Cliffs hide wee clues to dyeing art

Cliffs hide wee clues to dyeing art

Martin Wainwright

Friday July 25, 2003

The Guardian

Britain's oldest chemical industry is about to give up its secrets before its fragile traces tumble down an eroding cliff face into the North sea.

Archaeologists trained as rock climbers are hoping to find clues to a 17th-century commercial plot against the Pope - plus further proof that the north has been taking the p*$# out of London for more than 400 years.

The potentially dangerous excavation above Loftus sands, near Whitby, will also map shipping quays and "rutways" - tracks for mineral-loaded carts - which have already been drowned by the sea. The comprehensive survey of Loftus alum works, a crucial part of Britain's industrial revolution, will divide its work between the cliffs and areas reachable only at low tide.

The area's rare geological feature of alum shales has been one of the world's richest sources of aluminium sulphide - a once-revolutionary fixing agent for dyed cloth - since the 17th century. The complex smelting process was a papal secret and business monopoly until the 1670s, when Yorkshire entrepreneurs bribed craftsmen from Rome to emigrate.

"It's said that they smuggled them from Italy in wine or beer barrels, right under the Pope's nose," said Abby Hunt, English Heritage's archaeological investigator leading the survey. "The Italians were then set to work on the English coast, spawning an industry that eventually employed thousands of people, with ships taking the refined output south."

In return, London filled the empty alum cargo ships with barrels of ammonia extracted from human urine, another chemical used in the production of the dye fixatives from alum shale. The survey may turn up further traces of this niche trade, to add to bills of loading which specify that beerhouse urine from the capital was valued more highly than the weaker product from North Yorkshire farms and a scattering of local winedrinking vicars and gentry.

"There are lots of unanswered questions, too, about how the alum quarries actually worked," said Ms Hunt, whose team expect to clamber round the cliffs and the rock "scaurs" below the high tideline for eight weeks.

"We're also racing against the clock to find answers because of coastal erosion. We can't do anything about the site's imminent destruction, but we can make sure that it is fully recorded in the history books."

The Whitby breakthrough followed an earlier, unsuccessful attempt by Henry VIII to crack the secrets of alum, whose smelting system of roasting and soaking the shale was overtaken by alternative technology only at the end of the 19th century. The local coast's extraordinary geology also houses Europe's deepest mine, at Boulby near Loftus, where potash extraction takes place alongside scientific experiments to locate the elusive element of the universe known as dark matter.