50 Volunteers Dug Up a Farm and Discovered an Ancient Viking Structure

Yahoo

25-02-2025

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The remnants of a large late-Viking-age hall were recently uncovered by a volunteer archaeology group at a farm in Silloth, Cumbria.
The load-bearing timber found there was carbon dated to approximately 990–1040 A.D.
Discoveries like these are rare in the area—no evidence of large Viking communities from the time have thus far been found.
Fifty volunteers in the community of Silloth, Cumbria recently came together to discover a bit of local history. In this case, local history dates back more than a millennia.
After crop marks were discovered suggesting a structure had once stood on the grounds of Cumbria's High Tarns Farm, a volunteer dig at the site this past July uncovered remnants of a timber building, reports the BBC. 'That excavation [was] totally delivered by community volunteers giving their time every day to come out to the trenches and uncover our shared past,' remarked archaeologist Mark Graham of Grampus Heritage to BBC Radio Cumbria.
So, what exactly was that 'shared past' that this excavation uncovered? Carbon dating of the load-bearing timbers 'had a 94% chance of dating back to 990–1040 A.D.,' Graham told the volunteers in a letter. Taking that into consideration, along with the evidence found of a charcoal production pit and a corn dryer that 'were likely to date back to the late 10th to early 11th century,' a picture began to form.
In Graham's estimation, the structure that once stood on the site of High Tarns Farm was, in fact, a 'large hall of the late-Viking age.'
'It seems most likely that the hall is the focus of an early medieval manor farm,' explained Graham, noting that this discovery bore a notable resemblance to the 'high status Viking age farms in Denmark.' The site, he noted, provides insights beyond just the construct of the hall, demonstrating the social structure and 'broader agricultural activity' of Cumbria's long ago past.
'You really do not find much archaeology from that period in our county,' Graham noted of the Viking age discovery, 'It's a big gap in our knowledge.'
Perhaps the most notable Viking discovery in Cumbria occurred accidentally towards the end of the 20th century. When the Church of St. Michael in Workington, Cumbria was ravaged by fire in 1994, an archaeological investigation was undertakedahead of any reconstruction efforts. Though the church itself dated back to the late Victorian period, what archaeologists found among the wreckage—as noted in the abstract of a study by archaeologists Mike McCarthy and Caroline Paterson—were 'a substantial collection of Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture,' and metalwork 'from the late 9th to the 11th centuries.'
As scholar Nick Higham noted, 'No proven example of a Scandinavian settlement has yet been located in north Cumbria, despite the massive legacy of place-names and the comparatively substantial artifactual evidence for their presence.' As such, even something as small as timbers from a former hall can be crucial to obtaining a firmer sense of the centuries-old history of sites like these.
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