I met the formidable Dr Larch S Garrad at the Manx Museum in 1980. It was a rather unnerving experience for a 20 year old archaeology student, although I didn’t realise at the time quite how lucky I was. This is a short story of how she saved me from writing a terrible dissertation, rescued my degree, and probably enabled my future career and eventually the establishment of #TRAC. It’s a trivial story in itself; but it’s an adjunct to the whole bigger narrative of extraordinary women of archaeology who deserve much wider recognition. Garrad should have been appointed Director of the Manx Museum, but wasn’t. Nevertheless she became an Isle of Man icon - an archaeologist, educator, natural environment expert, and historian of the landscape.
Islands, Beer and Temples
In the summer of 1980 I’d returned home from Newcastle University by the usual means of bus, trains and Steampacket ferry to the Island. (It’s ‘the Island’ to everyone who’s from the Isle of Man - it’s the only island, ever, obvs.) Tasked by the Department of Archaeology to come up with a final year dissertation topic, I was clutching at a (very) half-formed and half-baked idea about the Manx neolithic, or ‘New Stone Age’ in old money.
Map of Manx Neolithic Monuments. (Credit: Department of Infrastructure, Isle of Man Government)
It was a risky idea but I liked a bit of risk. My lovely Department was largely a traditional place that focused on the culture-historical teaching of the Graceo-Roman world and late British prehistory. Archaeology was changing, however; and, following a revolution in scientific dating methods, new wondrous paradigm shifts were appearing (notably in prehistory) involving culture process, structuralism, data analysis and geographical applications. This was all pretty exciting stuff for a student used to posting archaeological evidence through conceptual letterboxes designed by Homer, Livy and Suetonius. Additionally, I was keen to do something on the archaeology of ‘home’, where the prehistory is extraordinary.
Renfrew Makes Maps: Malta and Gozo, Neolithic Temples and Arable Land (Credit: Prof Colin Renfrew)
I wrote to the Museum’s Director, Marshall Cubbon, who knew my father (island life …), asking if I might discuss an idea I had about the distribution of Manx neolithic burial monuments. I’d been reading Colin Renfrew’s Before Civilisation and his writings on neolithic Maltese temples and the tombs of Orkney, and his spatial theory on socio-political territories, and got a bee up my arse about transplanting this archaeological theory onto the landscape of the Isle of Man. Yes, yes, I know - it was a shit idea. For shame.
To be fair to my young self, I knew the Isle of Man inside out and had been a beach-and-field urchin since early childhood. As teenagers my friends and I would hike or drive out to sites like Mull Hill at Cregneish on windswept Sundays when everything but the churches were shut; or sometimes we’d hang out there on summer evenings where the sun dropped down into a still, cerise Irish sea. We broke the silence by lumbering over the gorse and grass to lie flat on our backs in the stone cists drinking from bottles of beer, shouting across to each other from cist to cist. And I dreamed a dream of studying archaeology - which meant leaving the Island.
The Meayll Circle (Mull Hill), Isle of Man (Source: Wiki Commons)
Mull Hill: a place to lie in a cist and gaze up at the sky
Roll on a couple of years and I started to feel the pull of home and its archaeology. But the Manx neolithic isn’t represented by temples or anything like the material culture found on Malta. Looking back I suspect that I had thought to myself at the time something along the lines of: the Island’s an island with which I have a native affinity, it has intriguing neolithic sites, and I really want to make maps with territories that tell a great story about its prehistoric past.
Meeting Dr Larch Garrad
Luckily, I had Larch Garrad to calm me down.
Marshall Cubbon the Director had kindly written back quickly and advised me to arrange to meet with his senior keeper Dr Garrad who would ‘be pleased to assist’ with my research proposal. I did; and she wasn’t.
Dr Larch Garrad of the Manx Museum
Dr Garrad met me at the main desk of the Manx Museum, a former Victorian hospital, precisely on time. She took me up a narrow twisting staircase to an office the size of large cupboard, which was heaving with piles of paper, journals and books. I already knew of her name as the Keeper of Natural History, who wrote prolifically and gave talks about the Manx landscape and gardens. She was passionate about everyone having access to knowledge about the landscape and ecological diversity of the Island, for example by acquiring Ballateare Meadow in the 1980s for conservation purposes. (Dr Garrard’s intervention secured the future of the meadow as a wildlife haven, protecting it against modern agricultural techniques which would have eliminated many of its wildflowers, such as wild orchids.)
That day at the museum, her tawny hair was pinned up on her head, and she peered at me curiously through the studious glasses on her serious visage. I was not offered tea.
