“You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a ****, you left the bodies and you only moved the head stones. You only moved the head stones. Why? Why?”
(Craig T. Nelson as Steven Freeling in the movie Poltergeist [1982])
With great discretion, paleo-archaeologist Danielle explained that there had been a cave find, on a new development somewhere around Plymouth, though she was careful not to hint even approximately at its location. We wondered where it might be. The new developments around Pool Farm perhaps? Or the big new estate in and around the quarries and meadows of Billacombe?
Yet we went to Sherford. Helen had inadvertently driven through it just before we met up with Danielle for a ‘Wild Geographies’ visit to Gully Cave in Somerset, and described a strange almost spectral fabrication of a place. We followed our instincts there. Intuition is not a recognised research method, in the sense that it is not necessarily reliably repeatable. However, as artists and walkers we allow ourselves to follow intuition, track rhizomatic webs of story across the earth, move toward fabulous images that stand forward in dreams, hunches and gut feelings; something that we do have in common with certain narratives of successful research.
So, we head for Sherford, just before Christmas.
It stands on lonely high ground to the East of Plymouth. The sting and moan of cold wind is the first thing we notice as we leave the car; despite the tall buildings on either side, the main through road seems to channel the wind rather than shield pedestrians from it.
Unlike much suburban development, which creeps irregularly but insidiously into greenspace on the peripheries of the city, Sherford is intended to be a small town in itself, built from scratch; it seems to have been conceived as a complete thing, with even its most banal elements promoted as gem-like highlights. A noticeboard entitled “Points Of Interest” includes, among its nine items, such gems as “Roads”, “Sports Pitches”, “Park and Ride Interchange” and “Vehicle Access Points”. It’s as if the developers are gaslighting their customers.
Fake Georgian town houses nestle next to fenced off building plots and rows of sham old country cottages. Industrious men in high viz jackets are everywhere, whistling, shouting, hammering. The new road is covered in mud from their vehicles. Although many hundreds of the eventual 5,500 properties appear to be already finished, a high proportion of these seemed unoccupied. Maybe we had come on the wrong day, but there is very little activity around the Bovis estate sales offices. The sign on the door says:
Monday – closed
Tuesday ¬ – closed
Wednesday – closed
Thursday – closed
Friday – closed
Saturday – closed
The ‘high street’ is very busy with through traffic; we wonder how long before they will need to put in a by-pass. Looking for somewhere to get a coffee we find a ‘square’; on one side there is a school and a locked community facility, on a second is the busy through road. The other two sides are rows of what at first glance appear to be ‘shops’ but turn out to be wooden hoardings covered in posters depicting phony boutique storefronts: a hipster barbers (with an unfeasible ‘established in’ date), ‘Baker’s Dozen’ bakery (with sour-dough and sprigs of rosemary), a florist (with terrifyingly large photo-shopped tomato trees), ‘Sammy’s Newsagents’ – (staffed by stock photo Japanese proprietors selling products with labels in Japanese and prices in yen). This was where we first got a strong feel for not-entirely-rational forces at work inside humdrum appearances in Sherford.
We follow the busy road eastwards for a while, noting the gathering of trees (‘Sherford Kilns’) up to which the building work runs, and the flat expanses North of the road, apparently awaiting development. Turning back, disappointed to be kept to the road by high metal barriers and warning signs, we dive into the streets of new houses. More retro-Georgian town houses, an occasional replica Methodist Chapel conversion, and more rows of smaller, ‘affordable cottages’ and mews-style dwellings. Even a hint of village square.
Roads here are named after classical mythic personalities – Hercules, Pegasus, and so on – though there is no indication that there was much of a Roman history here. However, we read on the Wessex Archaeology website that flint finds indicate the presence of both Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples, the footings and discarded earthenware of an Iron Age roundhouse have been found on a hill, plus ovens, a stone for grinding flour and a spoon mould used in metalworking. Elsewhere (none of the finds are precisely located online) a concentration of around 400 postholes and pits and a circle of Bronze Age urn burials were discovered around a central burial under a round barrow; this structure was Iron Age with a preponderance of Neolithic and Mesolithic flints surrounding the barrow suggesting the site served as some kind of communal focus for many thousands of years (and has now been levelled).
Based on the finds, Wessex Archaeology created a 3D ‘reconstruction’ of a high status ‘Bronze Age Man’, modelling his face on that of the Wessex Archaeology Site Director… you can swivel him around on your computer screen: square-jawed, wearing a cape-like cloak, he stands with his hands on his hips like a character in a kids’ Play-station game.
Visiting just before Christmas 2021, Sherford is a very odd place indeed back then. Very few people move about, only the occasional car, it all seems unnaturally quiet. Uncanny. We talk about creepy films: The Stepford Wives and Poltergeist. We ask a couple of construction workers if they know anything about some rescue archaeology, but they deny any knowledge of it. It begins to get dark.
