W. J. Varley

William Jones Varley, FSA (1904–1976) was a British geographer and archaeologist, particularly known for his excavations of English Iron Age hillforts, near Castle Hill, Almondbury, West Yorkshire. He attended the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University) in the mid-1920s, where he was taught by the geographer, H. J. Fleure (1877–1969). In any early paper he acknowledged the influence of a 1917 paper on "valleyward movement" of population by Fleure and W. E. Whitehouse.

Varley lectured in geography at the University of Liverpool in the 1930s, where his notable students included Margaret Jones née Owen (1916–2001). Owen and Tom Jones, later her husband, participated in several of Varley's excavations during the 1930s. An earlier partial investigation of the site had been carried out in 1898–1900, (Excavated by Thomas Kelsall and Shadrach Jackson; reported by William Boyd Dawkins At the time of his excavation, the site was partially reconstructed using concrete posts, and four surviving oak posts were moved to Harris Museum, Preston, which still has a permanent exhibit on the site and the two excavations.)

The Cheshire hillforts In the early 1930s, at the suggestion of C. F. C. Hawkes, Varley turned his attention to the hillforts of Cheshire. and the first to be carried out by an archaeologist on any hillfort in the county. (Garner notes that several urns containing bones were discovered in a sand-pit near Eddisbury hillfort by quarry workers in 1851.) The investigation concentrated on the hillfort's inturned entrance, where post-holes were found, suggested to be gateposts. Trenches were also cut through the double ramparts. The inner ramparts were found to consist of sand and carbonised oak timbers protected by a stone cap and revetments (retaining walls), which Varley compared with the murus gallicus method of construction, typical of Gaul. An outer revetment protected the outer ramparts, which had an internal line of turf, suggesting the possibility of multiple phases of construction. Varley described Maiden Castle as a promontory camp; he initially concluded that it dated from around 0–50 AD and had subsequently been strengthened in around 50 AD when Roman expansion began to threaten the area. By 1940, he had revised these dates substantially earlier, concluding that the hillfort was built in the 2nd century BC and had been strengthened in the 1st century BC; modern radiocarbon dating moves the dates earlier still. A contemporary review of his 1937 paper on the excavation describes it as "a valuable review of the problems of the life of Britain in the few centuries before the Roman conquest." Modern archaeologists Richard Mason and Rachel Pope describe his reports on Maiden Castle as showing "fairly meticulous archaeological reasoning". and he continued to employ volunteers under the scheme – mainly unemployed Liverpool dock workers – in his excavation of the much larger and more complex Eddisbury hillfort, on Eddisbury Hill near Delamere, which was carried out during the summers of 1936, 1937 and 1938. His interpretation of the excavation's results involved a complex construction history in several phases from c. 400–250 BC to the Anglo-Saxon period, with subsequent occupation extending into the post-medieval period. Some of his finds at Eddisbury, together with a model of his excavations, were displayed in the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities of the British Museum in 1937, but the Second World War and Varley's move to Ghana delayed publication of the results; the full report did not appear until 1950 and has significant problems, including lacking illustrations of his finds. Mason and Pope speculate that many of Varley's site records might have been lost during the war and that the 1950 paper might have been based partly on memory. All of the finds from his excavations of Maiden Castle and Eddisbury were long believed lost. This work included trenches cutting through the fort's ramparts, as well as studies of its entrances and the interior. which also holds many of his records from the Castle Hill site.

He also excavated Old Oswestry hillfort, Shropshire, in 1939 and 1940 with Bryan H. St J. O'Neil, who also independently excavated three other hillforts in the Welsh Marches during the 1930s. Varley never finished the excavation and his full report failed to appear in his lifetime, being published by Gwilym Hughes in 1996, twenty years after his death. Their methods were transitional between 19th-century archaeology and more-modern techniques; they began using a "wall-chasing" approach that resembles the "chase-and-clear" methods of the late 19th century, but later progressed to excavating a general area, an approach similar to modern methods that was novel at the time. They backfilled all their trenches at the end of each season of work. Varley's interpretation of the results, however, paid too much attention to historical events, leading to inaccuracies. It included fieldwork by the authors. The reviewer for Geography praises Varley's "unusual approach to the physical basis" as "both stimulating and unconventional." L. Gray Cowan, in a broadly positive review for Geographical Review, criticises the over-generalised nature of the book's conclusions. A reviewer for Geography praises the book's originality and describes it as "a model study of its type" that serves as "a brilliant introduction" to studies of the period. The book's blocks and types were destroyed by German bombing. His later work, Cheshire Before the Romans (1964), although intended as an updated replacement for the 1940 book, broadened its focus to review the whole of the UK and in particular his hillfort excavations in other counties. and was criticised by Victoria B. Morgan and Paul E. Morgan in their 2004 book on the topic.

He was interested in disseminating archaeological knowledge to the public.

Personal life His first wife was the archaeologist Joan Varley. She worked under Varley in several of his excavations during the 1930s and in particular was named by him as one of the directors of the excavation at Eddisbury; She specialised in the history of Delamere Forest. During the 1930s, Varley coached the University of Liverpool rowing eights. His large collection of papers and artefacts were handled after his death by Adrian Havercroft, an archaeologist and family friend.

Societies and fellowships He was an elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. and was the inaugural president of the Gold Coast Geographical Association, founded in 1955 to promote the study of West African geography.

Selected publications Research papers and reports

Books

Notes and references