The Festival Dig Sir Mortimer and Magnus

This afternoon before you came in,

I'd been taking one of those nostalgic walks

which I occasionally, I'm afraid, indulge in.

And this one is my favourite one.

It takes me down by the Embankment by the Thames

opposite that extraordinary building, the National Liberal Club,

then I walk along from that point towards Westminster.

And as I approach Westminster, on my right, there is

a very remarkable building indeed.

And with that building, I have all sorts of affinity.

I tell you - first of all, biological affinity.

That building was being built at the time that I was born.

It was being built here and I was born in place called Glasgow.

You know Glasgow?

Indeed.

Well, I was being born in Glasgow

when that building was being born here in London. New Scotland Yard.

New Scotland Yard.

That building has two great round towers, one at each corner,

facing upon the river and in one of those towers it so happens -

and this is a matter of purely personal interest -

that I spent my first hours and days and weeks as

a professional archaeologist.

At that time, in spite of the fact that most of the building was

occupied by the Metropolitan police force,

somehow or other, by some contrivance over there,

this tower had been partially allotted

to an obscure Royal Commission -

the Royal Commission On Historical Monuments for England.

They allotted me to the editorial staff

and the editorial staff of those days were one man - Alfred Clapham -

later on SIR Alfred Clapham, who immediately became my closest

friend and remained my closest friend until he died 20 years ago.

Well, I remember on one occasion,

Clapham - we always called each other by our surnames to

the end of our days - he died with my surname on his lips

and we used to have this little conversation for ten minutes,

ten minutes precisely, about some irrelevant subject.

On one occasion he, a Yorkshireman, told me about a very

remarkable ancient monument, a series, enormous series, miles long,

of earthworks in northern Yorkshire at a place called Stanwick.

Our conversation was interrupted, I remember, by the fact

that across the adjacent Westminster Bridge past

the statue of Boadicea, there was marching a battalion of infantrymen

in khaki - it was just two days before the opening

of the First World War and the troops were assembling.

And we looked at that and forgot Stanwick.

And then, my mind is a blank in this respect,

for, say, nearly 40 years,

and then nearly 40 years later,

after two world wars

and all sorts of minor sub-adventures

or non-adventures in peace time,

I found myself back in London, sitting in my room

at the University Of London,

where apparently I was some sort of professor, one of those things

and my door opened and in came

a man whom I recognised as the Chief Inspector Of Ancient Monuments,

the man in charge of all the ancient buildings in the country.

And he said he'd come... I said, "Do you represent the King?"

He looked rather like it.

And he said, "No, not exactly, but I represent the Ministry Of Works.

"And I've come to you with a petition." And the petition was this.

In the following year - it was 1950 - but in the following year, 1951, it

had been intended, it WAS intended, to hold a Festival Of Britain.

A sort of centenary of the great exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851,

and the site chosen was precisely opposite the...New Scotland Yard,

on the other side of the Thames.

And it may be that there was a remote association in my mind

between the two, but anyway, his petition was this.

"The Ministry Of Works, representing the government, offer you

"the excavation, the means to excavate, any site you like,

"in England, provided it's available, at any cost that you like to name."

Well, of course, this sort of thing happens to you in a dream

and here it was - the world on a plate.

And he said, he went on to say, "Don't hurry with your answer.

"It's a big question. Take your time."

And I said, "I'll tell you now."

My mind went back over those 40 years in that flash of an instant

to our little conversation all those years ago in the turret,

in the tower, corner tower of New Scotland Yard, and I said,

"I'll do the earthworks at Stanwick." Then I added,

"I've never been there, I've never seen them,

"but if they are what I think they are said to be,

"well, they're a alleged to be, then I can't do them

"unless I have the whole finances of what is left of the British Empire

"to work upon.

"But since you offer me those finances, I'm prepared to say yes.

"What about going up there and having a look at the place next week?"

Next week we went.

Northern Yorkshire, five miles from Darlington.

The rain's streaming down like an oriental monsoon.

We were in gumboots and Macintoshes and things

and we climbed for mile after mile after mile across walls,

through hedges, over earthworks which seemed interminable.

Banks and ramparts, ditches of various kinds,

an integral work of defence of some kind or other.

Who built it? No-one knew.

No-one knew what it contained, although of course, as one began to

think over it, one came to certain provisional conclusions.

Which you're obviously not going to tell me right now.

