Jump to: What is Turf? / Building with Turf / Revealing Roman Turf / New Insights at Roman Sites / Turf since Antiquity / The Art of Turf
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Across Britain, and indeed much of North West Europe, the earth holds traces of Roman structures made of turf – of soil and root and grass. Earth in earth. The Earthen Empire project has been exploring these remains, searching for the visible and hidden evidence of their construction at sites across the country. What do they reveal about our Roman past? And what can they teach us about our relationship between architecture and the landscape going into the future?
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Earthen building materials include mudbrick, rammed earth, cob, daub and turf. All these materials are forged from the earth, bits of landscape stuffed, slopped and squashed to form structures, then gradually slumping, disintegrating, melting away, forgotten into faded memories once again. We see these techniques used from prehistory, and across the world, notations of places and time held in organic remains.
Earthen architecture was common across the Roman world, the technique varying with the particular environment and climate of place.
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Here in Britain, and the north-west areas of the Roman Empire, turf in particular was widely used to build military and civilian architecture. The great border structures of Hadrian’s Wall (at least at its western, Cumbrian end) and the Antonine Wall used turf to mark their ground. And it raised the curved seating of amphitheatres from which the spectacles of the day were cheered and booed. Yet turf is a building material that has been rather overlooked by archaeologists. It’s often hard to see in the ground as it’s a matter of seeing earth in earth, and it’s also rare that it’s looked for. When discovered it is not often investigated further, or more complex questions asked of its materiality or function. The rather humble origins of turf mean that it is often presumed to be the somewhat cheap, less durable relation of stone. But if we look closely at the archaeology of turf, it reveals rare views: new perspectives and scales of understanding of the Romans and their world.
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What is Turf?
Turf is made up of the vegetated ground surface: the surface vegetation and the soil held together by its roots. Grassland, heath, mossy ground and saltmarsh can all be cut for turf. The roots systems of grass, heather and marsh plants tightly bind the soil together into a mat so it can be removed as a solid block. Different vegetation, soils, mineral and water contents result in variable properties of the turf. Within the roots, the topsoil (and sometimes the subsoil too) is included in the block. These soils have often been formed over hundreds of years, their mineral makeup reflecting the local geology and geomorphology, occasionally preserving within them traces of earlier human activity. Not all landscapes will be suitable for turf cutting: there must be a balance between the kinds of vegetation and soils. So what at first might seem a basic material is revealed as complex and subtle. It echoes the wider environment, and the local histories as an archive of landscape.
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Turf blocks are cut, then stacked up to form structures such as walls or banks. It is a robust material, and because of its organic make-up, is flexible yet able to bear large loads. The sides of the blocks are cut vertically or on a slight angle, and then a flat blade or tool is inserted underneath to release the turf from the ground. Longer, thinner strips can be cut for roofing or capping walls. In this way, it’s a remarkably straightforward building material: you cut, trim and place. The size of the turf will depend on the building project, the nature of the soil and its dampness and crucially on the ideal weight to lift. The blocks are usually rectangular or a parallelogram, depending on the particular qualities of the turf, its intended use, or the style of the turf cutter.
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This ongoing tacit dialogue between people and the soil is what makes turf such an enchanting building material – it’s a subtle merging of individuals and the earth in a process of making. And this is reflected in turf structures. The blocks are often cut from the areas around the building project, the structure becoming an upstanding record of the local environment and people’s activity within it. In the heft of stacked turves, the architectural choices of the builders sit alongside the properties of the local soils and vegetational histories. The way the turf is used alongside other materials, the way it is shaped and arranged also reflects how adaptations have been made for the local climate.
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During their use, the soft, sculptural forms of turf structures merge into the local landscape. Turf buildings must be maintained and repaired whilst in use. It’s a form of building that is always in progress, altered subtly by human or natural actions. And as such, it holds a different sense of time within the landscape; a fleeting, flickering signature of architectural life. Once abandoned, turf structures gradually age back into the land from which they were cut. In this lifecycle of turf building, its intimacy with the land is revealed. Those working with it create a particular tie not just with the locality of the land, but with the very soily, rooty matter of it. People become knotted into those tangled roots and microbial soils. People and place become knotted together within these earthy architectures.
