Archaeology and a new visitor centre
I saw Fountains Abbey in the flesh for the first time in 1988, just before my interview for the post of project archaeologist for the National Trust team charged with building a new visitor centre for the site. I didn't hold out much hope of getting the job and indeed it went to someone else. But then he got a better offer, and the job bounced my way. I can’t thank you enough, Vince. In September 1988, I started what has proved to be one of the longest three-year fixed term contracts in history.
At first, the work was all about the Fountains Abbey visitor centre. The Trust took over the management of the Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal estate from North Yorkshire County Council in 1983. Soon it realised that the eclectic smatter of visitor facilities on the site, many unchanged since the 1920s, simply couldn’t serve the numbers, or expectations, of the visiting public of the 1980s.
The solution agreed upon was the construction of a purpose-built visitor centre, designed by architect Ted Cullinan. It would be set on an elevated site in the arc formed by the River Skell between Fountains and Studley, serving both equally important ends of the property but intruding on neither. The land in the middle, Swanley Grange Farm, itself once part of the great agricultural estate of the abbey, was duly purchased and a project team formed.
As things turned out, archaeology soon proved central to the selection of the centre’s site, finding solutions to a number of challenges encountered. With a site chosen, focus shifted on to archaeological site investigations. These included, what was then one of the biggest geophysical surveys ever completed, 30 hectares of resistivity survey (looking for buried archaeology using an electrical current without disturbing the ground).
We even trialled one of the very first electronic data loggers – a Psion Organiser – having laboriously written down each of the thousands of readings on gridded paper up, which then had to be typed into the computer, until then. After the geophysics came fieldwalking (picking up and recording objects from the ploughed surface of the fields) documentary research and evaluation trenches. When the actual construction work started it needed very little extra fieldwork, as we’d managed to design things to leave the most interesting archaeology untouched in the ground – so future generations of archaeologists can use their more advanced technologies to investigate it.