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Holy Island, Northumberland
4 March 2001
After it ceased to be a centre for Christian monks in the 1530s, Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, off the far north-east English coast, became a military base. There was a garrison there for 250 years, and the island is as full of military archaeology as it is religious. Time Team came to investigate a field in the middle of the island's village, known locally, for no obvious reason, as 'the palace'. Was Palace Field connected with Holy Island's Christian past or its military one – or neither?
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The Palace Field
Time Team was asked to excavate Palace Field by the county archaeologist, Caroline Hardie. It is a scheduled site, so a detailed plan had to be drawn up before a single turf could be lifted. The 'geofizz' team had got in early for this one, so that surveys done the previous day had already indicated various structures for the diggers to get started on when they arrived on the first day.
Trench 1, the main focus of the three days, was positioned in the north-east corner of the field – but not before the overgrowth and vegetation had been cleared away from the masonry still upstanding there. The stonework was believed to be late medieval – 500 or more years old – and a large amount of it was cleared and visible by the end of first day. Could these walls and floors have been part of the 'palace' referred to in the field's name?
The Team also wanted to know whether the old priory boundary had followed the edge of Palace Field joining up with the bottom of gardens in the adjacent village, which follow roughly the same line. So the first garden trench was started at Beblowe Cottage, whose owners, Tim and Jackie Parkin, also own Palace Field. Digger Ian Powlesland started with a one-metre test pit.
The 1548 survey
 In the incident room at St Cuthbert's church, meanwhile, Stewart Ainsworth was busy sifting through the various maps and archives that had been brought from Berwick Record Office. He was particularly interested in a 1548 survey carried out in connection with proposed military construction work around the priory. A map produced at the time showed a complex of buildings where Trench 1 was positioned in Palace Field, including a courtyard with adjoining buildings and two circular structures. The old maps also suggested that tidal water probably came right up to the site in the past, with the sharp drop in ground level immediately beyond the field representing the old quayside or shoreline.
Phil digs a brewery
Sure enough, Trench 1 began to show up the features drawn on the old map – including the two circular structures. Phil had been referring to these as 'ovens', but architectural historian John Heward, who was called in by the Team to advise on this programme, suggested the alternative possibility that this was a brewhouse. The brewing process needs two vats: the first a 'mashing tub', in which the mixture is produced and then left to stand for a couple of hours, and the second the fermentation vat. Were the two circular structures these brewing vats?
Confirmation that there was a new brewhouse and bakery on this site in 1559 was found from other archive records. So the brewery would have been built after Henry VIII's closure of the Holy Island priory during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, and around the time he began building up Britain's coastal defences. A series of forts were dotted along the Northumberland coastline and a naval supplies depot was established at Holy Island. This would have supplied munitions, powder, cannon shot, food and other provisions – including, it appears, beer – to the navy. According to a 1590 survey, more than 1,000 cannon shot were stored in the area, capable of supplying six or seven vessels of varying size with all that they needed for a naval battle.
Anything earlier?
But Time Team still wanted to know whether there were earlier monastic buildings on the site. So Trenches 2 and 3 were started elsewhere in Palace Field to check geophysics survey anomalies pointing to other large stone structures. One of these turned up an extensive – and impressive-looking – cobble floor. It may have been part of a stable yard for a medieval house, but unfortunately it was still some way short of a palace. It was decided to dig a final large trench from the western wall into the middle of Palace Field to look for evidence of earlier medieval occupation from the time of the priory.
In the Beblowe Cottage trench, which covered a larger chunk of the Parkins' garden as the three days progressed, a large stone structure was uncovered, together with a range of pottery fragments as the diggers progressed downwards from one occupation layer to another. The excavation also uncovered the remains of a horse, which unusually showed signs of having been butchered and eaten before being buried, but it was from a much more recent period than the medieval layers the Team were now looking for.
Puzzlingly, the further the garden trench went down, the more elusive any evidence became of occupation at the time of the priory. There were odd fragments – a piece of what pottery expert Jenny Vaughan said could be medieval greenglaze ware and another that might be ridged pottery from a 13th-century cooking jar – but they were few and far between. Part of the trench was taken down as deep as safely possible, but even after the removal of five tons of earth there was frustratingly little found from before the 1600s. A coin found very deep in the trench, for example, bore the letters CAR, for Carolus or Charles – dating from 1625-49 at the latest.
Explanation without digging
The explanation for the absence of finds contemporary with the priory did not become clear as a result of digging. Rather it was due to work by the Team's landscape archaeologist, Stewart Ainsworth, and Holy Island expert Deirdre O'Sullivan. They located a line of stones marking the boundary between Church land and the town boundary, which clearly put Palace Field outside the original priory boundaries. Whatever was happening in Palace Field at the time of the priory, it didn't involve a palace associated with the priory.
Stewart also matched up the modern street map with the plans for military defences drawn up in the 1540s. Some of these can still be seen as earthworks on the ground, while the position of one can be identified clearly as an odd, arrow-shaped kink in one of the village streets. The military past of Holy Island was also represented in some of the finds: lead shot, a probable cannon ball, a piece of 17th-century decorated tankard that may once have contained beer brewed in the vats excavated by Time Team.
As for the palace, the Team was left to speculate. The naval buildings erected here from the dissolution of the monasteries onwards would have formed part of a new and impressive site – a 'Portsmouth of the North' in Tony Robinson's words. Perhaps the buildings earned themselves the nickname 'the palace' then and the name stuck. Sometimes you can only speculate.
Holy Island: A quick history
The first monks arrived on Holy Island in 635 under Aidan, a monk from Iona in west Scotland. They were invited by Oswald, the King of Northumbria, who had his palace on the Northumberland coast, where the 17th-century Bamburgh castle stands today. Oswald set up the monastery in order to Christianise the people of Northumbria. Nothing is left of the original timber structures occupied by those early monks, and the entire monastery was destroyed by Viking raiders in the 9th century.
The ruins that can be seen on Holy Island today are what is left of the Benedictine monastery founded there in 1082. This was closed down following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. As part of his improvement of the nation's coastal defences, Henry started to build a fort here in 1542 using stone from the former priory. Work was completed on what became known as Lindisfarne Castle in 1550 and the island served as an important naval supply base and fortification for more than two centuries.
The only attack on the island saw the castle briefly seized by the Stuarts in 1715. In 1819 the guns were removed and the castle fell into disuse. Edward Hudson, the founder of Country Life, employed Sir Edwin Lutyens to restore it in the early 1900s, but it has been unoccupied since 1968 and is now owned by the National Trust. The remains of the priory are owned by English Heritage.
The population of the island today is just 160, although it rises many times higher during the summer tourist season.
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