Then we notice a pattern. It is not so surprising that the show homes on the main road are decked out with generic ‘life-style’ soft furnishings, plush carpets, shiny fridges. But delving deeper into the estate, again and again the same nutcracker soldier guards the gates of these houses (more recently, May 2025, we found a battered example of one of these ‘soldiers’ propped up outside a house on the new nearby estate of ‘Saltram Meadows’). Turning a corner, we find identical red bows fastened to the front doors of every cottage in a row. Everything starts to feel composed, conducted. Becoming more suspicious, we peer through front windows and the pattern becomes more evident. The blinds hung in the window are all of the same design, and despite the lit rooms and full furnishings, there are no humans. Nothing moves. There is even a house with a life-size photograph of a couple placed in the back garden to be visible through the front windows.
Once we have understood that the Christmas decorations have all been sourced from the same suppliers, we become aware of just how odd these features are. There are outsize crackers and huge gift boxes the size of treasure chests tied with spotted ribbons. Some items are nightmarish. A human-sized toy soldier stands in a lounge by a sofa like an automaton-butler. One very large, detached house is festooned with garlands and matching trimmings from window to roof, as though the building itself were an enormous Christmas present; later we find another unsold house labelled “Unwrapped Home”.
We have a queasy sense that the organisations involved here have been finding it very hard to grasp, let alone take seriously any kind of reality. Given that even the archaeologists accept that we have very little idea of what a Bronze Age ancestral elder might have looked like, to assign them the face of a modern human…. Likewise, the pretence of empty houses celebrating Christmas, and the central square of billboards pasted with images of shop fronts like a plywood town from an old cowboy movie…
Just after Christmas the first local news stories emerged of the cave find at Sherford, along with a petition to prevent the developers from sealing off the cave and building over it. As we had suspected they would be, the finds reported by local and international press are astounding and special: bones of woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, hyena, horse, reindeer, mountain hare, red fox and a complete wolf skeleton, all lying undisturbed for between 30,000 and 60,000 years, all of them excavated and removed.
So, we decide to go back and look again. Now through a new lens; aware of the place as of the unhuman as well as of the dead human. The Christmas decorations are gone, but the place does not feel any more real than before. Unable to find any way through new fencing into the trees around Sherford Kilns, we wander to the west of the development and onto a hill that rises high above the whole development with views towards Dartmoor, of the copse on the hill above the Hemmerdon Bal tungsten mine and, to the west, of the high tower of the Langage anaerobic digester.
The hill is a labyrinth of new plantations of thorns, holly and other small trees. There are a few remnants of an older landscape – a closed stile, a rotting tree house, unhinged wooden gates – but otherwise this is an odd place, where the walkers, mostly with dogs, are obliged to turn back on themselves repeatedly.
Sitting on a bench overlooking the lines of sparkling cream and white pseudo-Georgian terraces, it is hard not to associate these almost pristine dwellings with the Cuesta Verde suburb of the movie Poltergeist (directed by Toby Hooper and produced by Stepehen Spielberg). The film opens with a shot from a cemetery hill overlooking a new estate; later, it turns out that the developers built the new houses over an old cemetery in the valley, having moved the gravestones to the hill but neglecting to move the bodies. In the movie, the bodies come back.
At Sherford a kind of negative print of the Poltergeist movie is running. Rather than moving the stones and leaving the bones, the bones have gone from the place. But what happens to the cave and the ancient burial site now that the barrow has been levelled and the animal remains removed to laboratories for assessment? Given the apparent lack of recognition of this extraordinary history right at the heart and in the fabric of the new development, this is beginning to feel very like an equivalent to the horror movie’s building over bodies. With what consequences? How does it affect a development and a ‘community’ if they are founded on a less than respectful approach to the holy spaces and animal graves of former aeons?
These sites have been ‘respected’ in that at least a proportion of the ‘promising’ areas identified by geophysics have been properly excavated, and there has been a subsequent undertaking made by the developers to not build over the emptied cave of bones (as a result of the petition with its over 75,000 signatures), but it is very hard to know what happens now (or has happened) to the round barrow and its neighbouring features, nor what happens to the cave short of burial in concrete.
Where does archaeological knowing fit with a new ‘community’? What role should the ancient play in a neo-Georgian hypermodernity? What kind of presence will the ancestors and old animals of Devon have in the new neo-Georgian Sherford? Will they return as honoured bodies, as stories attended to and studied, or as angry and predatory absences or malign spectral presences?
Is it for the best that old animals and traces of ancient ancestors are left to wreak their own quiet and meaningful seeking out of company among the terrain’s latest residents?
Returning in February 2023, there were no answers. If anything, the marks of excess oozing out from under the pristine surfaces of the new town have been mostly suppressed. More homes are occupied, though the entire designated space is still half building site. The older buildings are already looking a little scruffy, something in the bricks or mortar has reacted with something in the rain and the bright red bricks are messily stained white, spoiling the sharp contrast of white finish and bare brick. The area around the Kilns is still securely sealed off. A small square of green on the south-east high ground oozes water. We watch two buzzards circle above a shockingly large mountain of aggregate. Despite the winter sunshine, the winds are as bitter and uncontained as ever; the hoardings with the images of shops are still there, though some have been vandalised now, others have lost sections to the winds. There is now one tiny supermarket with limited opening hours, but no florists, hipsters bars, nor barbers. The cafe – the only other retail entity in the town – is closed; it’s Sunday in Sherford.
Report written 2022 & 2023, edited 2025.
