James Cherry

The following obituary for James Cherry (25 November 1920 to 20 July 2008; elected a Fellow on 4 May 1989) was contributed by his son Peter Cherry, FSA, and was originally written for the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society.

'My father's date of birth was 25 November 1920. He married my mother in 1944 and was married to her for nearly 64 years. His BSc degree was taken after the war and was external. He worked for UKAEA until the creation of BNFL, then for BNFL. He lived in Seascale from 1950 to 1980, then in Kendal from 1980 to 1999 before moving to Lichfield to be near to my sister. He became interested in archaeology in about 1959 - I remember seeing the excavation of Mecklin Park, Santon Bridge where the jet necklace was found in that year. He started by identifying all the known flint sites in the Drigg sand dunes that had been found by Jack Macdonald. He was then diverted by Clare Fell into surveying cairnfields, which were the subject of his first paper in the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society Transactions in 1961 

He then started looking for flints south of the Esk in the Eskmeals sand dunes (published 1963 and 1966) before moving to search ploughed fields around Seascale (1967), Eskmeals (1969) and north to St Bees (1973). The Drigg and Eskmeals sand dunes revealed a number of Romano-British and later ironworking sites, and he was able to carry out analyses of the slag at his place of work. Researching the probable sources of iron ore led him to explore the fells of lower Eskdale, finding Romano-British settlements (Brantrake) and mediaeval and later bloomery sites (e.g. Muncaster Head, excavated with Prof Ron Tylecote and Barbara Harbottle in 1967).

Through Clare Fell he was introduced to Winifred Pennington (Tutin) who did pollen analyses on our identified sites at Drigg, Williamson's Moss Eskmeals and Barfield Tarn, the last two producing rare evidence of pre-Elm Decline clearance, hence a precocious Neolithic. As the scale of Mesolithic occcupation around Eskmeals became apparent, he began working with Paul Mellars and Clive Bonsall, who carried out a series of excavations in the mid 1970's and subsequently.

After moving to Kendal, my father was aware that Dick Plint and Anthony Ellwood had found flints on the limestone uplands at Orton Scar and appreciated that there must be widespread evidence across the whole of the limestone uplands. The 1980s and early 1990s were devoted to fieldwalking on the limestone and publishing the results, which brought him into contact with Richard Bradley and Mark Edmonds, then working in Langdale, and with Vin Davis, implement petrologist. He also served as President of the C&WA&AS from 1987 to1990.

After moving to Lichfield in 1999 his active fieldwork ceased, but he still managed to record a monastic grange site above Orton, the 19th-century gasworks at Seascale and other miscellanea.