Jump to: What is Turf? / Building with Turf / Revealing Roman Turf / New Insights at Roman Sites / Turf since Antiquity / The Art of Turf
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Building with Turf
Turf has a long history as a building material throughout northwestern Europe, and particularly the North Atlantic region. It was used in prehistoric houses in Scotland and Scandinavia and continued in these areas up to the present day. By using it in different ways it has been adapted to particular places. In contemporary and past examples, turf blocks have been laid in arrangements that vary from the usual horizontal form that we might see in a brick wall, to herringbone forms. They can be used to form subtle curves and even arches for doorways. Turf buildings existed across Scotland up until the modern period and can still be seen in Iceland (as at Glaumbaer, pictured here), where the material has been used since the Viking period. It’s a material that’s seeing a revival as a green building material with a light and compostable footprint on the landscape.
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But what about the Roman period? When we think of Roman Britain, we’re more likely to imagine its impressive stonework than its turf architecture. Thanks to the writings of Pliny and other Roman writers, we are most likely to associate turf with the construction of military infrastructure. These are also often the structures that are easiest to see, such as the huge defensive boundaries of the Antonine Wall (Scotland). The Antonine Wall was one the largest military construction projects in the Roman Empire, and unlike Hadrian’s Wall, is constructed with a turf, or at least earthen, superstructure for its entire length. Turf was also used to make less monumental or long-lasting ramparts to defend forts and camps. Less is known about the use of turf in civilian projects, but again it is often found in structures that remain upstanding and visible, such as amphitheatres and the defensive circuits of towns.
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Roman turf constructions often made use of other materials to give stability. Sometimes, as along the Antonine Wall, stones were packed into platforms to act as bases onto which the turves were stacked. These gave stability to the structure, and helped with drainage, allowing the core of the buildings to dry and probably preventing rising damp. In fort ramparts, timber was often used to create a corduroy raft at the base of the turf. These were made from split branches and trunks, and may have helped mark out the course of the rampart as well as giving a stable and level surface on which to lay the turf. Wood was also incorporated as a ‘lacing course’ between the turf layers. Although we don’t know the exact reason why the Roman builders added these courses, it’s thought that they give tensile strength to the structure and help regularise the rampart. The language of fabric – corduroy, lacing - associated with these Roman turf structures gives light to their rather malleable yet strong character. They give a sense of turf as something woven together, knitted into the landscape, and a notion that architecture becomes something worn – something human and close.
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In its quiet echoing of the local landscape, turf has been somewhat illusive in Roman archaeology. It requires new ways of looking, an understanding of what to look for. That way, its stories can be seen stitched into the landscapes of Roman Britain once more.
Jump to: What is Turf? / Building with Turf / Revealing Roman Turf / New Insights at Roman Sites / Turf since Antiquity / The Art of Turf
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Revealing Roman Turf
To stitch stories of turf back into the landscapes of Roman Britain, the Earthen Empire team set out to better see and understand it in the archaeological record at a range of sites around the UK, as well as some on the continent. We developed a range of techniques to better understand how, why and where turf was used, what we can tell about the builders and the techniques for handling this material that they acquired and transferred. But we also discovered ways that turf could be used to understand the local environment and broader complex social and cultural changes through the Roman period. Interested in what ancient turf can tell us about its use in the past and in contemporary architecture, we also carried out a series of engineering tests to investigate its load-bearing properties and what happens when turf walls fail.
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Research techniques
The team have used a variety of techniques and approaches to find ways of seeing turf at archaeological sites, and to understand the complex human and environmental narratives woven into it.
Excavation
Excavation is a process of seeing patterns and forms, colours and change within the earth, to make sense of the past. Some materials are easily visible. But as something that is essentially made up of the local soil, at many sites turf can be extremely difficult to see or feel whilst digging. Turf is something that is easily missed, and at many sites archaeologists are not expecting to find it. This is especially problematic in areas that have no recent tradition of building in turf, such as southern England, France or Spain, but where we see use of turf in the Roman period. It may therefore be missed during excavations.
