Every little bit helps.I am proud to be the Executive Director of Creswell Heritage Trust. I hope you will enjoy my blog and perhaps even contribute to it. The tour guide was very informative.
These characters crop up particularly in caves or in what look like primeval landscapes, which people considered as being naturally and spiritually dangerous, or liminal, between worlds.An academic called Alison Fearn from the University of Leicester is also looking at the possibility of either a Christian pilgrimage route or another parallel pilgrimage tradition of visiting the Crags for the purpose of leaving your mark. Witch Marks at Creswell Crags The hidden cavern is covered with scratches and marks, but the technology captures them accurately. I have worked in the sector since 1998 and have a proven success record in heritage management and project development. Creswell Crags are protected as a scheduled monument and Historic England advises on its future management.Communications Manager at Creswell CragsHi I’m Angharad, Collections Officer at Creswell Crags.
To find this huge number of protection marks from the more recent past adds a whole new layer of discovery. I’m Jen, the Learning and Engagement Officer at the Crags. In 2017 I completed the Arts Council funded Museum Resilient Leadership Programme. During my PhD, I travelled to many museums, and became interested in the potential of working in museum collections, particularly those focussed upon palaeontology and archaeology.The number and variety of witch mark designs is unprecedented. The Creswell Heritage Trust which operates the site has for years thought the marks were graffiti made in the Victorian period, but Clark and Waters immediately suspected them to be apotropaic marks. Witch Marks Groundbreaking discovery of 2019! Square Merrels Board - Based on a board game known from ancient times, but here it was used to ward off evil. So I went back to base and declared that we’d found these witch marks in Robin Hood Cave and that it might be a nice story for Halloween.I know this looks like I’ve thrown the kitchen sink at your enquiry but it really is a case of rummaging through the kitchen drawers to find the specific utensil that takes your fancy. My achievements have been as a consequence of the hard work and creativity shown by the teams I have led, and this has been recognised with a variety of accolades including the prestigious European Heritage in Motion Award in 2015.Creswell Crags were recently presented with a Judges Special Award for their tours of the accessible areas containing ‘Witch Marks’ at the East Midlands Heritage Awards. 'A visitor came on a trip here and on the way out said we had some interesting witch marks. I was particularly fascinated by mammals from the Pleistocene (the period from 2.6 million to 11.7 thousand years ago), and completed a dissertation on mammals found inside and outside of Church Hole at Creswell Crags. But in Robin Hood Cave the extent and clarity of them is absolutely stunning by the standard of caves elsewhere.What we need to bear in mind about that chamber is that it’s been thoroughly excavated all the way down the hole and into the tunnel leading off from it.
As Heritage facilitator John Charlesworth, the acting tour leader when the discovery was made a year ago, stated : “These witches’ marks were in … This is believed to be the largest collection ever found in the UK. Now it does so again with a fresh one of medieval and early modern ritual protection marks on a huge scale, making a very important contribution, at a stroke, to one of the most significant current areas of new scholarly research.”“Creswell Crags is already of international importance for its Ice Age art and ancient remains. I then went on to a PhD, researching hyaenas that lived in Europe during the Pleistocene. They’d seen it in the news coverage the day before. What you have to bear in mind is a lot of the interpretation of these marks is retrospective and whilst scholarship is building and offering more insights into their possible meanings, we’re trying to span hundreds of years of knowledge here, attempting to get back into their original meanings.Witch marks is a relatively new and recent area of study and academics have only just begun looking at it seriously in the past 15 or 20 years. Visitors will be able to explore every corner of the cave and examine every mark, as never before. The caves were excavated by archaeologists during the19th century and in the process, widened. Everyone really enjoyed it and the cave was full of hundreds of witch marks. You also now can’t get across to the other side of the chamber, so clearly there was a floor there allowing people to get in to make their mark.There’s another theory about witch marks in caves, which comes from Professor Ronald Hutton at Bristol University. Even two hundred years ago the English countryside was a very different place, death and disease were everyday companions and evil forces could readily be imagined in the dark. We began in Robin Hood Cave following the wall around from left to right, which led us to a tunnel.