Archaeology firm that's piecing together the past

Greenlane Archaeology, in Ulverston, is called in to assess areas and buildings tipped for everything from housing estates to barn conversions as part of planning rules.

Director Dan Elsworth and his team of three are just a few of the thousands of archaeologists working in the sector across the UK.

Since the 1990s planning rules have required developers to carry out an archaeological assessment, similar to the ecological assessment conducted to confirm the presence of species such as newts or bats.

Originally from Ulverston, Dan always had an interest in the history of the area and went to study archaeology at Edinburgh University before returning to work for an archaeological company in Lancaster. He started Greenlane Archaeology in 2005, which can be involved in up to 10 projects at any one time across the North West.

Dan and his team work on a wide range of developments from new housing estates, landscaping projects or assessing heritage buildings which are set to be converted.

The investigations will often be a desk-based exercise at first, analysing maps and records, and can progress into digging exploratory trenches or carrying out geophysical surveys.

"Normally we try and get in before anybody else gets on site," says Dan.

"I think people assume we're diving under JCB buckets, but the whole point is that it is supposed to be built into the planning process now. We'll get in and out of the way early on, ideally. People have this idea that builders find something and then we turn up, but in reality it has usually been found months in advance of them getting onsite.”

Although the majority of sites do not uncover anything of archaeological significance, the team has come across finds from many different epochs, taking in the Bronze Age and medieval periods, right up to the more recent history of World War Two.

Dan Elsworth from Greenlane Archaeology (Image: Greenlane Archaeology)

In 2015 Dan found a series of Bronze Age cremation urns in pits at Jack Hill, in Allithwaite, near Grange, on the site of a housing development.

"We dug what we call evaluation trenches, just to see if there was anything there, because we knew there had been some cremations found in the area," he says.
Dated to between 1700 and 2100 BC the cremation cemetery was found less than one kilometre from a similar site discovered in 2001.

In such cases Dan and his team carry out the excavation and then write up and publish a report to contribute to the archaeological understanding of the area.

"Obviously there's something significant going on in that area because that's at least the second set of cremations that have been found there,” says Dan.

“It suggests there was some settlement there nearby. More and more of these things are turning up because more of this work's been done. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it works better than it used to. You read some of the horror stories of what used to happen in the '60s and '70s, where they were just flattening parts of entire Roman forts because there were no planning rules.”

(Image: Greenlane Archaeology)

In fact, Dan says, the amount of finds being made due to archaeological planning assessments is actually creating a problem for museums, which are running out of capacity to store them all.

"If we don't go and see what’s there it's going to be destroyed,” he says.

“People assume we know everything, but we don't. There are huge gaps in the knowledge of what's happening.

“And once it's gone, it's gone. You can't reconstruct it. Every little site adds a bit more to our understanding of what's happened in the past.”