shewhomust | The Hill of Goats

On Wednesday, after a short wander around the island and a little light shopping, I was mostly back at base: I bought postcards, I wrote (some of) them.

Yesterday, though, we did something new, and visited Ad Gefrin. Rather than try to compose my own one-line explanation, here's the headline from their website: Ad Gefrin is an "Anglo-Saxon Museum and Whisky Distillery in the heart of Northumberland."

Not far from the Northumberland town of Wooler is - if I have got this right - an Iron Age hill fort called Yeavering Bell. It's a wonderful name, and it is derived from the Celtic 'gefrin', hill of goats. This is not what we visted. Between the hill and the river is another archaeological site - well, actually the whole valley is rich in archaeology, but there is one particular site, spotted by aerial photography in 1949 and excavated in the second half of the twentieth century, which has been identified as the summer palace of the kings and queens of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. We didn't visit that, either, but the museum and distillery which we did visit is not far away, and celebrates that palace. And when I say 'celebrates' I mean that it has a magnificent new building, and that it goes overboard on the Anglo-Saxon theme. All the notices are in two languages. My favourite is:

The museum has two components, and the time of our arrival was such that we took a break between them for a distillery tour and then lunch. Part one is the Great Hall, a "re-imagining" of what the great hall of the palace might have been like if one wall of it was a video screen from which various personages told you about their life... The staff were friendly and assiduous and urged us to sit on the thrones, and what can I say? Someone has gone to a lot of trouble here, and if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will like. With a half-hour to wait for our tour, I was starting to sneak through into the museum proper...

The tour was excellent, and we had it all to ourselves. It was only in retrospect that I realised they might have preferred us to join the half-dozen people booked on the afternoon tour: the staff who sold us our ticket seemed, if anything, to be encouraging us to go solo.

Picture in lieu of a blow-by-blow account of the tour. Good information about their water source, from the Cheviot hills, and barley (grown locally, malted in Berwick); much complaining about the price of barrels. We were promised that our tasting would be conducted by "the flamboyant Oscar," but a bow-tie is not enough to establish flamboyance. Fabulousness, yes, by all means. Ad Gefrin is too new to be selling its own whisky, but is marketing a blend which they compose themselves, and a gin (of course) plus a cream liqueur. These were interesting (even the cream liqueur was that, I suppose) and I enjoyed the tasting session immensely, but wasn't tempted to buy a bottle of anything to take home.

After lunch in the - I was going to say café, but I see that they call it the Bistro - we returned to the museum. This is long on information boards, not so long on objects, but some of the information was amazing. As well as the palace, the site contained a structure which is referred to as the Grandstand, and which appears in the reconstructions as an arc of tiered seating, like a segment of amphitheatre. This is unique, apparently. I wanted to know more about it; indeed, I wanted to know how reliable this intepretation is, but D. says it's pretty solid. But no, that's all you get.

This site describes - and gives great pictures of - some of the objects on display, so I'll end with one more photo:

A glass claw beaker, found not here but in County Durham, so evidence of luxury goods of the time and place. Made, apparently, by melting down and reusing Roman glass. Isn't it pretty?

ETA:Our clients, the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne gernerously allowed us to attend their June 2024 meeting at which Sarah Semple and Roger Miket spole about the results of new excavations at Yeavering - the 'pa;ace' complex, not the hill fort - which began in 2021. This did not entirely support the version on display at the museum, which was based on excavations directed in the 1950s by Brian Hope-Taylor (and his subsequent conclusions about the site in the 1970s). The lecturers spole wih great respect of Hope-Taylor, and praised his excavation work in particular. But he had not had the benefit of modern dating techniques; and he had declined to draw in such carbon-14 dating as was already available. As a result, he had treated as contemporaries a building and a much earlier walled enclosure. The extraoedinary 'grandstand' building which so puzzled me was not mentioned; the new excavations don't seem to have touched this part of the site.

tl:dr; The site remains an interesting and omportant one, but was not, in the Anglo-Saxon period, altogether as shown at the museum. Bede, on the other hand, is a more reliable historic source than you might expect.