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If we think of its component parts – vegetation and roots, topsoil and subsoil – these will each look slightly different, so the vestiges of each turf block will be an assemblage of layers. At sites with good preservation, these often appear as: a dark brown or black layer where the vegetation has rotted; a brownish layer for the rooty topsoil; and finally a slightly different hue for the subsoil. In some cases the subsoil might be clayey or sandy, creating a light band. Where these layers—these clusters of stripes—are visible in section (seen where the excavation has cut a vertical face through the earth), archaeologists can identify how the turves have been laid: grass-side up, as in the ground or the vegetation facing down; in neat horizontal layers or set on an angle (as is common in Iceland). On some sites, where turf walls have been excavated in plan, the exact arrangement of blocks—as serried parallel lines or diagonally—can be seen from above. They can also tell if the turf structure has been created as a pair of walls with a filling or as solid turf. A section through a turf structure like a rampart or bank is a very beautiful thing. The patina and colour palette of the whole assemblage of construction reflects individual people and processes in the past; the sags and slumps of years of exposure and erosion, the skills and choices learnt on the march.
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At sites with anaerobic or waterlogged conditions, like Vindolanda (Northumberland), the organic content of the turf remains more intact. Here, stripy turf blocks stand out in section and their outlines show in plan particularly well during the excavation. As the archaeologists trowel down to the turf, they will feel the change in texture in the soil, and begin to see different areas of colour emerging. These might be the dark tops or lighter, yellower bottoms, depending which way up the blocks have been laid. Sometimes, the edges of the blocks are distinct in plan, allowing archaeologists to record the exact shape, size and position of each block. This gives astounding insight into the processes of turf cutting and building nearly two thousand years ago.
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Those other materials incorporated into Roman turf structures—stone foundations, wooden rafts or posts—emerge during excavation. At Vindolanda, wood and organic materials survive so well because they are sealed with no oxygen, waterlogged; scraps of leather among the wood have even been found in the rafts and lacing courses that run beneath and between the turves here. The archaeological record is beginning to reveal the huge variety in combinations of building materials for different purposes, feeding our imaginations for the possibilities of what might yet be discovered.
Turf that is preserved and visible in this way provides a valuable example for archaeologists to learn from. It’s important to realise the potential for finding this material on Roman sites. Without looking for it, it would be very easily missed, reinforcing the presumption that it wasn’t used much as a building material.
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Environmental sampling and microscopic analysis
The soil within turf blocks is made up of a complex mixture of minerals and matter. When analysed, these can reveal the environmental history of the earth: the geology, local species of plants, patterns of erosion, deposition and change, and human impacts like burning or agriculture. Some traces can be seen during excavation, but a whole world of detail is held at a more microscopic scale.
During the excavation of turf structures, samples can be taken to look at in more detail. Rectangular tins, their front or back removed, are eased into a vertical section, cut out, fronts and back lids added, and wrapped, holding in them a chunk of the in-situ soil. These samples are taken in areas where they might tell archaeologists most about the composition of the turf, methods of construction and other materials used in the structure. For this reason, a sample will often spans different layers, and tins will be taken from different parts of the structure.
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Back at the lab, these tins and their contents are set in resin, and thin slices of the rectangular sample sawn out and set between glass plates to create thin sections. The soil is dissected so thinly that light can pass through, allowing archaeologists to look at the fine details of the soil composition and structure, a mode of analysis called micromorphology.
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These microscopic views open up new perspectives of the past landscape held within the turf. They can reveal where the turf was likely sourced from, and whether that land was grazed, or if it had been cut before. In this way, turf allows us to see at many scales: the microscopic opening out a subtle understanding of the wider landscape.
Micromorphology can also tell us about the subtle local ecologies, and how these shifted over time under natural and human pressures. In these histories of grasses we are given a glimpse of ephemeral, fleeting and seasonal histories of ecology. This is the magic of turf – for all its temporariness, it has this capacity to tell deep-rooted stories of the earth.
The relationships between the different layers within the soil and organic structures also show how the turf was used to build, and how different materials (such as the wooden lacing courses) worked together within the structure. The details in preserved wood are so fine, that archaeologists can read the tree rings from them – an astonishing view that takes us across scales of landscape and time.
