Category: Features of the Reserves

Location

From the Jubilee Stone, take the sign-posted permissive-path heading south for about 50 metres and the remains of the cottage are located on the right hand side. There is an information board next the path.

History

The largest known dwelling in Jubilee Stone Wood was the cottage and garden referred to on old maps as either ‘Warren House’ or simply ‘The Lodge’. The first written references to the cottage date from the 1780s when the building was repaired after a severe storm. The ruins visible today suggest that the cottage would have originally covered an area of about 40sq metres with the adjacent walled garden (located to the left of the cottage) about 1200sq metres.

Rabbit Warrens

Rabbits (or ‘coney’) were introduced into England by the Normans and were highly valued for their meat and fur during the Middle Ages and have remained so almost up to the present day. It is thought rabbits originally came from south-western Europe so to ensure they would thrive in our cooler climate, artificial warrens were built consisting of low, flat topped mounds varying in size from a few metres to over a kilometre in length. These mounds were often referred to as ‘pillow mounds’ and were once quite a common sight in the English countryside.

Warreners were appointed to protect and harvest the rabbits and it was not unusual for the Lord of the Manor to allocate them suitable accommodation as part of their position. As rabbits were officially classified as ‘game’, no warrens could be established during the period without the express permission of the King.

The warren in Jubilee Stone Wood was granted to Sir Richard Rodney on the 10th June 1318 by order of King Edward II. References from a survey of the Manor of Backwell in 1709 record that the warren at that time covered an area of 3 furlongs by 1½ furlongs (600 x 300 metres) and would consequently have had the potential to produce many thousands of rabbits per year. The warren appears to have been in continual use until 1812 when the introduction of the Enclosure Act divided the area of the warren into fields which were subsequently allocated to Court Farm. After this date the fields were most likely used for other agricultural purposes and the warren was almost certainly abandoned. 

The Cottage & Garden

The warreners who cared for and eventually killed and processed the rabbits were often provided with purpose built accommodation. This was sometimes of a higher standard than was usual for the period and illustrates the importance of rabbits at the time. The cottage would have been a two-storey structure built of shaped limestone blocks extracted from the local bedrock and made watertight with a thatched roof. The warrener would have used the ground floor as a workshop to process the rabbits whilst using the upper storey as his living accommodation. When not working this arrangement would have enabled him to keep a watchful eye out for both predators and poachers approaching the warren. The large adjacent garden would have also allowed the warrener to grow his own produce enabling him to be relatively self-sufficient. After the warren was abandoned, the records show the cottage was still lived in up until 1843, however it too fell derelict some time between 1843 and 1882. 

Surveying the Warrener’s Cottage’s Remains – 2009

To mark the 700th anniversary of the warren, in 2018 it was decided to expose the remains of the cottage walls.  One year later, the excavations have revealed the structure of the main building plus a porch and two outbuildings. The photo below was taken in July 2019 from a similar viewpoint to the above picture. We had no idea what lay deep under all that soil!

The story of the excavation and more photos can be followed here:  Warrener’s Cottage Excavation

Location

Walk downhill from the Jubilee Stone (towards the Church Town entrance to the reserve) for about 100 metres. The Lime Kiln is situated on your left hand side, about 20 metres along a side path edged with stones & logs.

Restoration

The restoration of Jubilee Stone Wood’s limekiln began in 2006. By the end of the first year we had removed approximately 1.5 tonnes of rubble to expose more of the structure.

The kiln itself has been found to be in remarkably good condition – probably protected from the elements by the enormous rubble pile in front of it. The picture below shows the kiln as it was at the end of 2009 (after the removal of approximately 5 tonnes of rubble) when we were at last uncovering the full extent of the structure.

Historical Context

The Lime Kiln in Jubilee Stone Wood was constructed sometime between 1843 and 1884 to convert limestone (calcium carbonate) to ‘quicklime’ or ‘lime’ (calcium oxide). This material had many uses ranging from the production of lime mortar and lime wash for buildings to its use in agriculture as a soil improver. 

Towards the end of the 19th century, improvements in transport enabled larger industrial kilns to mass-produce lime at comparatively lower prices whilst the use of cement in the construction industry was becoming increasingly popular.

Historical evidence from old maps indicates that Jubilee Stone Wood’s lime kiln fell into disuse sometime between 1884 and 1902. The adjacent structure probably collapsed soon after the kiln was abandoned which has clearly helped to preserve the kiln in the excellent condition we find it today. 

The manufacture of quicklime was a time-consuming, dangerous and labour-intensive process. Sufficient limestone and fuel (probably coal and/or wood) would have to be collected and transported, loaded into the kiln and set alight. The limestone was then heated in the kiln at temperatures of up to 1000ºC for around 3 to 4 days. The raw materials needed for the process were all available locally. Wood (or charcoal) could be easily sourced from nearby woodlands and coal could be hauled up Cheston Combe from the pits around Nailsea.

