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A Celtic Spring
Llygadwy
21 January 2001
In a secluded valley in Wales, what may be a medieval or even Roman trackway leads down to a natural spring. Right in the middle of it is a megalith, a large standing stone, perhaps 3,000 years older than the track. Nearby, there are the remains of what appears to be a Neolithic tomb, and overlooking it what is reputed locally to be a Norman – or maybe Roman – watchtower. Stones in a ruined building on the site have early Christian symbols inscribed on them, leading to speculation that it may have been an early chapel. And in and around the spring itself the landowner has found hundreds of Roman coins, medieval jewellery, blades, buckles, statuettes and a strange collection of weirdly carved stone heads. Time Team set out to uncover the story behind this strange collection of archaeological features and finds.
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An historical theme park
Described by some archaeologists as an 'historical theme park', the site at Llygadwy presented a new kind of challenge for the Team. Local archaeologists were so dubious about its hotchpotch of features that none of them would agree to appear on the programme. Is this a remarkable and previously unrecorded site, bringing together elements from an amazing range of periods in British history? Or could it all be an elaborate hoax? Time Team decided to call in some of Britain's top experts and put the site to the most rigorous archaeological analysis.
The spring
Francis Pryor, well known to Time Team viewers for his Bronze-Age expertise (see, for example, the Flag Fen and Seahenge programmes from the 2000 series), certainly believed that the spring could have been sacred to ancient people. If it was, it would be one of only a very few to have been excavated in Britain. (The best-known are at Bath and Hadrian's Wall.)
Pagan peoples – Roman as well as pre-Roman – often regarded such places as sacred, viewing them as gateways to the world of the dead. They would make offerings, often of very valuable objects – 'the equivalent of a Range Rover today', according to Francis Pryor – which would be ritually broken and thrown into the water. Many of the objects found by the landowner in and around the spring are precisely what would be expected at such a pagan sacred site.
 Time Team also found objects that appeared to have been broken in a ritual offering. After draining the spring and excavating a silted-up drainage gully a few metres away, several coins and other artefacts were found amongst the mud. One of the most striking was part of a deliberately broken Roman brooch (right), brightly coloured with red and green enamel and in extremely good condition.
But the more the Team's experts considered the finds, the less they seemed to fit what would be expected of a pagan sacred spring. For a start, although there were many Roman coins, which would be expected, they were almost all from 300 AD onwards, whereas at other such springs they date almost wholly from the first and second centuries. As Roman expert Guy de la Bédoyère commented, it seems an odd time for pagan offerings to get started when the rest of the empire was adopting Christianity.
There were also many finds from much later dates. A heap of 1797 heavy penny pieces struck for George III in the new steam presses of the day were among the landowner's finds, while pieces of 19th-century pottery were found alongside a 1st-century Roman brooch. Different finds were stained in different colours, as if they had been in different soils. One statuette had an apparently ancient symbol on it, which had been cut through the green patina that built up on the metal over hundreds of years, and so must have been placed there long after the statuette itself was made. There was even one Roman coin that had been cleaned and another that had been broken and glued back together again.
The inescapable conclusion of the experts was that whatever had happened here in the past, very few, if any, of these finds had been placed here in antiquity. And someone had clearly salted the spring with ancient goods within living memory.
The 'Neolithic tomb'
The Team's scepticism grew as the investigation progressed. The 'Neolithic tomb' looked right – a corridor of stones leading to an end chamber that would have been buried beneath a mound – but was it authentic? Neolithic expert Jodie Lewis confessed: 'I find it rather puzzling. It looks right, but the fact that a monument this big has seemingly gone unrecorded I find puzzling.'
The Team set geophysics to work to look for outside ditches or quarries, while Phil Harding decided to excavate some of the stone holes to see if there was any dateable material. An early discovery of a flint scraper, and then a prehistoric pot, raised hopes, but geophysics found nothing – and what Phil found demonstrated conclusively that the structure was a fake. The stones were set far too shallow for a real neolithic tomb, and when Phil uncovered pieces of china and clay pipe in the stone hole that could not be more than 20 years old, the case against was proven.
The head pillar
One of the most extraordinary – and gruesome – finds turned up by the Time Team dig was a 'head pillar'. This was a carved stone, showing a skull and a head-sized niche, of a kind found only in southern France. Dating from the first or second century BC, it would have been attached to a temple involved in a 'head cult', whereby the Celtic Gauls in that area collected the heads of enemies killed in battle and placed their skulls in niches such as the one on this stone.
Celtic ritual expert Miranda Green was unhappy about its presence in Wales. And the carving differed from those found in southern France in that there the cheeks of the faces were cut away to highlight the nose and here the nose was hollowed out. It was just the sort of mistake that someone might make in copying a fake from a drawing without having seen the real thing.