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Engineering
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There has been very little work by engineers on turf in load-bearing construction. The engineers on the project approached turf as they would earth, applying tests that are usually used on soil to see if turf follows the same rules. These tests included triaxial tests to test the sheer strength and friction of the turf. These revealed that turf reconstitutes. It recovers and moves back into shape. We are testing how differences in water content effect this behaviour, and how cycles of wet and dry might affect the long-term structural integrity.
We tested three walls, 1.5m long x 0.5m wide x 1m high, and applied different loads to them. First they had weights added to their tops, simulating the load of a roof, and were left outside under cover the best part of a year. Moisture sensors embed in the turf told us how they dried out and responded to weather conditions. Photogrammetry was used to model and record how the walls consolidated over a long period of time; how it changed, moved and recovered. At the start, the turf walls consolidated very fast, with the height lowering but very little bulging, and this occurred less over time. After month 4, there was very little consolidation showing that the walls were settling, and had found a new equilibrium. The 3D models generated from the photogrammetric recording record how the height and width of the structure altered over time according to the loads, allowing the engineers to analyse the models more in the future as they gather more data.
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After their months outside, each wall was then lifted inside and compressed until they failed. This revealed new results: even under extreme loads the walls compressed, bulged and buckled; but they did not collapsed or crumble. The roots held them together.
What these experiments have revealed is that turf structures evolve over time, with an elastic ability to recover up until a critical point. These experiments have revealed how much more there is to know about turf, and how many more questions we can be asking of it.
Jump to: What is Turf? / Building with Turf / Revealing Roman Turf / New Insights at Roman Sites / Turf since Antiquity / The Art of Turf
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New Insights at Roman Sites
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Vindolanda
The Earthen Empire team worked closely with Andrew Birley and the Vindolanda Trust to examine the well-preserved turf ramparts at the site. Located in the north of England just south of Hadrian’s Wall, Vindolanda developed from AD 85 as a fort—or series of forts, one on top of the other—and later an associated settlement, which continued through the Roman period and beyond. The high water table and anaerobic conditions, have led to astonishing preservation of organic remains at lower levels of the site.
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A series of turf ramparts were constructed at Vindolanda. These date to between around AD 85-90 (Period I) to AD 140s-160s (Period VI), after which stone took over. Thanks to the detailed documentary evidence found in the Vindolanda Writing Tablets, we know these spanned the construction and occupation of the forts by at least three different cohorts of the Roman army. This evidence builds to give astonishing insight into the skills of cutting and building the turf ramparts, and how this tacit knowledge was transferred between people and through time.
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The ramparts were each built in slightly different ways. Mostly, timber rafts made of alder, silver birch and oak logs that were split lengthways and arranged at right angles to mark the line of the rampart. In some stretches of the structure, branches were used to lay perpendicular to the turf at the edge of the raft, creating a marked edge. The men from the cohors VIIII Batavorum who built the Period III rampart at the beginning of the second century AD, however, did not feel the need to use a raft, constructing the turf up directly from the ground.
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Where the timber rafts have been discovered, they are fantastically preserved. Excavating onto them, the team felt the hard stretches of silver birch bark butterflied over the split timbers. On their white surfaces, their trowels picked out knots from branches, ripples, tucks and scars in the bark that would have been visible to those cutting it down all that time ago. The great logs, lying together in neat order, were sculptural against the dark soil. It’s so rare to find wood in such good condition, that something so practical, so normal, takes on new wonder as it emerges from the earth.
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The remarkable conditions at Vindolanda have also preserved the turf itself. Excavating down into the turf ramparts, the team began to feel the fine changes between the stacked layers of turf. They could see the differences in colour and texture between the vegetation, topsoil and subsoil, firstly in the vertical section, but then emerging in plan across the trench. It seems unbelievable that these turves, cut from the earth just next to the fort, could be seen with such clarity nearly 2000 years after they were laid there. Patches of pale grey, dark grey-brown and more yellow-brown showed the shape and size of the individual blocks, and even the lumps of cut edging and handfuls of soil that were stuffed into the gaps. In the vertical section, the edge of the rampart could be clearly seen, beyond which a layer of yellowing moss and dead grass stretched away: the ground surface that the rampart had first been built upon still there, the vegetation still in recognisable form.
