The Bone Cave
Alveston Gloucestershire
1 March 2001

Carenza's diary

Carenza Lewis writes a regular diary for Trench One magazine. This is her account of the dig at Alveston.

Wednesday 20 September
I'm just a bit concerned about this site. It's a cave that we were going to film in April, but it flooded in a downpour (remember the wet spring that went on until July?) and was cancelled at the last minute. As I didn't have a mobile phone then I had no idea about this dramatic turn of events. So it was only when I arrived after a three-hour drive in the pouring rain that I discovered the shoot was off. All I could do was turn round and drive three hours back home in what was by then driving snow. Not much fun! The next day I went out and bought a mobile ... and today I kept it beside me all day, just in case.

All seems OK – though there has been a lot of rain recently ...

Thursday 21 September
Spent the morning hearing all about how wet, muddy, claustrophobic, difficult the cave is by those who'd been down. After lunch I was supplied with a rather nice, warm, cuddly, green fleece under-suit (rather like a toddler's playsuit – I look like a teletubby) and a canvas-like outer caving suit, which were intended between them to keep me (a) warm and (b) dry. I doubt it.

This cave is very different from Cheddar, the last underground site we dug. The only entrance is at the foot of a huge pit where there's a tiny slot in the ground that you have to wriggle into feet first.

When I got in it seemed like a dead end. Clive, the cameraman, was immediately below me, while my 'guide', Roger, had apparently vanished. Every way I turned (which was difficult as it was so cramped) there was solid rock three inches from my face. The only reason I didn't get straight back out at that point was because I couldn't move! It took a few minutes to realise that the way 'forward' would be down a tiny vertical shaft which Clive was blocking, and that Roger had nimbly twisted up a small cul-de-sac and was actually squatting above me.

Once we'd filmed me squirming in and out of the entrance about ten times, I descended to the dig site – something of a contrast to the normal stroll across a grassy field. The route is a long vertical crevice in the rock, not much more than half a metre wide anywhere. Again and again I had to twist and turn to get through a tight spot, and then slither down a wider drop, flailing my feet to try to find a foothold. Amazingly, when I arrived at the bottom, feeling like I'd entered the uncharted bowels of the earth, there were about five people already down there, happily setting up sound recording stuff and sorting out digging equipment.

Although it felt a bit claustrophobic at first, we soon settled down to the serious job of trying to find some archaeology. We're here because cavers found a load of bones – human and animal – which were old (not a modern murder, in other words), but they couldn't tell any more. We've had them radiocarbon dated, and they're all later Iron Age or Roman – but we'd like to know more about them, so that's why we're digging. By the end of the day we'd just started to turn up some bones of our own – including one human jaw bone.

The climb back out of the cave was very hard, as I had to haul myself up the bits I'd slithered down. The most alarming part, however, was realising that the shaft was actually 'Y' shaped – and one of the routes was a dead end. Unfortunately, that one's more gently sloping, wider and shored, so it looks like the right way. It was only when I realised it wasn't going anywhere that I noticed the tiny crack in the roof, which was the correct way out.

I have to say that I really wouldn't want to do this sort of thing on my own. I'd be terrified of getting stuck, especially with the added bulk of the caving suit and teletubby outfit – though they did actually keep me remarkably warm and reasonably dry, so I shan't complain.

Friday 22 September
What's the one thing you really don't need when you've had a hard day potholing using muscles you didn't know you had? Answer: A fire alarm at 4.30am. But that's what we got. We all had to stagger out of bed and hang round in the hotel car park for half an hour in the rain waiting to be told it was a faulty alarm. It went off again at 6.50am ... and then again at 7.40am.

Spent most of the day back underground – slipping in and out much more easily this time. But putting on the caving suit, disgustingly muddy from yesterday was a bit grim – though, like always, once I've got going, being dirty actually doesn't bother me at all. We've found a lot more bones today, nearly all human and dog, which is rather unusual – hardly normal domestic rubbish.

After coming out of the cave (having taken off the caving suit but still cosily dressed in the green teletubby outfit, which I'm getting rather fond of), I talked to the geologist. He told me that the place where the bones are used to be open to the sky – a huge hole in the ground, caused by the roof of an underground cave collapsing. The reason we now have to climb down through the shaft is because rock falls over the centuries have partly filled the pit up.

So it would have been quite easy to throw the bodies in from the edge in the Iron Age. But why do that?

Saturday 23 September
Never mind the fire alarms, I've now realised that the one thing you really don't want when you are working in a cave is an earthquake – and apparently there was one centred on Birmingham last night, an unusually strong one for Britain. This just isn't our lucky site, is it?

But back down the hole everything seems intact – though my legs and arms are a mass of bruises from the last couple of days. We've had a lot of bones now, still nearly all human or dog, and some nice bits of pottery. There is heated debate about what it can all mean. At least one bone has hints of cannibalism – are we dealing with an Iron-Age Fred West?

Personally, I think it's not murderous at all, but amazing evidence of one very different way in which our ancestors chose to dispose of their dead – in some societies, cannibalism is a very respectful thing to do. Maybe people in the Iron Age would be appalled by the idea of putting people in boxes and burying them with earth like we do.

But why the dogs? Was a favourite hunting dog killed when someone died? Or maybe there was some dog cult here? We can't prove anything either way, but the dig has given us a fascinating insight into a world that was clearly very different to ours today.

Sadly at the end of the day I had to give back the teletubby suit. A pity, as it would be ideal for winter digging – or sitting by the fire, of course!

You can read Carenza's diary in every issue of Trench One.

The Bone Cave Live Webchat
There was a live web chat with Carenza Lewis after the Bone Cave programme.
Read it here.

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