I returned to the UK by
car on Wednesday after two and a half days excavating with the Waterloo
Uncovered team at Hougoumont Farm. Coming
out of Dover through Operation Stack was the most tortuous part of the entire
journey. But overall, what a fantastic
trip!
Having collected a bag
of camera equipment (which a friend of the excavation was loaning) from somewhere
in deepest Hampshire, I proceeded to Andover on Sunday afternoon to collect the
great Phil Harding. Phil is the President of the Defence Archaeology Group and
decided to spend a week on a ‘busman’s holiday’ excavating at Hougoumont Farm.
Having collected Phil,
we proceeded to Dover. As my famous
cargo leant out of the car window at passport control he was recognised – “I
know who you are…” – and we were waved through with only a cursory glance at
our proffered passports. The Eurotunnel ‘station’
at Dover is a pretty bleak place with only fast food and Starbucks for
company. We waited over a coffee until
boarding the train.
Arriving in France was
fantastic, the sun shone and the signs to the motorway and Dunkirk were so
clear and easy to follow. With so many
British cars around us on the motorway, it almost felt like home.
At Dunkirk we turned right
towards Hazebrouk and Lille, then on past Mons towards Nivelles, where our
hotel was waiting.
As night fell and the
rain came down, we approached Nivelles.
At this point the satnav decided that it was tired and as we passed the
junction for Nivelles Sud it switched off completely. Phil and I decided to come off the motorway at
the next junction and take a view of the situation at that point. Quietly I was beginning to worry as it was
dark, I’d been travelling for 10 hours, the rain was getting heavier, I had
promised to deliver my famous cargo safely to the hotel……but I calmly turned around
at the next junction, re-joined the motorway going in the opposite direction
and headed back to the junction at Nivelles Sud.
Exiting at Nivelles Sud,
we were totally lost. Having negotiated
a couple of roundabouts correctly, I really thought we’d better just stop in a
layby and call the hotel for help. As I
pulled into the nearest layby, Phil said, “…isn’t that the hotel over there?” And it was!
We had stopped in the driveway of the hotel! How lucky was that? “…somebody up there was keeping an eye on us…!”
said my safely delivered famous cargo!
Peter Gin (Waterloo Uncovered
media co-ordinator), Cornelius Barton (L-P Archaeology) and Mark Evans (Waterloo
Uncovered excavation co-ordinator) were literally waiting at reception with
beers in-hand for us! My first taste of
Leffe Bruin! What a welcome.
The beer and “bonhomie”
flowed into the early hours! At one
point, I even managed to persuade one slightly tipsy archaeologist that I was
Phil’s driver and that we had travelled from Calais in the “Roller” and that my
job was to make sure that the very temperamental TV star was treated like the
celebrity he is!
Mini-busses from the hotel
at 8am!
With the one hour time
difference and the over-hanging “bonhomie” of the previous evening breakfast the
following morning was a slightly awkward affair. On arrival at the buffet, all I noticed were the
bread rolls and platters of cold meat and cheese – so I duly filled my plate
and sat down…….only to notice that most of those wearing the Waterloo Uncovered
tee shirts were tucking into bacon, sausage and scrambled egg!! Not a mistake I planned to make the following
morning!
Anyway, arrival at the Hougoumont
farmhouse was as exciting as I had hoped!
It looks just like it does in the pictures! There are the gates which were closed so
famously during the battle! There is the
chapel – all that remains of the chateau!
There is the wall where so many died defending and attacking! There are the trees with evidence of musket
shot impacts! WOW! Me, here with army veterans and injured Grenadier
Guards and Rifles to excavate at this historic site! Of course, I was nervous – 20 years since I last
scraped a trowel through the earth! Even
back then, I wasn’t sure I was any good!
Tony Pollard –
Excavation Director and Battlefield archaeologist extraordinaire – assigned me
to Phil’s team and set us the task of investigating an area reputed to be where
the hollow-way met the pond near to those famous gates. Poor Phil, his team consisted of two
veterans, a Belgian former archaeologist and me! What hope for a successful day!
As Phil explained the
plan, my memories of how to do this gradually returned. Set out the trench with string, use 3-4-5
triangles to get the corners square, remove the turf…….
Wanting to make a quick
impact and to show that selling insurance isn’t my only skill, I volunteered to
remove the turf (as I had done this a few weeks ago in my garden in preparation
for a new patio!). To shouts of “come on
John, you can lift bigger turfs than that can’t you?” and “..don’t forget to
put grass to grass and soil to soil…” we cleaned off the top surface of our 5m
by 1m trench. Through sweat, aching
muscles, blistered hands…..nothing was going to let me show Phil or anyone else
just how hard this was for an over-weight, unfit insurance salesman!
What was really great
though was remembering, through renewed experience, the camaraderie of the
trench. Phil is a great teacher – very relaxed,
but still unwilling to take any prisoners.
He chatted, we laughed, we took short breaks to lean on spades, the black
humour of the army was flowing and the work was getting done.
At this point, just when
things should have started to look interesting, I was asked to move to another
part of the site to do another job. Metal
detectors are being used by Waterloo Uncovered as a routine part of the
investigation. The site is so large and
excavation opportunities so few, this represents a great way to identify
scatters of metal objects – namely musket balls! My new job was to excavate individual metal
finds previously located by metal detector and now identified by flags in the
ground.
Excavating musket balls! How lucky was I? It doesn’t get any better than this! Excavating the actual musket balls which had
been fired during the battle at Hougoumont Farm. Me!