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Within some sections of the turf, strips of tent leather and branches sometimes formed lacing. The vertical sections cut through the ramparts show the circular ends of wood, punctuating the horizontal layers of turf. It’s hard to know the exact reasons why these other materials were layered into the structure (perhaps it was a convenient spot to dispose of them), but it shows the diversity of approaches that the different groups of soldiers took to the same task. In these small actions and approaches to detail, we can see the decisions of individuals; particular skills and techniques that would have been learned and passed on over time and across the Empire. The soldiers at Vindolanda would be well used to constructing turf structures. The army tended to build temporary camps from earth capped with turf as they travelled, so it’s likely the actions and techniques would have been ingrained; a muscle memory of turf.
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It has long been thought that turf was a temporary, second-grade material, and that at Vindolanda the fort circuits evolved towards stone from the more ‘primitive’ turf. But the excavations of the turf ramparts at Vindolanda have revealed the huge levels of skill and design in these structures. It has become clear that turf was a valued building material; one which the army relied upon and was familiar with. The grasslands around Vindolanda provided a perfect resource for the rampart constructions, and turf was cut from them across an extended time period. Turf could be cut from close to the fort, it was easy to transport and handle, and the structures could be easily maintained and repaired. It seems likely, therefore, that the military builders turned to stone only when the turf had become so over cut from the land around the fort that it no longer had the structural integrity required. Micromorphology shows that some of the later turf was from soils that were eroded and over-grazed, reflecting the increasing pressures the fort put upon the landscape around it. It also shows that by Period III, the turf was being double-cut, using areas that had already been exploited and not had a chance to fully recover. As the quality of the turf decreased, they turned to stone. The stone quarries are located on the hill up above Vindolanda, and it would have been significantly more work quarrying and transporting it, as well as the associated requirements for mortar and the skills of stone masonry. The excavations of the turf ramparts are revealing more nuanced understandings of turf architecture, the people who created it, and its impact on the landscape.
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The Antonine Wall
Moving north to the later frontier, the Antonine Wall runs between the Clyde and the Forth, across the ‘Central Belt’, in Scotland. It was constructed around AD 142, but unlike Hadrian’s Wall, it was only occupied for around 20 years. It therefore provides a smaller timeframe within which to look at the architecture. Its timeframe may be small, but the structure itself is one of the biggest and best-preserved earthen structures to survive in the Roman world. As one of the latest Roman turf constructions, its details reveal that its construction was the culmination of skills and experiences acquired over decades. This is the highpoint of turf building. It is easy to overlook this, the wall disguised in the landscape with its roll-top form and grassy covering.
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It would be easy to think of the Antonine Wall as a homogenous structure. However, archaeologists have previously identified a difference in building technique of the superstructure between the east and west sections. It was thought that in the east the wall was built with an earth core faced with turf or earth ‘cheeks’ or facings, whilst the west was made with layers of turf throughout. New work now suggests turf might have been favoured more widely.
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The Antonine Wall does not have the same waterlogged conditions as Vindolanda, but much can still be seen during excavations. By looking at micro and macro levels through excavation and geoarchaeology, the Earthen Empire project have identified further details in this subtle structure: the visibility of construction techniques and of the broader environment, as well as localised adaptations to climate and the lie of the land. The team carried out an excavation in the Laurieston area of Falkirk, at the eastern end of the Antonine Wall. It revealed that the earth core and turf cheek structure that was noted along this eastern section of the wall, was somewhat more complex than originally thought. Looking specifically for turf, we found that it had been used to construct the core of the structure. But rather than each layer being laid in parallel lines, here it was placed diagonally to the line of the rampart, and perpendicular to the layer above and below. This created a lattice pattern, a kind of woven form. Turf cheeks were built up at the same time, to give the whole thing even faces, and to protect the core from erosion or slumping.
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Micromorphology allows us to look more closely at the Laurieston turf itself. The soil sediments reveal more about the wider landscape during the construction of the Antonine Wall. They reveal that the turf used for the cheeks of the structure—the visible parts of the whole—were cut from an area of clay and sand, most likely a water meadow in a flood plain. In contrast, the core was constructed from an area of glacial till, with a much higher silt content. It’s not known why the sources of the two sets of turf are so different, but the two are keyed together in the construction of the wall, to stop the cheek from detaching from the main structure. This shows that the structure was built up layer by layer, rather than the core first and then the cheek. The builders must have collected the turf from both sources and had them ready to stack. The use of a different kind of turf for the cheek was therefore a conscious decision and must have made a difference, or been thought to have made a difference, to the integrity of the structure – a technique learned and applied.
