The strange cache of Saxon weapons found on Hardown Hill

From a young boy’s chance find in 1916 to modern surveys that reveal little, the strange cache of Saxon weapons on Hardown Hill remains one of Dorset’s most elusive archaeological puzzles, says Martin Papworth

One day during 1916, high above the village of Whitchurch Canonicorum, a boy was hunting rabbits amongst the earthen mounds of Hardown Hill. He discovered a pointed metal object lying in a spoil heap dug from a burrow. Excited by his find, he knew that Dr Vitruvius Harold Wyatt Wingrove lived nearby and that he would be interested and be able to identify this rusty piece of iron.. so he took it to his house.

Dr Wingrave was able to tell the boy that he had discovered an ancient spearhead and asked him to show where he had found it. An excavation was arranged and soon, 30cm below the ground surface, a second spearhead was unearthed. The excavations continued and eventually seven spears, an axe head, a knife and a domed shield boss were uncovered. There was also a brooch amongst the finds indicating that, if this was a burial site, the remains of both men and at least one woman were once interred here.

Dr Wingrave often came to the area on holiday and settled in Lyme Regis after the First World War. He was the first honorary curator of Lyme Regis Museum.

(Image: Dorset Museum)

The mounds across the summit of Hardown Hill were thought to have originated as Early Bronze Age burial mounds constructed up to 4,000 years ago. These were often chosen and reused as burial places by early Saxon communities.

The finds are now within the collection of Dorset Museum and Art Gallery. Dr Wingrave did not publish the information on Hardown Hill until 1931, and his report provides insufficient detail to help us understand how the objects were arranged. They seem to have come from a single mound and he mentions that it had already been dug into when the boy made his find.

Wingrave believed that the finds were Saxon grave goods accompanying burials and dated from the early medieval period. In 1968, the objects were studied again by Vera Evison who compared them with finds from other warrior burials. She found an engraved representation of a fish on one of the spear blades and believed that the finds dated from just after the Roman period, AD 450-550, and that the location of this discovery was extraordinary for Dorset.

Although these objects are very similar to other grave goods accompanying early Germanic settlers, these comparable artefacts were concentrated in eastern Britain, none had previously been found in west Dorset. So how did these weapons arrive in a remote barrow mound far from the nearest early Saxon occupation evidence? In this part of Dorset, Romanised British people continued to govern until the early seventh century. Their burials are in the Christian tradition, aligned east to west in cemeteries without grave goods.

Finds from Hardown Hill: a) brooch b) spear ferrule c-k) spearheads d) shows details of fish design on the blade. (Image: Dorset Museum)

In 1977, Hardown Hill was one of the first pieces of fieldwork I was involved with while training to be an archaeologist at Weymouth College. We spent a Saturday on the hilltop measuring the heather covered earthworks, walking with ranging rods and survey equipment. Our finished plan showed a line of four small round barrows on the east side of an unusual feature – a group of mounds arranged like a four dot die, linked to one another by a low earth bank forming a circle. At the centre of this group was a hollowed mound surrounded by a shallow circular ditch.

All the mounds had been dug into and it is likely that this had happened long before the 1916 discovery. Nobody knows now which barrow contained the Saxon iron objects. In 1977, our college lecturer wondered whether the placename element, ‘Har’, might indicate the location of a Saxon sacred site and that the circular feature with its five hollowed mounds might be a Saxon temple. However, many years later, I came across a 1769 map of the hill which shows the five hollows as ponds. The map gives the name of this feature as ‘Jn Devizes Pits’. Perhaps they were not Saxon at all but part of some sort of 18th-century folly. Later Ordnance Survey maps call them ‘Jonny Vizer’s Pits’.

Forty years after my initial survey of the hill, I was asked to carry out an archaeological landscape survey of the National Trust’s Golden Cap Estate. Hardown Hill was part of this and I wondered whether a geophysical survey of the hill top might indicate where these rare Saxon objects had been found.

I gained scheduled monument permission from Historic England and persuaded fellow archaeologist Dave Stewart to help me survey the site. On an overcast March day in 2017 we negotiated the steep track up to the site. We divided the ground into a 20m grid and then set up the earth resistance meter and the magnetometer device. Throughout the day, we walked systematically up and down the survey area to record what lay beneath the ground.

Whitchurch Canonicorum church tower. (Image: Martin Papworth)

My feeling was that if quantities of Saxon iron still lay within the barrows then the magnetometer would highlight their location easily. However, any readings of that sort turned out to be bits of rusting modern metalwork. Our survey findings turned out to be inconclusive.

That day, Hardown was a lonely gloomy place. From time to time the mist cleared enough to reveal the church tower at Whitcombe but the coast to the south was hidden. On a good day, the views are wonderful.

On such a cold bleak day we could feel the grimness of Hardown and perhaps the mood of a group of Saxon pioneers who had grounded their boat in enemy territory too far west, and ended their days here. The acid soils of this area mean that their bones would have completely disintegrated long ago. It is a mystery why this group of items ended up here, apparently found together in a heap rather than spaced around the bodies of the dead. One theory is that this is a hoard of items captured in conflict and buried up on the hill for retrieval at a later date. I suppose we may never know..

The summit of Hardown Hill with one of the hollowed mounds, part of earthwork known as John Devizes Ponds in 1796 and as Jonny Viser's Pits on OS maps (Image: Martin Papworth)

Further Reading:

Austin, M. 2014. ‘Rethinking Hardown Hill’, The Antiquaries Journal 94, 49-69

Evison, V.I. 1968. ‘The Anglo Saxon Finds from Hardown Hill’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 90, 232-239

Wingrave, Dr V. H.W. 1931. ‘An Anglo Saxon Burial on Hardown Hill’ Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 53, 247-249

The Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society are being digitised and many can be found on the Dorset Museum web site. Proceedings - Dorset Museum & Art Gallery dorsetmuseum.org/proceedings