A long journey through the past: Paviland Futures
Written by Helen Nicholas
As I write this, I am in a hotel in Oxford. I have only been to Oxford twice; on both occasions I visited the University Museum of Natural History to consider the display of the Red Lady of Paviland.
The Red Lady of Paviland is the name given to a famous prehistoric burial discovered in 1823 by the geologist William Buckland in a limestone cave on the Gower Peninsula. Despite the name, the skeleton actually belonged to a young man, not a woman. It is one of the oldest known ceremonial burials in Western Europe, dating back around 33/34,000 years to the Upper Palaeolithic period.
Buckland assumed the skeleton was female because of the presence of red ochre and decorative items, but later research confirmed it was a young male, possibly a hunter. The bones were stained with red ochre, a natural pigment, suggesting a ritualistic burial. In the grave were perforated seashells, ivory rods, and carved mammoth tusks, indicating some form of status or belief system.
Originally thought to be from the Roman period, later radiocarbon dating placed it at 33,000 years old, and some ideas suggest we could find out it is even older. At the time of burial, the area wasn’t a coastal cave but part of a tundra landscape, with the sea much farther away.
The remains are housed in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and for some time there have been calls for repatriation. The restitution of the Red Lady was forefront in my mind when I first visited Oxford, a fleeting visit before a long journey home on foot. On my second visit, I had time to reflect with a mind full of conversations that our initial journey back from Oxford had stirred.
In October 2024, after my initial stay in Oxford, I ran, with a friend, just under 200 miles, self-supported from Oxford to Swansea Museum. The primary aim was to garner media attention and throw a spotlight on the question: ‘Is it possible for Swansea to provide for
a return of The Red Lady? And what would it mean?’ For the last few years, the campaign, Paviland Futures, has delivered school sessions, talks, and called meetings with key people, institutions and the community. Support has been largely unanimous. This individual (the ‘Red Lady’) from our deep past means something to people today; there is a deep connection to our deep-time past, and he is key to this.
The conversation is a difficult one, poignantly The Red Lady can never be returned to the cave he was placed in: Goats Hole. The cave, at Paviland, will always be a sacred space resonant with the powerful memory of its ancient past. The story has captured our imagination over the centuries. In our fast-paced digital age, it’s perhaps hard to imagine how the story of an ancient individual can inform approaches to heritage today.
On our long run home to Swansea, I had a lot of time to ponder this question. The initial stages of our journey were extremely challenging, after a quiet evening in an Oxford hotel, we set off early at 8am. The idea was to cover a lot of distance in the first quarter, the first day was brutal, wet, water-logged fields, rutted by the harvest tractor, the landscape was less natural and more of a vast lifeless quagmire.
Small pretty villages slid quietly in and out of view as we ‘locked in’ to a rhythm and pace as best we could. At dusk, we descended a hill onto a lane with Bourton-on-the-Water twinkling in the distance. I felt like we were Mole and Ratty in the Wild Wood searching out a warm light. Our GPS Strava had cut out a couple of hours ago, and I had drunk an ill-fated pint of shandy at a beautiful Cotswold pub and it gurgled uncomfortably in my nauseous tummy. A slow jog across the village saw us arrive in Bourton-on-the-Water at 8pm, a good 12 hours after we had set off. A hot bath and kindly host welcomed us into her Airbnb home, and we slept.
Goodness knows how many extra miles we covered on that first day, unrecorded. The first few days were pretty much a repeat, and we passed an interpretation board detailing the discovery of a dinosaur fossil in Stonesfield, Oxfordshire. The discovery was made by William Buckland! The dinosaur, named Megalosaurus (great Lizard), was the first named dinosaur; it felt like a sign confirming the purpose of our journey.
Traipsing through the landscape brought to mind how we (humans) have changed and shaped the world. The natural landscape was full of beautiful medieval churches, ancient oak trees, countless pheasants, and I was struck by how desolate the empty muddy fields looked, devoid of crops, they were silent.
We had expected the hillier sections of our route to be harder, but the elevation and extraordinary beauty of the mountains somehow made the borders and hills of Wales easier – or perhaps it was a sense of familiarity.
From Hereford to Hay was bright and warm. We often didn’t see a soul or even a shop. My ankle at this point was angry and swollen after the endless fields, and I resorted to stinging nettles stuffed in my socks to distract from the pain and try to reduce inflammation.
However, there was never a question of not making it, and of course civilisation was never far away, but we had time out of everyday life to just run, and that was a great privilege, so I wasn’t going to squander it or let anyone down. Every day we had to get up eat, move, rest, eat, sleep and keep our goal in mind. A world away from modern life and ideas of progress.
