This landscape is dotted with burial mounds known as ‘barrows’. There is a large barrow built into the henge bank at Arbor Low, and another prominent barrow nearby to the south-east called Gib Hill. Scan the hilltops nearby and you will probably spot more distinctive ‘bumps’ on the horizon.
Many of these mounds were excavated in the 1800s by antiquarian Thomas Bateman, who dug hundreds of Peak District barrows.
Archaeologist John Barnett explains why Bateman excavated so many sites, and how his methods compare to today’s archaeologists:
You can read an audio transcription below.
He had his own private museum and one of the reasons, probably the main reason he was digging, is to find things to put in his museum, but he was fanatically interested in burial mounds. He dug hundreds of them, literally, in the Peak District.
For his day he was very good, he made a decent record of what he found. Of course we do things totally differently today. What might take him an afternoon would take someone like me several weeks or months to dig much more meticulously.
The big thing that Bateman did right is, he wrote it down, he wrote two books on his findings. A lot of the contemporaries that were working in the Peak District, we don’t really know very much about what was going on apart from Bateman who would make the occasional comment about ‘so and so dug a hole over there’, because they never wrote anything down at all.
Thomas Bateman was born in 1821 at Rowsley, Derbyshire. His father, William, died when Thomas was only 16, but his own work as an amateur archaeologist no doubt helped to develop his son’s growing interest in archaeology.
Bateman helped to run the family estate at Middleton Hall where his enthusiasm for archaeology continued to grow. In 1843, he joined the British Archaeological Association and, after witnessing the excavation of barrows near Cantebury, came home and excavated around 38 barrows in Derbyshire and Staffordshire in 1845.
Bateman published his first book, Vestiges of the Antiquities of Derbyshire, in 1847. It brought together the results of his own work with those of other local antiquarians.
He second book, Ten Years’ Diggings in Celtic and Saxon Grave Hills in the Counties of Derby, Stafford and York, was published in 1861, the same year as Bateman’s death.
Thomas Bateman built up a large private collection from his excavations. After his death much of the collection was acquired by the Sheffield City Museum (now operated as Weston Park Museum by Museums Sheffield).
Arbor Low and Gib Hill are managed by Historic England
The Bateman Collection is in the archive of Museums Sheffield
‘Ten Years’ Digging’ is available as a free ebook