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Kenfig is situated between the town of Porthcawl in the south and the industrial area of Port Talbot in the north, in the old county of Glamorgan. It is bordered on the east by the M4 motorway and on the west by the Bristol Channel. It comprises an extensive area of quite stable sand-dunes, the bulk of which is scheduled as a National Nature Reserve.
2 - Brief History
A castle was built by the Normans, in the C12th and around it grew a small town, which is known from documentary evidence to have thrived during the C12th to the C14th . During this time, being located on the border with the Welsh lordship of Afan, it suffered many attacks and the castle was partially destroyed and rebuilt on a number of occasions. From at least the beginning of the C15th there was encroachment of sand and by the latter part of the century, the town and castle were abandoned. A great deal has been written about the area. Ref. 1 gives a good introduction and contains a large number of references to other documents. Since then, there has been virtually no disturbance to the landscape, with remains of the town buried beneath sand dunes at depths varying between a few centimetres and 30 metres. The area around the castle is a scheduled area. The castle itself was partly excavated in the 1920's by the Aberafan and Margam District Historical Society (2) and the finds, which included pottery, ridge tiles, leather and various iron artefacts were deposited at the National Museum ( Accession Nos. 37.453 and 49.163) In 1989, the Kenfig Society was formed by a group of local people, to encourage the study of the area. It was apparent that there was considerable interest in excavating the area of the old town. Eventually, the necessary permissions to excavate were obtained. A site was chosen, which was outside the scheduled area but still near the castle and which was free of any large dunes and was not waterlogged. Work commenced early in 1993 and has continued each summer since then.
3 - Summary of Excavation
We are just coming to the end of the 7th year of the Society's excavation near Kenfig castle and it has been a period greatly enjoyed by those taking part. Sometimes it has been exciting and its always been interesting and it has been a time during which we have gained a lot of experience and expertise. We have found thousands of artefacts in the form of pieces of pottery, bones, shells, iron slag and metal objects. Although few of these would be worthy of a place in a museum, there is still the excitement of knowing that these are the remains of articles, which were used or consumed by the medieval inhabitants of Kenfig. Sometimes we have found fleeting glimpses of an even more ancient settlement in the area in the form of two pieces of Samian pottery and a Roman coin dating from about 300 AD
Over the years we have had many visits from professional archaeologists, who have given generously of their time and expertise, to help us interpret those features and artefacts that we have discovered, and in that time it has become clear to us that it is often very difficult to be absolutely certain what a particular feature of the excavation really represents and very often quite different interpretations seem to be equally valid. It is with this point in mind that I attempt a summary, which could be one of many alternatives, of what we have discovered during our excavations.
The first thing that strikes you about the dig is that in most places on the site it is necessary only to remove at the most a foot of sand before finding artefacts that date from about 700 years ago. It is quite a thought that as you walk around those areas near the castle, where there are no high dunes, there are probably medieval artefacts laying only inches below your feet. In the particular area in which we have been digging there is usually a covering of only about 6 to 18 inches of wind-blown sand over most of the area. This sand usually covers a layer of darker material, which is rich in pottery, bones etc. Below this lies the hard stony clay, which forms the subsoil of the area. In some places this dark layer is absent and the sand lies directly on the subsoil, whilst in other parts, there is an additional layer of darker sand between the dark artefact-rich layer and the subsoil.
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The main discovery has been a building about 8m by 5m.
Click Here for View of Building
The base of the walls consists of about 3 courses of masonry lying in what appears to be a slight hollow in the subsoil. There are entrances in the middle of each of the long sides. Above the masonry, the walls are made of clay and in parts they still rise to a height of 3ft. No hearth was found inside the building and so we assume it was not a dwelling. Neither are there any post holes to support the roof. This roof would have been of thatch and would have been far too heavy for the clay walls to support. We therefore think that the roof would have been supported by timber crucks, which would have sprung from the flat stones, which we have found around the base of the building. This building technique is known as clom construction and this must be one of the oldest in existence, because normally the clay in the walls, which in our case was protected by sand, would have been washed away over the years.
In the subsoil over most of the excavated area, a series of ridges have been found all running parallel to each other and remarkably evenly spaced at about 18 inches.
The consensus of opinion is that these represent the remains of furrows made by medieval farmers ploughing the area. At some time these ploughed fields would have been suddenly covered by sand and abandoned. Perhaps later the sand would be blown away, taking some of the topsoil with it. This process may have been repeated several times over the years, until all that was left are these marks in the subsoil. The furrows appear to continue right up to the walls of the building and it is evident that its foundations were dug in this ploughed surface.
The dark layer contains large amounts of small pieces of pottery, shells, bones etc. and it is evident that what we have found is a medieval rubbish dump where people threw their rubbish. This layer is not continuous over the whole site, but is most obvious in the vicinity of the building and indeed the layer abuts right up to outside of three of the walls. It seems unlikely that people would have dumped their rubbish all around the building if it was still being used, so we assume that it had fallen into ruin before the area started to be used as a dump. Scattered over the site we have found large quantities of iron slag, which clearly indicates that they were either smelting or smithing iron on the site.
The dateable artefacts, which we have found, consist mainly of pieces of pottery and arrowheads, which can be dated to the 13th century. A silver long cross penny, which has been dated between 1280 and 1284 was also found, together with two quarter segments of pennies, dating between 1251 and 1272 and 1248 and 1250 respectively. So evidently the site was being used as a rubbish dump by about 1300 - 1320 say. Because the rubbish is right up against the walls of the building, we would assume that the building had been abandoned by that time. So we could assign a date of say 1280 - 1300 at the latest to the building. Now since the building seems to have been built on land that had once been ploughed, we can assume that the cultivation of this land had ceased some time prior to 1280.
If the reason for abandoning the field was the influx of sand then we must assume that this process started about 1275. In places the rubbish layer was dumped onto sand and in others onto the clay subsoil. So it looks as if the advance of the sand was not a steady process but that after an initial burying by sand, resulting in the field being abandoned, the wind may well have blown away some of this sand together with the topsoil, laying bare the clay subsoil upon which people who were still living nearby built the building, perhaps for the purpose of ion making. Further inroads by the sand eventually caused the abandonment and subsequent collapse of the building and the site became a rubbish dump for the people still living in areas as yet free from sand.
So this might be what happened in one small area lying just outside what was probably the extreme south-westerly edge of the old town of Kenfig. How typical it is of the history of the rest of the town we don't know. We have hardly pricked the surface in our 7 years of excavation but it seems it has sometimes brought us close to those people who lived there 700 years ago and given us at least some feel for what it must have been like to have your home and community and whole way of life destroyed by the inexorable power of the elements.
References.
1 'The Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments in Wales - The Early Castles'. Section EM2 pp 314 -326.
2 Richard, Arthur J., Kenfig Castle, Arch. Camb. 1925, pp 161-182.
3 Frances, M. & Lewis, J.M. 1984, ' Pottery from Kenfig Castle', and Later Pottery in Wales 7, 1-8.