Raymond Harland Hayes, MBE

Raymond Hayes was born in York on 13 July 1909, the son of a professional photographer who ran a busy studio in Monkgate. When Raymond was still in his pram the family moved, by horse and cart, to Beck Garth in the village of Hutton-le-Hole on the North York Moors, where the business continued to flourish, much of it concerned with illustrations for books on North Riding history and topography. On leaving the village school in 1925 Hayes was apprenticed to his father and began to develop an interest in archaeology, first aroused through attending the lectures of, among others, Philip Corder. This enthusiasm, combined with his skill as a photographer, led to Hayes being in demand on local digs. When Hayes senior died in 1940 the business was suffering from wartime shortages and restrictions and Raymond supplemented his income by signing up as the Hutton postman – an inspired move on his part since the contacts he made among the farmers and landowners gave him unrivalled access to important sites. It was this comprehensive knowledge of the area that enabled Hayes, in the late 1950s, to introduce Geoffrey Dimbleby to crucial areas of the moors in his pioneering work on the analysis of pollen from archaeological contexts. Indeed, Hayes frequently worked with professional archaeologists: Roy Gilyard-Beer on the Romano-British baths at Well in 1946–7; Peter Wenham on the Roman cemetery excavations at Trentholme Drive, York, in the early 1950s; Ian Stead at Beadlam Villa, near Helmsley and on various Iron Age and Roman sites in Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire and elsewhere. His study of querns laid the foundation for collaboration with Professor J E Hemingway and Dr D A Spratt which resulted in the publication of a landmark paper, ‘The distribution and lithology of beehive querns in north-east Yorkshire’ in The Journal of Archaeological Science (1980); and his association with John Hurst produced the history of Hutton-le-Hole, now in its third edition. Dr Don Spratt and his colleagues dedicated the volume, Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology of North-East Yorkshire (1984 and 1993) to Hayes ‘in gratitude for his sixty years’ research in north-east Yorkshire’. Hayes served as an energetic county correspondent for the Ordnance Survey from the 1940s, working with C W Phillips, and was awarded the silver medal of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society in 1990. With two colleagues he founded the Ryedale Folk Museum near Malton, which houses, in the Raymond Hayes Gallery, his collection of artefacts, dating from the Middle Stone Age to more recent industrial times, from sites where he dug. His archaeological papers and photographic archive, including the only record of work undertaken on the Roman town of Cataractonium (Catterick) in 1958, are also deposited at Ryedale. At home, Hayes was active in village life, playing football and a variety of musical instruments at dances in the village hall and, when he ventured abroad (usually no further than the Lake District) he enjoyed rock climbing but, first and last, wherever he was, archaeology was his passion. He died on 16 May 2000 and is buried at Lastingham.