Jump to: What is Turf? / Building with Turf / Revealing Roman Turf / New Insights at Roman Sites / Turf since Antiquity / The Art of Turf
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Turf since Antiquity
Although the Earthen Empire team have been focusing on turf use in Roman contexts, the material has a long history as a building material. It is ubiquitous in the North Atlantic zone, notably in field walls and farmsteads. Few structures survive as well as the Roman ramparts, but excavated examples of turf-built houses are known from Scotland to Scandinavia and the northern Netherlands, dating from the Neolithic to the Medieval periods. In Scandinavia, the Vikings built large burial mounds in turf that arguably rival the Roman remains in their monumentality.
If well-maintained, turf produces solid buildings that can provide good insulation against the cold North Atlantic winds. For this reason European settlers on the plains of North America also made use of this material that was so familiar to them from their homelands. Their turf-built houses, or ‘soddies’, would have been a common sight in the 19th century. In Iceland, turf houses were still lived in until the 1960s, and many are now preserved as part of museums. ’The Turf House Tradition’ is on Iceland’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage recognition.
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Turf is much less often used in contemporary architecture. Projects in Scotland and Iceland have experimented with integrating turf elements into their designs, as roofing elements or feature walls. One of our project members has now teamed up with professional turf builders and local communities to translate ancient turf building concepts into modern structures. Other practitioners with an intimate knowledge of turf’s use in the past are also continually exploring the ways in which this unique material can be deployed today, in both new construction and heritage projects.
For further information:
http://ebuki.co/
https://www.facebook.com/archaeobuild/
https://www.rebearth.co.uk
https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/our-glencoe-turf-house-is-taking-shape
Jump to: What is Turf? / Building with Turf / Revealing Roman Turf / New Insights at Roman Sites / Turf since Antiquity / The Art of Turf
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The Art of Turf
Rose Ferraby
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As someone who spends a lot of time in archaeological trenches, the world of turf in archaeology has been a surprise and a wonder. I could never have imagined the beauty of its material form, the clarity of its narratives.
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My first encounter was during the excavation of the turf ramparts at Vindolanda. When the rest of the team said we would be able to see the turves in plan, I couldn’t quite believe it. How would we see earth in earth, local soil that had only shifted a short distance? Yet as we dug, there it was. First of all it emerged from a section, the dark stripes of vegetation clear as day. Peering at this side view into the Roman rampart, getting my eye in, I realised we could see the individual blocks, the edge of the rampart where the turf met air. And not only was this astounding archaeologically, it was also very beautiful indeed. The colour palette a delicate shift of earthy hues ranging from blues to browns and yellows to pinks then black.
With this section established, we began to take down the wider area in plan. First of all the stone from a later phase was lifted: a Roman oven dissected into its component parts and piled up beyond the trench. Then down we dug. I was digging along the side of the rampart, on the area that would have been just inside the fort. The first sense of a change was the feel of the soil. The fine, dark brown silty soil, began to take on a particular roughness. Small pieces of vegetation appeared on my trowel, sun-starved but intact. It was a surface of thick moss and grass: the original ground surface still there after all those years. Over the rampart, the rest of the team had come onto something too. Clayey coloured patches. They cleaned it back with their trowels and we stood back to look.
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My first thought was that no painting could ever be as beautiful as the square of earth in front of us. The colours were distinct, but they all worked together in an earthy palette. The sediment brought a subtlety to their edges. As I looked, I was already thinking of what medium I could use to capture the delicacy of this unique archaeology. How do these apparently abstract patterns in the earth tell us stories about the people who made them; about the wider landscape and processes of environmental change that they’re formed from?
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In the weeks after the dig, I kept thinking about the colours, textures and forms, the feel of the changing layers in the trench at Vindolanda. I imagined the feel of the earth beneath my trowel, and tried to transfer that to the feel of a paintbrush applying paint, or scissors cutting paper. I decided that oil paints somehow reflected the qualities of the earth and the turf. Oil enables the slow build of subtle colours onto and into one another, to haze boundaries or make more potent contrasts. And there’s something poignant about its pigments, which, drawn from the earth are being used to visually describe the soil and sub-surface once more.
