HI, Professor Alice Roberts here. We’ve run out of old Norse settlements to explore, so we’ve moved on to laybys. Here’s what we discovered on the A57 west of Sheffield.
Condoms
It appears these were part of a primitive mating ceremony in which males and females met to frantically copulate. Archaeologists are unsure why, but this ritual only took place in darkness. Possibly it was a ceremony to appease the culture’s moon god, with condoms and knickers left in the hedgerows as an offering.
Truckers’ Tizer
Our team unearthed several bottles of a cloudy yellow liquid. The hieroglyphs on the outside of many said ‘Lucozade Energy Drink’, but one of the team had a sniff and said it smelled like rancid piss. This is evidence of a tradition where traders taking their wares to market would urinate in bottles and leave them by the side of the road, possibly as a superstition to bring them luck.
Burger van sign
Laybys were the site of important hostelries, providing food and drink for weary travellers. Hostel keepers would each have their own sign – much like medieval knights had their own coats of arms – and cater to travellers from a broken-down caravan. Curiously, the more colourful the sign, the worse the victuals offered.
Many small shiny metal cylinders
In ancient times, the layby was an important meeting place for the community, and young Britons would gather there with curious shiny silver cylinders. We can’t be completely sure, but our best guess is they were used in a game called Huffing. The rules of this have been lost to time, but it appears to have been very popular as there are literally hundreds of these things.
Disposable nappy (used)
Sometimes we come across a discovery that reveals a sad story, and such was the case with this item. The nappy would have belonged to a family forced to halt their long journey and spend 20 stressful minutes clearing up after their baby shat everywhere, before flinging the item in a bush. Difficult for them, but useful for archeologists as these things never, ever biodegrade.
AA Road Map 1990
A map was a large book in which scribes had drawn aerial plans of the entire country. It sounds remarkable to us now, but ancient travellers would look up their destination on the relevant folio page and use it to guide their progress as they went. Wiser old men would often eschew such maps, using intuition, the sun and self-confidence instead. These learned elders would offer younger men advice on the best roads to travel upon, especially ‘if there be roadworks and a contraflow on ye M62 westbound’.
Well-thumbed copy of Razzle
Beneath a patch of brambles we found a surprisingly well preserved journal named ‘Razzle’, dated September 1986, which offers an important insight into the fetishes of the time. For example, several of the women are pictured reclining in barns on bales of straw, leading us to conclude that farms were viewed back then as extremely erotic, despite stinking of cow and pig shit. Fascinating.