The sword
On the morning of the second day, only 10 centimetres below the surface in a trench dug in boggy ground adjacent to the spring, the Team uncovered the end of an Iron-Age sword. Only two or three have ever been found in Wales, so there was great interest in the find. Could it have been made specially for an offering at the spring?
Time Team's diggers and experts were sceptical. It had been found in disturbed topsoil; and there were no other contemporary finds, although Francis Pryor said that such offerings were always found in the context of many other artefacts. Ian Stead, the country's leading expert on swords and scabbards, was called in to identify it.
It was genuine, he concluded. The shape of the hilt and profile of the blade, both very distinctive and very rare, revealed it as a La Tène sword, so named after a site at Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland where many such artefacts have been found. Dating from around 150-250 BC, at a time when the ancient Britons were using bronze, it certainly wasn't made in Britain as it has an iron scabbard. No such swords have ever been found in northern Europe.
But although the sword was genuine, it turned out to have been placed there very recently. It was found to be resting on a length of barbed wire, connected to a post and running under a nearby water pipe and electricity cables, so it must have been placed there after the barbed wire. Stewart Ainsworth, consulting local agricultural hardware suppliers, was able to date the wire to less than 20 years old – the first time that Time Team, or probably any archaeologist anywhere, has used barbed wire for dating purposes. The service cables, meanwhile, had been laid in 1992. Someone had buried the sword here since that time.
The 'Norman tower'
The 'Norman tower' looked plausible, at least superficially. But closer examination revealed that it just didn't work as a building. Corbels jutting out of the wall were misaligned; one was upside down. A huge fireplace on what would have been the first floor showed no sign of ever having been used for a fire. The eaves would have been a foot below the floor.
Stratigraphic evidence dated it to the 19th century, as did one of the three types of mortar used in its construction. Coal and iron slag were found in the foundations, placing its construction after the industrial revolution. And Stewart Ainsworth's research into maps of the area showed that it did not appear on the 1844 tithe map, making its first appearance on a map in 1886. It was, without a doubt, a Victorian 'folly'.
The track and the megalith
The megalith, or large standing stone, looked suspicious even at a casual glance, standing right in the middle of the trackway. It wasn't even necessary to excavate the stone to demonstrate that it was not authentic. Phil Harding was able to rock it from side to side in the ground. As with the stones that made up the 'tomb' it had not been planted anywhere near deep enough to be a genuine prehistoric relic.
As for the track, it didn't appear on any map until the middle of the 19th century. The finger of suspicion again pointed towards a Victorian construction of a quasi-ancient 'folly'.
The 'chapel'
And then there was the 'chapel', with the 'early Christian' symbols carved on its stonework. Not so again, it seems. Excavation of the floor found layers of rotted animal dung and a drainage channel to the spring. The 'chapel' had been an agricultural building, used to house animals; the inscriptions, in common with others found elsewhere in Britain, could have been either the idle doodlings of bored agricultural labourers – or yet another deliberate fake.
The Rev Thomas Price
So who was responsible for all this archaeological trickery? The finger of blame points to two main time periods. One, involving the sword, the supposed tomb, the standing stone and some of the artefacts found around the spring, was very recent – after 1992, according the date when the service cables and water pipe were laid.
The other takes us back to the early 19th century. This was when the Rev Thomas Price, a Bardic authority who was into the revival of druidism, came to the local parish, where he was rector from 1825 to 1848. Also good at wood and stone working, Price – or 'Carnhuanawc' as he was called in Bardic circles – was known to have erected a prehistoric cromlech and standing stone in his churchyard. He was also a collector of antiquities and travelled widely in Ireland, Scotland and the continent, meeting and discussing with scholars of the day.
Given the Victorian passion for erecting historical 'follies' – mock 'ruins' and picturesque quasi-historical features – it seems that the 'Norman tower' at least dates from this time. The Rev Price's stoneworking abilities also make him the most likely candidate as the sculptor of the head pillar. And since most of the finds discovered in and around the spring date from his time in the parish or earlier, it seems likely that he had a hand in placing many of them there too.
'Now they can tell us nothing'
For Mick Aston, the dig re-emphasised two important archaeological concepts: the importance of stratigraphy and the context of finds. 'It doesn't matter how attractive or valuable they are,' he says. 'If they're not in the right context, they can't tell us about the people living on that site.' For Tony Robinson it was all very frustrating: 'All these finds must have come from archaeological sites somewhere in Britain and people aren't going to be able to interpret those sites properly because key bits of evidence are now missing from them.'
'See those', he said at the end of the programme, pointing to the many artefacts unearthed at the site. 'Now they can tell us nothing.'
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