I outlined my dissertation proposal to Dr Garrad, focusing on the Manx element. I became more hesitant as the expression on her face grew more withering as I moved on to talk of Renfrew’s work. When I mentioned spatial theory in the same breath as neolithic burials and monuments she had heard quite enough. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘this will never do for the Isle of Man! We simply don’t have the dating! These approaches are ill-advised!’ I believe I may have pulled a long face.
Larch Garrad was not only a specialist in Manx natural history but also in its archaeology - and more beyond. In fact she had a PhD in Mycenaean burial customs. As Stephen Harrison pointed out in his obituary for his erstwhile and superior colleague, she also had taken part in a number of excavations with the British School of Archaeology in Athens. And she had passed the Library Association examinations. Larch Garrad was an all-rounder, a polymath, an expert on multiple places and periods, and a key part of the Manx Museum’s outreach work.
Manx cross conservation. (Credit: Manx National Heritage)
‘Have you thought about studying early Christian crosses on the Isle of Man?’ she suggested.
No, no I hadn’t. After a lot of Methodist chapel and church during my childhood on the island, I couldn’t think of anything worse at that time than studying Manx bloody crosses. But she was right about my dissertation idea being a dud.
Dr Garrad herself knew a great deal about early Christian religious practices on the Isle of Man, and, if I’d been listening properly, she had been offering me a really good suggestion. Further, her comments about lack of dating information at that time on the Manx neolithic sites was prescient of the criticism that would later be levelled at Renfrew’s Malta hypothesis.
I did eventually change my mind about the dissertation proposal, because medical circumstances enforced upon me a long period of reflection. And I certainly reflected on Dr Garrad’s words. After a long spell in hospital that required me to start my third year all over again, I re-jigged the content of my final year and decided to take quite a few Roman courses, as well as signing up for John Chapman’s Data Analysis course. (This was quite an unusual combination for a final year ‘Romanist’). I shifted my dissertation research completely to a study of Romano-British aisled farmhouses. And out of this strange mix of Roman archaeology and archaeological theory arose my own PhD thesis, and eventually my organising the first Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) in Newcastle University in 1991.
One of Larch Garrad’s many expert publications
And Dr Larch Garrad, a museum archaeologist on the Isle of Man who took the time to talk to a young undergraduate, is one of the people I have to thank for that.
Too many women in archaeology are invisible. Too many are absent from Wikipedia, which, love it or loathe it, gives visibility to individuals and their achievements. Dr Larch Garrad is one of the current absentees. If any wiki editors are reading this, they might like to give Dr Garrad her long-overdue entry. Meanwhile, I’ve enjoyed writing my brief tale about my encounter with Dr Garrad. I believe that the more stories that women archaeologists relate about each other, to each other, then the more layers we build into these narratives. One anecdote might not seem like much, but all these layers build up to a ‘tell’.
Obituary
I have found one published obituary for Dr Larch Garrad, briefly outlining in two short paragraphs her career, and her life span - 1936-2005 - written by Stephen Harrison in the year of her death and published in the Journal of Ethnological Studies:
“Friends and former colleagues at Manx National Heritage (MNH) were deeply saddened by the news that Dr Larch Garrad passed away on 6 July 2005, after a very short illness. Larch Garrad was a well-known and much-loved figure in the Isle of Man, primarily due to her massive contribution made over a period of thirty years to the work of the Manx Museum and to her important work as an author of several books about aspects of the Island's social, industrial and natural history.
“Educated at the Weston-Super-Mare Grammar School for Girls in Somerset, Larch went on to study for a degree in Ancient History and Archaeology at Birmingham University. She later gained her Doctorate with a thesis on Mycenaean burial customs, following a number of excursions to take part in archaeological excavations with the British School of Archaeology in Athens. She also found time to pass the Library Association examinations.”
Larch, you’re much missed. And thank you.
Dr Larch Garrad, Graduation
Acknowledgements and Thanks
The Manx Museum (Manx National Heritage), Isle of Man - archives, publications and online images (Isle of Man Government)
#TRAC = Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference
Renfrew, Colin (multiple editions but mine was c. 1976, paperback) Before Civilization. The radiocarbon revolution and prehistoric Europe.
The Orchid Walk at Ballateare Meadow http://www.isleofman.com/news/details/79491/orchid-walk-at-ballateare-meadow-
Wikimedia Commons (Meayll Hill photo) - Meayll_Circle_in_early_Autumn_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1463849
Marshall Cubbon, an Appreciation - http://manxnationalheritage.im/news/marshall-cubbon-obe-ba-fsa-fma-rbv-1924-2012-an-appreciation/
Stephen Harrison obituary of Dr Larch S Garrad https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/flk.2005.44.1.137?journalCode=yfol20