Er, no. It wouldn't be artistic to tell you at this stage

but the...

When we got down to work, one had to ask that question, now

where in six miles are you going to dig in the hope of finding anything?

You don't just dig in the blue,

you take a place where there is an entrance, an entrance,

through which traffic must have converged.

It's at the entrance that in ancient times the passers-by, or the

people coming in, would throw away their cigarette packets and so on.

You can imagine them throwing away their rubbish or sticking up things

that they wanted to attract the attention of others.

I put my principal diggers on to the entrance.

We carved into it - I shall never forget this - it was a deep, great,

deep ditch ending at a causeway, ending abruptly at a causeway.

It was carved past the...in the rock.

It had been filled since ancient times by marsh,

by liquid mud, a pool.

And I shan't forget sitting there and watching my foreman,

an expert foreman of mine who'd been with me for many years in this

country, digging there, and suddenly stopping with his pick in midair.

He was about to bring it down and he stopped.

And looking over his shoulder, there was a sword,

a full-length sword in its scabbard, lying in the mud, intact.

A Celtic sword in a sheath - not of metal as they ordinarily are,

but in a sheath of wood.

And when you say Celtic sword, Celtic to me

suggests wild Scotsman with kilts and hairy knees coming

tearing down from the Highlands and invading England.

Celtic is a word, now, which suggests northern,

but how are you using the term?

I'm using it in a wider sense. Are you a Celt?

No, I'm an Icelander, sir.

Icelander.

We have 40% Celtic blood in us.

Yes. I knew you were tainted.

Well, immediately I did two things.

I sent for my assistant director,

and got her to go to the village to instruct the local carpenter

to make an oblong box, a sort of little coffin box,

which would take the sword

when I lifted it.

Secondly, I made a tracing of the outline of the sword in case

anything should happen to it, while it still lay in the mud

before we touched it.

And then finally, the little box arrived in about half an hour,

done very quickly.

The village carpenter brought the box along,

and the foreman and I lifted, very carefully, this wooden sword

scabbard, containing the iron sword, up in our hands

and laid it gently, very gently indeed, into the box,

still covered with its mud and bolstered with wet moss

and so on to keep it wet in transit.

I rang up the British Museum laboratory in London and said,

asked the chief man there, Dr Plenderleith,

very skilful chemist,

to be good enough to wait until my messenger had arrived.

I sent my assistant up with this box,

wrapped up exactly as it was found

in the next train.

She arrived that evening with the box

and as the chemist, Dr Plenderleith, told me afterwards,

and actually he has written,

the preservation of this remarkable relic was due entirely to the fact,

of course, that we took those precautions, that we

had prevented the wood from drying and splitting as it would have done.

Now why did you find this sword so remarkable?

It's in the British Museum now.

It has a pride of place there, but there are surely

lots of swords 2,000 years old and older than 2,000 years.

Why were you so excited when you found it?

I'll tell you. For two reasons.

-First... Excited is not the word I use.

-Why not?

I'm never excited. I don't believe... No scientist is ever excited.

Don't use the word. It's a terrible word...Mag!

But the point is that it was of interest for two reasons.

First of all, so far as I know, it's the only wooden scabbard of its

kind found in this country, or found, so far as I know, anywhere else, too.

Wood doesn't last in most European soils.

This had been preserved by the accident of its having fallen

originally, or been thrown originally,

into this great heap of wet mud

which had kept it airtight for 19 centuries.

Secondly, I'll tell you.

Close alongside this scabbard, there lay a human skull,

which had been severed from the body - the body was not there,

there were no signs of the body -

about the third or fourth cervical vertebra.

And prior to that, the owner of the skull had been killed by being

struck violently with a sword or an axe, probably a sword,

three times upon his skull, across the eyes and the forehead

and a slice off the top of his skull.

He'd been executed and beheaded

and his head had been strung up there on a pole at the gate

in accordance with ancient Celtic custom.

Many tribes, many ancient tribes used to do that sort of thing

to their foes or to their victims. Well, it went on here

in London till the 18th century when heads were exposed on Temple Bar.

Same sort of thing.

Another, an older and a more brutal age. Well, there it was.

We had a picture of the whole thing.

This post, standing up beside the gate

when everybody could see it with the skull of the executed man

on the top of it

and the sword hanging down from it

in token of the dead man's rank

And origin. It's a remarkable thing.

There it is in the British Museum. You can go and see it.

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