28 Ancient Skeletons. THE TRUTH

This all looks very pleasant, doesn't it? A beautiful, awesome day, in fact. But there's a cave in these woods, more like a hole, very dark and very deep, and it's called the Dog Hole, which is an apt name because it's full of old dogs. That's right, 1,000 years of dog bones down that hole, but it gets a whole lot worse, and I don't know whether to affect a Roald Dahl in the Tales of the Unexpected or Uncanny Danny from Uncanny. Never mind the dogs, 28 human skeletons have come out of that hole. This is an unparalleled number of cave inhumations for the northwest of England, and we've got evidence of stabbing plus babies being interred with a whole Iron Age horse. We are visiting a site that has challenged our view of Iron Age and Romano-British rural burials in the northwest of England, and as with most such discoveries in this part of the country, you're likely to have heard nothing about it. So watch this, why don't you? Hello there, fans of Tales of Historical Horror. As you can see, I've sort of opted for the Roald Dahl-type thing, and I've got to be honest with you, I am so skint right now. I was really tempted to massively hype and clickbait this story, given that we are talking about human bodies being thrown down a deep, dark hole in the woods for hundreds of years. But seriously, this story is too good to Danny from Uncanny it. I mean, seriously, what is his game? The discoveries that were eventually made here at this dog hole that we're gonna try to find in the woods today transform our understanding of Celtic native burial practice in this region, and the shift to surprisingly urban Roman styles over time in a part of the country that many consider to be un-Roman. Now, even though this is a story of skeletons in a dark hole, there is nothing graphic here, there is nothing to worry about. You are safe to watch this, even if you are a bit of a wuss. Oh yes, there is another thing. Whilst I was filming this, I was told by a local that there have been some recent peculiar goings on at the dog hole, which I probably should have said really in a woo-woo voice, but it's difficult to Danny from Uncanny anything when you're sat at home in your socks. Right, so the dog hole, the cave we're gonna try to find today, and it's gonna be difficult, I can immediately tell because look, they are partially filling the forest here. So the cave was first excavated to a depth of 17 feet in 1912 by a chap called Wilfred Jackson, and he was a prodigy of William Boyd Dawkins, who authored in 1874 the book Cave Hunting, and that set off something of a late Victorian mania for cave-based archaeological exploration. You know, if they'd have had a Victorian X, formerly known as Victorian Twitter, this thing would definitely have been trending. Now, as I understand it, the cave that we're looking for today is not your archetypal sort of caveman cave. If there's any sign of it, it's gonna be a hole in the ground that's covered over by a stone, something like that. Now, Jackson tells us that the cave was known variously as Haverbrack Bank Pot, but also the Fairy Cave. I'm not entirely sure if the dog hole name existed before or whether that came about because he found so many dogs down it. He does call it the dog hole, though. And there was a tail as well. He does recount a tale, a local sort of myth, that a dog disappeared down there one day and turned up a mile or so down in the valley. So possibly the dog hole did predate the discovery of so many dogs. Anyhow, Jackson appears to have given up once he hit a layer of barren sediment. He found five wolves, loads of dogs, pigs, that sort of thing, and a bit of Tudor pot. It was all very confusing. The fact that it was so confusing may explain why. I found a note that Jackson tried to come back in the 1930s to have another go at it, but it didn't happen. There was no labor available to help him. So he sort of concluded that it was a wolf den and that wolves had dragged all these various sort of things into the cave. Remember, he didn't find any evidence of humans. He concluded it was not a dwelling place. It was not a place of habitation. Further confusion comes because he also excavated, not too far away from here, a cave called the Dog Holes. And there he did find quite a convincing argument for habitation at various points over a huge span of time, Neolithic through to Romano-British. And the confusion is not confined to Wilfridge Day. I'm confused by these S's. Now, I'm sure that someone out there in the audience, because we've got some extremely knowledgeable viewers, will be to tell me about this, because S stay, and yet every single one of them has been topped. Please explain that. I can't stand the confusion in my mind. Anyhow, so Five Wolves Wilfrid, or should that be Wolfrid? It's worthy of Jim Murray, that one, isn't it? Didn't know what to make of this place. At this stage in our narrative, I don't know if we're talking about a tale from prehistory or the Romano-British period, or even the Dark Ages. You know, he did have a bit of Tudor pot there even, so really late. What I do know is that this sort of location with the exposed limestone always tends to make me feel prehistoric. And actually, just over there is a huge, what I think is a working limestone quarry, which is coming perilously close to where I believe the dog hole is. So this cave of mystery may not be around for too much longer. I suppose it's pretty obvious, isn't it, why I would think prehistoric Stone Age when you've got all of this here. Some of the locals told Wilfrid that they thought the dog hole was nothing more complicated than a place where, for years, farmers had been depositing shot, stray dogs that had been worrying sheep. But that was nonsense. The bones were way too old for that. Wilfrid, as