Archaeology
When you look up at the stars on a clear night in Sark, it’s easy to reflect that people living here were doing exactly the same thing 3000, and even 6000, years ago. And each Mayday, La Beltane festival takes place in the Seigneurie, drawing on Celtic rituals, to recreate the celebration of summer’s arrival that would have been familiar to Sark’s Iron Age inhabitants.
Until Barry Cunliffe, one of Britain’s most distinguished archaeologists, took a day trip to Sark in 2003, very little was known about the island’s prehistoric past. He realised that it was ideal for archaeological digs: its fertile soil, abundant marine life and high defensive cliffs have always made it an attractive place for hardy settlers. Ever since then (except during COVID), he and his team have visited for a fortnight every year, organised by the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. They have revolutionised our understanding of Sark’s past. This work has relied on the goodwill of locals who have allowed digging on their land. It has been funded by a number of archaeological trusts and most recently by La Société Sercquaise, who have also organised volunteers to provide vital assistance with pot-washing as well as accommodation and logistics.
Neolithic settlements
Carbon-dated evidence on Little Sark has established that the island was inhabited by Neolithic farmers from Normandy and Brittany from about 4800 BC. They brought their animals and corn with them, and built houses using oak and mud bricks – some of which, unusually, were discovered intact. More than 120 Neolithic stone axes have now been found on the island. Some of these were imported from France, but those made of dark dolerite almost certainly came from a local quarry. It was probably at L’Eperquerie or L’Ecluse, but has yet to be definitely identified.
Signs of Neolithic agricultural activity before 4000 BC have also been discovered in the field at Plaisance east of the road to La Coupee and just north of the coastal path. And a large boulder found north of the Methodist chapel may have been the cap of a megalithic monument placed over a site of ritual activity, probably a place of burial. The bones would have disappeared long ago because of the acidic soil.
In Little Sark, a stone-lined burial chamber from about 2000-1800 BC was found very near the Neolithic farm. Placed in the grave was a rectangular archer’s wrist guard, carved from (imported) slate, and usually worn to indicate social status. The guard is now in the Heritage Room of La Société.
The Bronze/Iron Age settlement at Tanquerel
The archaeologists’ richest site on Sark has been Edric Baker’s Tanquerel field north of the Mill (the field beyond the one accessed from the track opposite the Mill itself). They excavated this upland site over nine visits and showed that it supported a major settlement throughout the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. Radiocarbon dating suggests that it was occupied between c.1350 and 800 BC, and the pottery hints that habitation may have continued for one or two hundred years more.
They found evidence of timber buildings and ditched enclosures, and came across bronze axes and fragments of clay pots. It was clear that the community kept sheep and cows, cast copper, and ground wheat and barley. From Sark’s green serpentine stone they made amulets, and weights for nets. Some amber beads from Denmark suggested that they traded with other seafarers. Examples of all these finds are in the Heritage Room – Barry’s motto was ‘Everything found on Sark stays on Sark’. The Room also displays other relics from that period, including a decorated bronze bracelet found by Edric Baker in 2003. The excavated area itself is now permanently closed up, but it’s easy to imagine what was once there.
Roman ritual offerings and the Sark Hoard
The Tanquerel site was known to be promising ground because of the curious episode of the Sark Hoard in 1719. The Hoard was an earthenware pot discovered that year by the farmer William Tanquerel while he was digging the southern field boundary (he had just bought the land from the Seigneur). It contained not only eighteen silver coins but also thirteen strange silver-gilt discs embossed with fantasy beasts, dating from the first century BC.
Most experts have argued that these discs came from Thrace, now in Bulgaria (though a case has recently been made that they are much more local). They seem to have been brought to Sark by voyagers who had to bypass the wars by which the ancient Romans sought to control north-west Europe. This was probably a thank-offering to the gods for safe travels in a war zone. Barry Cunliffe speculates that by the Roman period, Sark was known to passing travellers as a rather forbidding place of high cliffs and mystery, in which the gods were believed to have special powers.
Barry’s excavations at Tanquerel showed that similar gifts continued to be made over four hundred years, throughout the Roman period. The main community of island settlers was by this time living downhill, around the spring that flows from Le Manoir area down to Dixcart Bay. It appears that they treated the upland site at Tanquerel field as a place for ritual offerings.
In 2023, LiDAR survey data revealed that the Tanquerel community benefited from two ponds now buried beneath the medieval soil. The water from this natural fissure still floods the road by the Methodist chapel in winter, and flows down to Port à la Jument unless diverted into the Bakers’ orchard. We might imagine that the settlers moved downhill to the Le Manoir spring once the ponds silted up, and felt that the gods needed to be appeased as a result.
The Roman and medieval community at Le Manoir
There seems to have been a community based around the Manoir site during the Roman and medieval periods, until the population declined in the fourteenth century. Here there was a medieval cemetery and church, the church of St Mary, but we don’t yet know how big the village was. Excavation in 2017 in the grounds of Le Manoir located 17 graves from the cemetery – though almost no surviving bone fragments. Later digs suggest that at least 1200 people could have been buried there, and that it might have been in use for 800 years.
In 2019, remnants of a building were found abutting the cemetery, suggesting that it was a Christian building, probably a chapel, but it is not yet clear when it was built. The Cider Barn, which dates from after the island’s resettlement by Helier de Carteret in 1565, sits in its footprint. Nineteenth-century records suggest that the medieval church was north of the current Visitor Centre, so it may well have been extended from this original chapel.
Port du Moulin
It’s long been assumed that missionaries founded a Christian monastery in the Port du Moulin area in the sixth century AD. Barry Cunliffe thinks that it may originally have been on a rock platform on the Tintageu headland, providing some isolation but also access to fresh water and agricultural land. The monks moved later towards the current La Moinerie area in the hope of better protection from Viking raiders, who preyed on the island in the ninth century. The old theory that their monastery wall survives in the Seigneurie grounds appears implausible, as the wall in question dates from the seventeenth century.
The low wall over which the path runs down to Port du Moulin beach may be the foundation of the monks’ mill. However little evidence of man-made activity has so far been found in the valley. Investigation of a mound north of the path suggests that it may once have been a dolerite quarry.