Following the lines of flags
inside the south wall of the garden – where the British soldiers had stood on a
wooden platform in order to shoot over the wall. There were musket balls, mostly flattened on
impact, but some still round. It is
likely that the round ones had been dropped accidentally during
re-loading.
Can you imagine the
stress of re-loading a musket while under attack? Fumbling and dropping the odd piece of shot wouldn’t
have been uncommon. As for the flattened
ones – fired towards the wall from the inside?
Testing guns in preparation for the battle? Fired at French soldiers who got over the
wall? We just don’t know. Certainly one of the musket balls which I
excavated was smaller than most – and likely to be French. It wasn’t flattened, but was mis-shapen and
scarred. Clearly it had hit something …..
or someone ….on its way from outside the wall into the garden.
Joining me in this task
was a very personable and good-humoured ex-soldier who had just taken his legs
off to make digging with a trowel easier when Tony Pollard came over and said
that his services were required elsewhere.
Back on went the legs and off he went.
Shortly after this, I
too was moved to work on uncovering a potential track-way to the south outside of
the garden wall and then to work in another trench back into the garden where a
possible ‘garden feature’ had been identified by James. Scraping, digging, mattkocking thick wet clay
– that is real archaeology. I ended the
day totally exhausted, but ready for some Leff Bruin and steak!
After an early night it
wasn’t such a struggle getting ready for the 8am departure. Buoyed-up on bacon, sausage and scrambled egg
– even toast and marmalade (I’ve NEVER come across marmalade anywhere outside the
UK before!) – James and I ‘bashed away’ at the trench with the disappearing
garden feature……..and eventually we had to admit defeat and abandon our beautifully
crafted and hard-fought box sections.
The ‘garden feature’ was a trick of the light….. James really wasn’t
happy, but we had spent an enjoyable few hours chatting, laughing putting the
world to rights…..even though, he considers my move from archaeology to
insurance a complete sell-out!!
With the abandonment of
that job, I was assigned to the team cleaning the track-way which I had helped
to uncover the previous day. This was a
fairly delicate task undertaken with Lewis – I believe a serving Grenadier
Guard. Lewis was quiet and unassuming…..until
he put on the back-pack water sprayer - when he took on the persona of Peter
Venkman from Ghostbusters! (Prior to
photographing the track-way, Lewis sprayed it with water in order to high-light
the contrast in colour between the soil and the stony rubble). A more natural ghost buster I have never met!
My final task of the day
was to empty buckets of ‘loose’ being dug out of another trench further to the
south – where Waterloo Uncovered’s Major Charlie Foinette was excavating with a
team. At the time, it was believed that
they were uncovering a steam-bed which ran along the south of the farm.
This brought an end to
another tiring day – and one which saw my friend and business partner Chris meet
me for another steak dinner in Nivelles.
Some Leff Bruim and red wine later, I turned in for my last night at
Nivelles Sud.
Having packed my bag (badly)
the night before I had breakfast and checked-out of the hotel and rather than travelling
in the minibus, Chris and travelled to Hougoumont in my car so that we could
leave at lunchtime for the long trip back to the UK. I was also keen to squeeze every last second
of excavation time out my trip!
Luckily, I was assigned
to Phil’s team again. The trench which I
had started on Monday was now about 10m long and over 1m dep. It seems that all of that depth was taken up
with modern back-fill probably relating to the construction of the nearby
motorway! How frustrating is that! Dumping tons of rubble and soil on top of an
historic site……..how did that happen and why wasn’t it recorded anywhere?
Still, Phil was
good-humoured as usual and set me the task of digging a deeper box-section to further
define the stratigraphy and find out where the back-fill ended. With a veteran called Martin (‘Jonsey’) I set
out my strings and began the task of removing soil in 3cm layers. I like to think that Phil wasn’t unimpressed
by my efforts as he did at one point suggest that Martin should follow my
example….though that might only have been in relation to my tea making skills….!
(I believe that since my
departure the remains of the actual ‘hollow-way’ were identified in this area by
James – at least 1m deeper than had been expected. Well done James!)
Sadly, my time was
up! I said my goodbyes and expressed my
thanks and promised to meet everyone again sometime
Chris and I re-traced my
route to Dunkirk where we boarded a ferry to Dover. Incidentally, the Dunkirk ferry terminal is
even more unpleasant than Dover’s tunnel terminal – which I wouldn’t have
believed possible if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes!
What did I learn?
Archaeology is a great
leveller. It brings people together and
no task is too small or menial for even the most ‘up-themselves’ site director
or army officer. [..and by the way, the 'up-themselves' comment certainly did NOT apply to those leading Waterloo Uncovered!]
Trowelling is harder
work than I remember!
Some human beings are
amazingly resilient.
Fighting in the battle
of Waterloo must have been truly horrific – Bernard Cornwell’s book just begins
to scrape the surface!
Archaeologists are people
who are slightly different from everyone else – in a very very good way!
So, please look up the
news and results section of http://www.waterloouncovered.com/,
follow them on Twitter and make friends with their facebook!
Thanks to the following
for allowing me (a mere insurance broker) to take part:
Diarmaid Walshe
Mark Evans
Peter Ginn
Tony Pollard
Phil Harding
Dominique Bosquet
Alasdair White
Cornelius Barton
Chris Varley
And thanks everyone else
for putting up with me!
Call me to discuss your
insurance needs on 0208 2550617 / 07768 865983
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