I mentioned, thought it might be a wolf den, although there's no certainty whatsoever about how long wolves held out in this area. Some tend to think up to possibly the 13th century. Although there is a poem, a late Victorian poem, the other side of the bay over there at Humphrey Head, which recounts of the death of the last ever wolf in Britain, I think it was. In fact, I've got a video, Don't Drink the Holy Water, you'll find out a little bit more about that. It's an early effort, but an oldie, but goldie. Now, there has been a lot of rain. Wee! The risks that I take for this channel. How many of you were Boy Scouts? I bet loads, looking at our demographic, I bet loads of you were. We get to 1956 and the Boy Scouts make a discovery. The Milne Thorpe Boy Scouts, to be precise, exploring the cave in 1956, they discovered 23 human skeletons. Now, the subsequent Boy Scout-led exploration of the dog hole is great. It really upset the experts. Claire Fell, a leading archeologist of the day, was a little bit more open-minded. She sent a note saying that they were full of enthusiasm and highly suspicious of the experts. I like the cut of these Boy Scouts and their jib. Well, stuff the experts, the report that was put together by two of the Scouts who went on to then have an academic career is absolutely top-notch. And I will share that with our members, who we love and adore. It's a really good quality piece of work, particularly for 1956. It's so thorough. They even worked out the age ranges. And if I put those on the screen, it's a little bit like the sort of opposite of the demographic of this YouTube channel. Interesting to see that in the main with our skeletons there, we are looking at sort of young adults. It's an odd thing, isn't it? A lot of dogs today. It's a beautiful day. I guess people are taking their dogs out for a walk. If I had a dog, which I don't, I'd take it out for a walk today. Anyhow, the Scouts did better. They got down further. They got down 30 feet. And as well as the human bones, which they were able to put these sort of age ranges on them, they identified in things like the sort of ox and sheep bones down there, cut marks. So they were able to see that that was effectively food. But it proved impossible for the Scouts to put a time period, a date on these bones. The finds were largely 2nd to 3rd century AD. So Romano-British. But there were glass beads down there, for instance, which could have dated as late as the 9th century. So they were really unable to sort of pin a time period on it. And they came to the conclusion that this had been happening potentially for 700 to 800 years. That for whatever reason in this location, people had been burying their dead, throwing their dead down into this cave. And it must have been a sort of a practice of throwing the bones in over so many centuries. Very, very odd. Very odd, as is the fact this coffee has appeared. These sort of things magically happen when you're a filming professional like what I am. Anyhow, the Chaps didn't just leave it that the human bones were being put down there for 700 or 800 years. They did identify that broadly, the finds were in three areas. So human bones, along with the bones of animal food were sort of in one place. Then there was another area where they thought this was the dog's den. Dogs had lived down here. So the 5th to 9th century, they speculated on that. And then there was another area where there was lots of antlers. And those antlers showed signs of human activity, which they thought was later, sort of medieval sort of period. So they weren't narrowing it down a bit. And then when we think that the finds are, although there are curve balls, the finds are in the main, sort of Romano-British in their style. You know, they sort of thought that it seemed most likely that the humans were deposited down there, sort of in the Romano-British period, possibly early dark ages. Well, I'm pleased that we seem to have left that area of felling behind. We're in the woods proper now, but somewhere out here in this dense woodland where we've got all this limestone to get through as well is the dog hole. Rolling our story forward, 1980s, Tom Clare, the county archeologist was taken down into the dog hole. He found skeletons still in situ, skulls, and he had the cave gated at that point. Well, I spoke too soon about the felling. The way forward is absolutely devastated by the process. And I also feel a little bit like Danny from Uncanny on BBC Two, because a local has just come up to me and told me that apparently at Halloween at the cave entrance, the dog hole cave entrance, there is a local lady, for reasons unknown, who comes and carries out sort of rituals there and hangs sort of ornaments there. Nobody knows why. I'm actually finding it easier to sort of track along this limestone sort of escarpment rather than down there where they've been cutting the trees down. But we are getting there. You can see it on my app. I've got OS Maps. Is it still there? Yes, it is still there, despite all this devastation. I can still see the metal winch. Look at that. The metal winch from the 1950s when the Boy Scouts did their thing. Little bit spooky with all these dogs barking, but it is Sunday, isn't it? People that like dogs and have dogs, they walk their dogs, don't they, on Sunday. So nothing to be scared of. It's just a coincidence. It's the dog hole and I keep hearing dogs sparking. Quaking Jamesian style fear aside, you will note that the grid on that thing is padlocked. I do hope none of you thought that I was going to be going down there. I am a serious leading YouTube amateur antiquarian, you know. You wouldn't catch me doing anything as reckless and unprofessional as that. We will try and get a camera down there, old school style, and have a look to it in a bit. But before we do that, I just want to bring my story a little bit further forward. In 1994, one of the original Scouts has a close look at some of the bones and identifies on two sets of rib bones, deep cut marks. And the conclusion of that analysis is that we are looking at a deliberate stab to the heart. Two attempts of that. Deliberate sternal action on the heart with a blade that was something like 20 centimeters long, one and a half centimeters wide at the point of entry. The conclusion here was that this was not a battle wound. This is not a soldier being killed in a battle. This was a deliberate act of murder. Right, do you want to go and have a little look, don't you? Gonna have to do this old school style, camera on the stick time. Let's do this. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways. Right, I have no idea if this will work. Now, it'd be marvelous if when I play this back, we see some bones, but I guess that's unlikely. That's as far as I can go. We will just try over here as well. It does look scary, doesn't it? History horror files. There was some debate in my head as to whether this was gonna be a coastal catalog, but it's definitely history horror files. Struth, what was that? Did you hear that? 2003, Tom Clare returns to the cave for the first time since the 1980s. He can't find the skulls and the bone fragments that he saw then, possibly dislodged, disturbed by ongoing caving activity. But through the course of 2003 and 2004, cavers, I think one chap was called Jim Newton, hello, Jim Newton, if you were watching, took various experts down there, and more bones were found. They found sort of a layer of human bones with skulls protruding. So by taking some of those, and Don Benson, one of the scouts, presented up his four boxfuls of human bones from the 1950s, they finally did some radiocarbon dating. So I think in 2004, and then again in 2006, we had dates. And contrary to those earlier ideas that possibly human bones had been deposited in this hole for centuries, it appeared that they were all confined to a fairly tight date range. They were Romano-British in date. It was around about this sort of point in the investigation that I realized this film should have really been an entry in the Roman Gazette series. But one, I was way too invested in the Cod Hammer House of Horrors thing by that point. And two, my playlists don't make any sense anyway. We leave caver Jim Newton in the mid-noughties, wondering if more will ever be known about the dog hole burials. And it was in fact 2010 to 2011, when a modern study with additional excavation took place. And dib, dib, dob, KP Bland was still included, which is really rather nice. The body count is now 28. Carbon dating gives us dates of the late Iron Age through to the late Romano-British period for the human remains in the cave. With animals continuing to be thrown into the hole right the way through to post-Norman. 1,000 plus years of dogs in the hole. Isotope analysis showed that all of the bodies in that hole were local-ish, with the exception of one off Cumden from down south. Some things never change. Celtic continuity then, with a whole horse accompanied by neonatal infants, puppies, piglets, and lambs. With those lambs clearly signaling a seasonal ritual. Celtic horse-based inhumation has turned up elsewhere in the north. And it's fascinating to note how 100 years on from Old Epona here, going down the hole, we have horse cremations at Broome, where Celtic names dominate in the Vicus. The horse in the hole here dates between 5 to 125 AD. And then higher up, surprisingly urban-style burials with jet, shale, gold-in-gold beads, bracelets, and necklaces. This is Romano-British mid-third to fourth century. Fascinating to see this here in the un-Roman Northwest. Ex-military absorbed into rural life, or keeping up with that lot down the road at the fort. Butchery marks on animal bones are slight, indicating ritual over rubbish. And a third trauma death was identified out of the now 28 human skeletons. Where did these people live? Possibly the destruction of two-thirds of the hill by that quarry answers the question. Dark ages onwards, it's just animals with an ant moustache, 881 to 1013. And the last dogs in the hole, 1220 to 1280. It adds atmosphere. An entrance to the underworld guarded by dogs. My arse, ask me another question. Set aside the mumbo-jumbo, consider the plentiful supply of deities at this time. And what we have is a useful natural feature, which probably carried spiritual resonance with these people. And whilst we may flinch a bit about throwing Uncle Affleck down a hole on top of Mutley the dog who went down last week, it turns out this was not so uncommon in Iron Age and Roman Britain. I very often get surprises when I make these films, and that was absolutely the case with this one. I had no idea that cave-based inhumations were such a thing during the Iron Age and Roman period. I would have wrongly assumed that that was something that had died out many, many, many, many, many centuries before that in proper prehistory. There you go, it was a thing, and it seems to have happened across the whole of the country. Would you look at that? So I've been having a good look around. I can't see any sign up here at all of these supposed sort of ritualistic offerings that the chap that I met was telling me about, not long after Halloween. So if this lady from Storth is still doing it, perhaps she didn't do it this year because of all the disruption here with the forestry operations. If you know anything about that, let me know. Really would be interested to find out about that. Very atmospheric stood here, an ancient burial site with ritualistic elements. Not a shrine nor a temple. It's a grave. Those three stab victims remain a concern, though.