Today’s image for Day 349 of the VM_365 project shows a late Victorian/early 20th century Codd bottle manufactured for a soda water company from Broadstairs. Soft drinks bottles from other companies in Thanet have previously featured on Day 347 – Reeves & Co. Ltd and Day 348 – Philpott’s of the VM_365 project.

Codd-neck bottles were used for carbonated drinks; their unique design patented by Hiram Codd of Camberwell, London in 1872,  included a pinched neck enclosing a glass marble and a rubber washer. The bottles were filled upside down and the pressure of the gas used in the carbonation forced the marble against the rubber washer sealing the gas in. The pinched neck of the bottle incorporated a small chamber for the marble to move into so that it did not obstruct pouring.

This clear glass example is from a company called Miller & Co. ,which is moulded along one side of the bottle, moulded on the other is ‘Broadstairs’.  The glass marble and rubber washer are still intact which is relatively unusual for these bottles as they were often broken by small boys to retrieve the glass marbles! Glass marbles from bottles such as these used to be a frequent chance find on local beaches popular in the late Victorian and early 20th century and were also frequently found in fields used as Victorian rubbish tips.

A clean water supply was important to our local towns in terms of hygiene and health both for locals and holiday maker alike and Broadstairs had been favoured with improvements to the town water supply in 1859 with the construction of Crampton Tower which featured on Day 262 and a new reservoir which featured on Day 263 of the VM_365 project.

The image for Day 291 of the VM_365 project is of another of the burial associated with a small barrow, excavated at St. Stephens College at North Foreland, Broadstairs. The grave  pictured was encountered at the base of the north western arm of the barrow ditch, adjacent to the narrow causeway entrance.

The irregular,=  ovoid grave cut, shown in the bottom right of the  image, had been inserted into the base of the barrow ditch while it was  still open. The south west – north east orientated grave cut was  well defined with near vertical sides, slightly undercut at the eastern end and a flattish base.  The cut measured only 0.7 metres long and 0.5 metres wide, with a maximum depth of 0.3 metres. The upper right image shows how the skeleton had been placed directly on the base of the grave, before it had was backfilled with chalky sandy silt presumably derived from digging out the grave from the chalk geology.

The deceptively small grave suggested that the poorly preserved skeletal remain were those of a child, however it appears that the person buried was a juvenile or young adult. The body was laid on its right side, in a tightly crouched position, with the head placed at the western end of the cut, facing south east. The tightly crouched position of the body suggests that the remains had been either bound or wrapped to allow the body to be placed in the small grave cut.

A fragment of whale rib had been placed across the fill on the southern side of the grave cut,  resting partly on the edge of the cut. More material had been mounded over the grave, covering the rib fragment spreading over the edge of the cut. It seems that the Barrow ditch was deliberately backfilled soon after the burial had been inserted in the base of the ditch to seal the newly inserted burial.

The whale rib capping the grave raises some interesting questions about the form and meanings associated with the burial in the flat base in the terminal of this unusual ring ditch. Was the choice of a whale bone deliberate, perhaps having some symbolic value reflecting the waters at the junction of the North Sea with the English Channel that could be seen so clearly from the barrow’s location? Or was the rib fragment a more practical substitute for a timber to span the top of the grave to form a chamber, it wooden counterparts lost because they were less resistant to decay? Whale bones may have been rare, carrying some cultural significance, or they may have littered a Bronze Age maritime settlement having been collected from the foreshore with other useful flotsam and jetsam.

The VM_365 post for Day 30, which showed another image of this grave, gave some thoughts about how we try to understand the prehistoric remains that we encounter.

Today’s image, for Day 267 of the VM_365 project,  is the third and last of Dave Perkins’ reconstruction drawings, which show the progressive development of the landscape at Lord of the Manor, whose story has been revealed so vividly in aerial photographs and archaeological investigations and traced in the reconstructions shown on VM_365 Day 265 and Day 266.

The complicated development of the prehistoric funerary monuments ended in the Late Bronze Age, with the insertion into the mounds of groups of pots and urns containing cremated human remains. The mounds of the barrows then stood in the landscape for many centuries, becoming overgrown with vegetation and diminishing through erosion.

The prehistoric mounds were eventually overlaid by the graves of an extensive Anglo-Saxon cemetery. Perhaps the barrow mounds, as memorials of the older inhabitants of the area, continued to influence the choice of burial sites, but they may only have shown as rises and hillocks barely distinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

In the later medieval period much of the Lord of the Manor landscape may have been ploughed as a rising population, recovering from the effects of the Black Death, created a demand for agricultural produce. Ozengell Grange, which is also close to the Lord of the Manor barrow group, was an agricultural estate owned by the Monastery of St Augustine, who farmed much of the land where the barrows once stood. The once impressive prehistoric monuments, which were designed to preserve the memory and display the power of the ancient inhabitants, were reduced by the plough over many centuries.

There was no trace of the prehistoric monuments in the wide, flat and featureless fields that were left in the later 20th century, until they gave up their secrets to the archaeologists who were monitoring the crop marks each season and painstakingly plotting and investigating the sites they encountered.