For Buckland, ideas of progress were personal. He wanted to prove the great flood theory and his correspondence with the Lady Mary Cole at Penrice and her daughter, led to his finding out about local investigations and discoveries that might prove his
theories. When Buckland hot footed it to Goats Hole, Paviland, he discovered the burial of the Red Lady, but there was not a museum to house the relics at that time locally, so they were taken to Oxford where they have been cared for until today.
The modern display in the museum at Oxford is a replica, tucked away in a corner. It’s a long way from the ceremony in a cave. The hustle of the museum passes by the boxed display; children race to see the ancient skulls, and students marvel at the geological exhibits and the dinosaurs. In the time I was there, no one stopped to look at or discuss the Red Lady of Paviland.
If we could create the right conditions here in Swansea, I believe an interpretation of Gower’s bone caves would elevate the cultural significance of our heritage and provide impetus for further research regarding Gower’s deep past in relation to other discoveries in Wales, Britain, Europe and beyond, contextualising our heritage globally.
The red lady is the oldest surviving ceremonial burial in Western Europe, this is hugely significant, and educationally the narrative offers Swansea a wealth of opportunities to show how we can offer the next generation ways to actively connect with their heritage. The Story of the Red Lady would of course be centre stage. It is the issue of how and where such a restitution would take place that is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the conversation. Money is needed to respectfully care for human remains, and there is the question of display that raises ethical issues.
In my opinion, a return is a mark of respect. Knowledge that an ancestor is present when out of sight is surely a practice that is not unremarkable, but in fact something we know about from studies of the past. For example, the practice of burying ancestors under a sleeping place or dwelling place – out of sight but near. Our ancient ancestors have indicated with the carefully considered artefacts placed within the grave of the Red Lady, that they are intellectually considering life and death, and there is a ‘religiosity’ of thought and practice.
What is remarkable is that this burial is in a cut grave, laid out as he would have stood in life, with the presence of red ochre and personal items. No one can dispute a level of care that we can identify with. The story is distantly old, but the narrative is a vibrant, understandable one, and there is still much to discuss, understand, and perhaps discover, about the bone caves of Gower.
The bones of the Red Lady themselves are understandably fragile, and perhaps too delicate to display, and an ancestral return to the actual cave and place of burial out of the question. Therefore, the museum in Swansea may be the best place for keeping – the closest viable alternative. It would be appropriate also to lie the replica bones out as they would have been found with the grave goods in situ – this is something that has not been done in Oxford. We must also remember a key element of the story is the young man’s missing skull, and the mammoth skull which appeared to have been placed with
the man’s skeleton, unrepresented in Oxford, and yet surely there is much to discuss here.
There is, in fact, much to discuss about our deep-time history, philosophically and spiritually, and this informs how we approach our relationship with our environment and each other.
As we ran home, we passed extraordinary markers on the landscape, time travelling through periods of human habitation. When we imagine 33,000 – and perhaps more – years back, the idea becomes distant, and I realised this is precisely why the Red Lady is a key to understanding the Palaeolithic, he is a tangible connection to a time out of reach.
The museum at Oxford has wonderful educational explanations of adaption, geology and evolution. My running partner on the run from Oxford was a biologist and teacher, and we were both excited to see all this knowledge visually displayed. We could have
something like this in Swansea and offer opportunities to ‘time travel’ for communities that live here. In a time of fear over climate change, knowledge can offer agency for the next generation to understand how to move forward. Perhaps it’s not Swansea’s historic heavy industry that will define the curiosity of future generations but our deep past.
At Gower Unearthed, we have worked over the last five years engaging schools and the community with walks, talks, and school trips centred around prehistoric Gower. We were able to host Dr. James Dilley, a specialist in the Upper Palaeolithic, to reenact a living history for local primary schools using Gower Unearthed’s Cultural Recovery Fund. As an organisation, we were delighted to do this, particularly as, after Covid, many young people were struggling to understand the world around them. Archaeology offers a purposeful connection, and there is still much to discover and understand about our ancient past. Gower has an extraordinary Palaeolithic history that we have a duty to communicate.
During my visits to Oxford, with its beautiful museums, its confidence, and its aspiration, I realised that this is what I want for us – for the people, young and old, of Gower, Swansea and Wales.
Our 200-mile journey:
Day 1: Oxford to Bourton-on-the-Water (35 miles)
Day 2: Bourton-on-the-Water to Gloucester (21 miles)
Day 3: Huntley to Hereford and Kenchester (26 miles, mud and flood challenges) Day 4: Kenchester to Hay-on-Wye (18 miles)
Day 5: Black Mountains in mist and rain (18 miles)
Day 6: Pen y Fan and Beacons Day, including Cefn Moel (26 miles) Day 7: Storey Arms to Abercraf, bogs and unmarked paths and ancient tracks (16 miles) Day 8: Ystradgynlais to Swansea across forestry and canal (21 miles)
