old as that, dating from the Bronze Age, as was shown many decades later when they were revisited by Professor Chris Tilley and a team of archaeologists from University College London.
 
Carter’s was an unfashionable theory in the mid-20th century but he held to it. One of the mounds of pebbles he excavated in the 1930s and named by him as ‘Woodbury e’, contained a fine barbed and tanged flint arrowhead and fragments of Beaker pottery: classic accompaniments to an Early Bronze Age burial, of between 2200 – 1800BC. Carter did not find a burial however and discounted the Bronze Age date suggested by the artefacts, saying they were already very old when they were put in. His interest was in the pebbles forming the mound and in patches of burning that they covered, because they reminded him of ancient Vedic tradition he’d seen practiced in Sindh.
 
On Aylesbeare Common Carter excavated with his daughters at least nine pebble pavements or platforms in the run-up to World War II. It is thought their remains were destroyed during the war when bombing decoys were sited nearby.
 
He also excavated a trench across an enigmatic mound beside a spring known as Jacob’s Well on the hillside overlooking the Exe estuary. Beneath the middle of this black mound he found four sharpened stakes and a large shaped stone. He decided the stakes had held up an altar over the spring and the stone might be its ‘Godling’, the focus of a rain-making cult. Jacob’s Well is now known to be a rare burnt mound, again a Bronze Age monument, dating from around 1500 BC, but there is still debate about its purpose.

​Carter collected many prehistoric stone tools over the years, sometimes from field walking and occasionally because he became known as the local expert. The museum has a good example of a Bronze Age axe-hammer, found in Otterton and donated to an appreciative Carter.
 
In addition to archaeology George Carter was interested in geology. He was intrigued by the unusual radioactive nodules that occur naturally in the cliffs at the western end of Budleigh beach and he devised an experiment to discover whether the substance at the core of the nodules caused the greenish-grey discolouration around them or whether something in the discoloured rock was concentrating to form the core.

budleigh's geology

Carter’s contribution to the study of Devon’s archaeology was often dismissed in his own time, but he is now recognized as one of its pioneers.

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For a full account of George Carter and Christopher Tilley’s excavations on the Pebblebed Heaths see Tilley, C. (2017) ‘Landscape in the Longue Duree’: A History and Theory of Pebbles in a Pebbled Heathland Landscape’. London: UCL Press

​​PRISCILLA CARTER (1920 - 2013)

In 1967 Priscilla was one of the four founders of Budleigh’s museum with her friends Elizabeth, Aalish and Joy Gawne. Together they bought the distinctive Fairlynch cottage to house their collections of historic costume and in Priscilla’s case, the geological and archaeological items collected locally by her father, George Carter.
 
Priscilla and her sisters and brother grew up in Budleigh Salterton after their father left the Indian Civil Service and took over the family building and letting business in Exmouth. She attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College and won a place at Cambridge to study Classics, but left early to help the war effort, joining the ATS. She met and married Captain Alfred MacMullen during her time with the Army and had six sons. After MacMullen’s death she married  John Hull in 1968. Priscilla Hull became very active in the life of the town, standing as a Town and District Councillor, a JP and President of the Budleigh Salterton Chamber of Commerce for 11 years. She was the first Chair of the Management Committee of Fairlynch Museum and Arts Centre and remained its energetic champion until the end of her life.
 
The Environment Room, housing displays of Archaeology, Geology and the Natural World, was named in Priscilla's honour in 2014.

the history of the fairlynch