Limestone was almost certainly mined from the surrounding area and the woodland has several large, square shaped pits where limestone has clearly been extracted.

Construction

The kiln has been built from locally extracted, shaped limestone blocks and has been deliberately set into the sloping hillside. This arrangement has the advantages of saving on construction costs whilst also assisting in its ease of operation by being able to load from the top and unload from the bottom. It also ensured the kiln was aligned with the prevailing south-westerly winds which would have helped fan the fire and speed up the conversion process.

The internal bowl of the kiln would undoubtedly have been lined with Pennant sandstone extracted from around Nailsea. Whenever kilns were constructed from limestone blocks it was always necessary to physically separate the limestone used in the main body of the kiln with the fuel otherwise it too would be converted to quicklime during the lengthy firing process.

Direcly in front of the kiln are the remains of an open-sided rectangular enclosure which may have served as a storage area for the kiln’s labourers or alternatively used as a sheltered loading point for the extracted quicklime.

There is a Bronze Age barrow cemetery in the field by the Jubilee Stone, with 4 – 6 burial mounds dating back 2,500 to 4,000 years, although they are quite hard to make out now. They date from the middle to late Bronze Age, when the usual practice was for the dead to be cremated and buried either individually or as part of a family group. The ashes were then placed, with due ceremony, in specially-made urns, and set upright in a pit in the centre of an earth or rubble mound, sometimes surrounded by a ditch. This is unlike the earlier period when defleshed, disarticulated bones were left in chambered tombs.

The urn shown here came from a barrow made of stacked-up turfs in a cemetery on the skyline at Beacon Hill, Shepton Mallet. Made of coarse fabric, and decorated with a row of finger prints, it contained the ashes of a female, 18-25 years old.

Barrows were usually placed on the false crest of a hillside, and in close proximity to the settlement, so the dead were, in theory, still part of the living. No trace has been found of where they lived at Backwell, but it might have been somewhere in BET woods, or down below under more modern houses.

In 1933 Professor E. K. Tratman flew over the whole area looking for archaeological sites, noticed the barrows and later investigated them on foot, carefully measuring their sizes as he went along. Lower down on the hillside he reported that there were 2 almost touching each other on sloping ground, their height ranging from 4 ft to 8 ft, with flat depressed areas on their summits. Local tradition is that they are spoil heaps from mining, but there are no large shafts or mining pits nearby. The golf course was built into their sides.

What the largest barrow might have looked like

Another large barrow closest to the Jubilee Stone had a circle of stones around it, 2 ft high, 6 ft wide at the base and 30 ft in diameter. A central mound of stones was 3 ft high and 14 ft in diameter, which joined the outer ring in 2 places. This is the barrow that in 1898 was excavated by Reverend George Masters from Flax Bourton, who described it like ‘a cup or basin inverted in its saucer’. He dug it in July, but probably not up to the usual rigorous standards adopted by today’s archaeologists.

How not to dig a barrow!

Some antiquarians often dug out with picks and shovels the central area where they thought the burial and grave goods were, telling workmen to stop when they found bones or pottery. This is how Reverend John Skinner of Camerton managed to dig 100 barrows in 17 years, although, to his credit, he did make detailed sketches of them.

Pitt-Rivers excavating Wor Barrow, Dorset in 1893.

General Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers was very professional, and an important pioneer in many aspects of archaeology, his work being neat, methodical and accurately surveyed in accordance with his military training. Not only did he record all finds, however trivial, but also the contexts in which they were found, and published all the information in massive volumes, with copious illustrations that are informative even today.

Back at Backwell, Reverend Masters was very disappointed by his barrow, because instead of burial urns and jewellery, etc. all he found was a pavement of flat stones, 2 ft down below the surface. They covered a layer of ‘moist and unctuous’ (greasy, soapy, oily) earth which yielded bones from pigs and smaller animals, but no human ones. There were also fragments of glazed earthenware, tobacco clay pipes and iron nails, all of a recent date, which he declared ‘constituted a puzzle’. As the nearby Jubilee Stone was only built the previous year in 1897, it is probable that these unexpected finds were left by the workmen, who buried traces of their meals and pipes beneath stones in the barrow – these stones being identical to those placed beneath the Stone itself.

In 2011 both resistivity and magnetometry geophysics were carried out on several of the barrows to determine if any features still remained beneath the surface of the soil, and two previously unknown ones with ring ditches were found. Probably all the main burials are still intact, and although this could be confirmed by excavation, it is better that they remain intact and undisturbed, on the hillside where they have already lain for several thousand years.

Most of the top stones were removed to allow deep ploughing by tractors in the field after the War. Very little can be seen of the barrows today, apart from slightly raised surfaces in the grass.  This aerial photo, taken in the evening sun in September 2019 from 400 feet above the Jubilee Stone, clearly shows the circular outline of one of the barrows, to the left of centre.