I began those views down onto the turf and timber in plan. I prepared a canvas with a layer of blue acrylic paint, as a base onto which to lay the subtle brown hues. I sketched out the edges of the area, then the forms of the turves. As they appeared, oily marks in silhouette, they took on a new kind of abstraction, a new energy and sense of time somehow. I started light with the whites and pale yellows, which formed floating forms in the blue, like icebergs breaking loose on the floe. With the greys and ochres the painting felt more grounded. Slowly it built, deepening and settling. I loved the way the oils allowed subtle merging of colours; small glimpses of something else. The end result feels somehow ghostly, in transition. And that feels right for these lumps of earth, set there by people long gone.
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The next painting tackled the timbers, the feel of the birch bark rippling firmly over the heft of wood after all those centuries in the ground. I was entranced by their sculptural form, and the way they still echoed a sense of a woodland thicket as they lay recumbent in the ground. I wanted the painting to hold that feeling. The dark earth around the pale wood and clay gave it a strange abstraction, and they suddenly felt like a landscape once more. I wanted to play with that, and the sense of scale and time.
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I then turned my attention to the section views of the turf ramparts, both the small area I excavated with the team and the huge one they had dug a couple of years before. The canvases were prepared with blue acrylic once more. I sketched out the layers and forms from photographs we’d taken on site with an oil pastel, the orange brown already pinging off the blue to give a sense of balance and line. As I began to occupy the layers with paint, the colours began to settle, much like the sediments they echoed. When you’re painting, you find yourself in a very intense concentration, whereby you’re not consciously making decisions. Your eye is always looking for a particular aesthetic balance; one that’s grown over years of looking and making. As the painting of our small section 'Vindolanda Turf Landscape III' (see opposite) developed, its layers and arrangement took on the look of an abstracted landscape at a macro scale; like a view across, or down in some kind of aerial shot. To me this felt natural for the turf, since it is full of landscape histories and views: when we look closely, we see widely.
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I found a good long canvas for the second section painting of the large rampart excavation 'Vindolanda Turf Landscape IV'. I wanted something that captured the sheer scale of the view, and of the archaeology; the stripy narrative lilting through the earth. The circular forms of the timber lacing were like percussive marks tapping a beat through the image. The painting began in the same way: blue base, oil pastel scrittled layers finding their own paths. I was fascinated in the images of this section by the dark lines of decomposed vegetation on the turf, and the way they contrasted with the yellows and buff ochres. The way they settled to blacks that were dark blue, the colour shifting here and there under my gaze. This relationship of blue and brown continued to fascinate me. And bringing in subtle blues suddenly opened the section out once more as a landscape of many simultaneous forms. It is geological, almost coastal. A sense of sky and movement, of change and dynamism that for me is what landscape is: a hurry of people and earth.
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These paintings opened up turf in a different way for me. The archaeological knowledge, the tacit feeling of the dig, and the action of painting all combined into a more fluid way of reimagining the past, and bringing that sense of wonder to the present.
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Acknowledgements
This online exhibition was produced as part of the Earthen Empire: Earth and Turf Building in the Roman North-West project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2018-223). This project was a collaboration between the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh.
Project team: Ben Russell, Chris Beckett, Tanja Romankiewicz, J. Riley Snyder, Rose Ferraby, and Benedicta Yi Xin Lin
Exhibition text: Rose Ferraby and Ben Russell
Exhibition photographs: © Rose Ferraby, Ben Russell, Tanja Romankiewicz, J. Riley Snyder, and Daniel Postma. For permission to reproduce any images please contact Ben Russell (ben.russell@ed.ac.uk).
Artwork: © Rose Ferraby. For use of any images please contact Rose Ferraby (rf255@cam.ac.uk).
Collaborators: We are very grateful to the collaborators who have worked with us on the Earthen Empire project - Daniel Postma of ArchaeoBuild; Andrew Birley of The Vindolanda Trust; Tom Gardner of Historic Environment Scotland; Geoff Bailey of the Falkirk Community Trust.