Street House Anglo-Saxon cemetery

The vicinity of Street House Farm, located on Upton Hill to the north-east of the town of Loftus, has been known to archaeologists for some decades as an area of interest. An Early Neolithic long cairn and mortuary structure dating to about 3300 BC, on which a round barrow was built in the Early Bronze Age, was excavated over the course of three seasons between 1979 and 1981. In 1984, the archaeologist Blaise Vyner discovered the remains of an enigmatic structure that he dubbed the "Street House Wossit" (a contraction of "what-is-it"). This was a segmented circle of 56 wooden posts built around 2200 BC. In the centre of the structure, which was approximately 8 m wide, were two D-shaped…

The cemetery consists of neat lines of graves arranged on an east–west alignment, covering a nearly square area of about 36 x, in a layout not seen in any other known Anglo-Saxon cemetery. The enclosure within which the cemetery was laid out was many centuries older, dating to about 200 BC; the establishment of a cemetery within its boundaries was probably intended to serve as a deliberate link to the past. It would still have been clearly visible in Saxon times. The layout of the cemetery seem to have consciously reflected that of the earlier enclosure, with its apparent main entrance aligned with that of the enclosure. Most of the graves were laid out in a highly ordered fashion with a…

The most important grave, and the most spectacular set of artefacts, was found near the centre of the cemetery. Grave 42 was a deep, wide pit in which a high-status individual was buried on top of a wooden bed with iron fittings. The body lying on the bed was most likely that of a woman of very high-ranking noble descent, possibly royalty, as the quantity and quality of the jewellery found in the grave is indicative of a woman ranking at the top of Anglo-Saxon society. Such burials are highly unusual; only a dozen are known in the whole of the UK, and the one at Street House is the most northerly known. Although nothing remains of either the body or the bed, surviving artefacts and the 56…