Welsh Journals

Excavations at St. Barruc's Chapel, Barry Island, Glamorgan. JEREMY K. KNIGHT, B.A., F.S.A. Welsh Office, Ancient Monuments Branch INTRODUCTION When John Leland visited the coastal village of Barry in Glamorgan about 1540, he saw off its shore Barry Island, separated from the mainland by a strait 'at full se. a flite shot (i.e. a bowshot) over, as much as the Tamise is above the bridge' but at low water only 'the shalow stremelet of Barrey brooke on the sands', with a natural causeway of rock 'a broken causey to go over' at one point. 'There is no dwelling on the isle' he continues 'but there is in the midle of it a fair litle chapel of S. Barrok, wher much pilgrimage was usid'.1 Another traveller, Giraldus Cambrensis, had noted the same chapel in 1188. He described how the remains of St. Barruc, who had formerly lived on the island, were deposited there in a chapel covered in ivy, having been translated to a shrine. In the period after Leland's visit, the chapel fell into decay and was engulfed in sand dunes, but its ruins were rediscovered and excavated by John Storrie, curator of the Cardiff Museum (the predecessor of the National Museum of Wales) in 1895.3 They stand near the eastern end of the island, in the lee of a slight rise which forms its highest point, commanding a wide view over the Bristol Channel out to the islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm and across to the Somerset coast beyond. Following Storrie's excavation, the chapel was left exposed in a small fenced enclosure and the finds were deposited in the basement of Barry Public Library, where they were rediscovered by Lady Fox in 1936. She published them with a fresh account of Storrie's excavations,4 but the remains of the chapel were by this time so overgrown that it was impossible for her to do more than summarise what Storrie had written of it. This state of affairs continued until the present excavation, the ruins being almost totally concealed in a thick growth of trees and scrub, whilst the fenced enclosure was by now surrounded on three sides by the car park of Butlin's holiday camp. In 1967, Barry Borough Council (now the Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council), who owned the site, decided that it should be laid out as a small park. Since the chapel is a scheduled ancient monument, they consulted what is now the Ancient Monuments Branch of the Welsh Office. It is very rare in Wales for a church site known to have contained the bones of an early saint to be available for excavation, since most such church sites are still in use. At St. Barruc's Chapel, Storrie had recorded a structural sequence beginning with a Norman apse and, inside the chapel, a series of superimposed floor levels whose relationship to the structural sequence was not wholly clear from the published report. Though it seemed probable that Storrie's claim to have discovered features on the site going back to early-Christian times was mistaken, there seemed a good chance of recovering an archaeological sequence going back to Norman, or even pre-Norman times. The laying out of the chapel site as a park implied a measure of tidying and levelling which might disturb anything that remained of Storrie's stratigraphy, and it was therefore decided that the chapel should be re-excavated. Barry Island is a popular holiday resort, and since excavation of the chapel was certain to produce human remains, the work was carried out outside the summer holiday season, at Christmas 1967 and Easter 1968. The weather was dry and soil conditions good, with