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Digging War Horse
Project team and
from ‘The Garrison’ stand next to a WWI 18lb artillery piece © Harvey Mills
Within the shadows of the great
prehistoric monument of Stonehenge
lies an altogether less well-known site;
a site which, even though it was only
established one hundred years ago,
has now all but disappeared. In 1914 at
the start of the Great War, the ‘Horse
Isolation Hospital’ was established at
Fargo on Salisbury Plain. The site was
only in place for a very short while
before being superseded by a hospital
for humans and only cr yptic
references to its presence lie within
the historic records.
A Phase 2 recruit excavates the hospital area © Harvey Mills
Larkhill played a vital role in the
training of artillery and infantry during
WWI but surprisingly little is known
about how and where much of this
training took place. During the War,
huge numbers of horses and mules
were required to not only pull the
guns, but were also employed pulling
horse drawn wagons and carrying
supplies. The peak in relation to
numbers of horses and mules
employed was in 1917 when there
were 869,931 recorded as working for
the Army.
The summer of 2014 saw the start of a
community project to try to locate this
hospital and to link in with local school
studies of Michael Morpurgo’s literary
phenomenon ‘War Horse’. With funding
from the Heritage Lottery Fund and
Wiltshire Council in place, a team began
their mission of investigation.
Geophysical sur veys by Wessex
Archaeology and the Defence
Academy on the ploughed farmland
soon yielded tantalising traces of
buildings, of ser vice trenches and
vestiges of W WI. This enabled the
excavations to take place under
the exper t tutelage of renowned
archaeologist Julian Richards. Julian
has huge fieldwork experience in
the Stonehenge environs but for
this projec t was simply tasked to
recover material which would relate
to the hospital sites and the militar y
presence. Seven local schools,
Phase 2 recruits from Larkhill,
local volunteers and par ticipants
from Operation Nightingale
(using heritage for recover y post
Operational Tours) all worked
together on the dig.
The results were fascinating. Traces of
the horse hospital were elusive,
perhaps the structures were simply
posts and thus fairly ephemeral and
certainly something tricky to pick up
with test-pits.
What did come to light that could
be easily identified were a number
of items that demonstrated the
existence of the buildings that were
once located there and to
individuals that were based here.
Whilst the struc tures had been
comprehensively removed, a mass
of material was uncovered
dem ons trating their e xis tence,
indicated by the presence of brick ,
roof covering and general building
rubble. The in-situ remains of a
drainage s ystem were also
uncovered. A mass of small ar tefac ts
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Sanctuary 44 • 2015