Cotswold Archaeology’s Buzz Busby recently returned to Whitby Abbey during March 2014 as part of an English Heritage team directed by Tony Wilmott. The three week excavation was the crowning glory of over 20 years of excavation by Buzz and Tony at the Abbey.
The uncovering of a chapel with substantial stone foundations within the lay cemetery excavated 14 years ago was exciting. But the work on the ditch originally thought to enclose the cemetery proved to be one of those eureka moments in archaeology so typical of the last hours of an excavation. As the section across the ditch was cut, it became more and more obvious that it was far too large simply to enclose the cemetery. At the same time it also became obvious that the ditch turned east toward the cliff, not west as expected.
As Buzz tells us:
‘It was fantastic, standing on the wind swept headland with Tony, as the JCB back filled the trenches and to realise, just like a child joining up the dots in a drawing book, that a number of ditches we’d seen in trial trenches over the last 20 years linked together to form a ditch that ran between town and cliff, kinking around the cemetery and partly overlain by the 13th century monastic boundary. It had to be a ditch defining the southern boundary of the promontory settlement which contained St Hilda’s monastery. For the first time in a 1000 years we were able to picture the layout of this iconic Christian site’.
Between 1997 and 2002, Buzz directed the HLF funded excavations associated with the development of the visitor centre at the Abbey, including the uncovering and display of the 17th century hard garden in front of the visitor centre, the preservation of the iconic view of the Abbey ruins reflected in Abbey Pond and the English Heritage funded excavation of the Saxon remains on the very edge of the crumbling cliff in 2001.
