Most people would have thrown them out straight away. But when Yorkshire hill farmer Tom Lord inherited boxes and boxes of dusty old animal bones – amassed over more than a century by a succession of intrepid cave explorers – he resisted the temptation. Instead, he spent the next 30 years making sense of them. Thanks to his dogged detective work, his collection of old bones is finally proving its worth. For hidden within these boxes are traces of Britain’s most mysterious carnivore – the lynx – and clues to its last days as a native British species.
TOM LORD’S inheritance was certainly unconventional. Where others end up as custodians of the family silver or an antique chair or two, he inherited a pile of old bones. The bones had been handed down by his grandfather, Tot Lord. Born in 1900, Tot worked as a greengrocer in Settle in the Yorkshire Dales, but as a young man he developed a passion for the archaeology on his doorstep. He lived among the spectacular uplands of Craven, a Carboniferous limestone landscape riddled with caves and fissures. Generations of explorers had discovered that these treacherous places preserved traces of ancient humans and long-extinct beasts, including an unexpected one: the European lynx. On that score, the caves of Craven have proved particularly rewarding, yielding more lynx bones than any other limestone caves in Britain.
The discovery that these charismatic continental cats had once roamed the forests of the British Isles was a revelation. For a time, cave exploration was cutting-edge research, so much so that between 1870 and 1878 the British Association for the Advancement of Science funded a large-scale excavation at Victoria Cave in north Yorkshire. When the dig was over, all the finds were kept in a museum attached to nearby Giggleswick School. Tot Lord was a great friend of the school’s headmaster, and when the museum closed in the 1930s, Tot took over the collection and made it the nucleus of his own museum.
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Soon hundreds of bones from yet more cave excavations found a home in Tot’s museum, which grew to occupy the entire ground floor of his large Victorian house. Grandson Tom grew up with the museum: he and his parents lived on the second floor, and Tot on the first floor until his death in 1966.
In 1973, Tom was at university studying history when his father died suddenly, and Tot’s voluminous bone collection became his responsibility. He took his inheritance very seriously, and set about cataloguing the collection to see what treasures it contained. Tom spied the lynx bones straight away, marked with the beautiful penmanship of Wilfrid Jackson, the geology curator at Manchester Museum. By great good fortune, Jackson had identified many of the bones in the 1920s and 30s. “Jackson was a very good bone man,” says Lord, “and very good at record-keeping too.” Unfortunately, his detailed records, noting when and where each bone had been discovered, were not with the bones but in his own notebooks, which ended up in yet another museum. Once Lord tracked down Jackson’s notebooks, things began to fall into place. With each bone’s provenance known, the collection became a valuable scientific resource, and the bones prime candidates for carbon dating.
Just over a decade ago, there were two schools of thought about the fate of the lynx: they had died out in Britain either about 10,000 years ago, not long after the ice had retreated, or about 4000 years ago, as the region’s climate turned cooler and wetter. Either way, climate was to blame, not people. That view began to look decidedly shaky in 1997, when a lynx skull in the collections of the National Museums of Scotland was dated to around AD 240, during the Roman occupation of Britain.
This suggested that lynx had lived in Britain for thousands of years longer than anyone had imagined. A single result didn’t convince everyone, however. Sceptics argued that the skull might have been a traveller’s souvenir, brought in from the continent.
Now, two new dates from lynx bones found decades ago in Craven caves have demolished the climate theory entirely. For some time, Tom Lord had been working alongside palaeontologist Roger Jacobi of the British Museum, . They persuaded the Yorkshire Dales National Park to fund the dating of two lynx bones, expecting to find that the Yorkshire cave lynx dated from the late-glacial or early post-glacial periods. “It was pure serendipity that we chose those particular bones,” says Jacobi.
To their astonishment, the first result reinforced the Scottish finding: this bone, which had been in the Manchester Museum since the 1890s, belonged to a lynx that had met its end falling into Moughton Fell Fissure between AD 80 and AD 320, during the Roman period. The second bone – from Tot Lord’s collection – produced a still bigger shock. It came from a lynx that had died in Kinsey Cave between AD 425 and AD 600, establishing for the first time that lynx survived in Britain into early medieval times.
“We were very, very surprised,” says Lord. “Lynx need a substantial amount of woodland and everyone expected that, in England, pressure from farming and deforestation had exterminated them long before that.” Solitary, stealthy hunters, lynx rely on forest cover to ambush their targets. What’s more, their favourite prey are roe deer, which also need plenty of woodland.
“Solitary, stealthy lynx rely on forest cover to ambush their targets”
The persistence of lynx in Craven suggests that Yorkshire remained wild and wooded for much longer than anyone had supposed. It looks as though it wasn’t until the early medieval period that woodlands were reduced to small, scattered fragments in a sea of pasture and arable fields, a change in the landscape that triggered a major loss of biodiversity.
Lynx may have become so scarce that few people ever saw one and awareness of them gradually faded, but their deaths in Craven caves reveals that they were still there. “The results highlight the importance of caves as windows into the past,” says Lord.
But there is also cultural evidence suggesting that lynx were still being hunted in early medieval times. An expert on modern-day lynx, ecologist David Hetherington of the Cairngorms National Park Authority in Scotland, has searched for historic clues. He points to a 7th-century lullaby written in Cumbric, an ancient British language related to Welsh and once spoken across northwest England. Called the , or “Dinogad’s tunic”, the poem is set in the Lake District, just 80 kilometres west of Craven, and celebrates the hunting prowess of Dinogad’s father. Among the creatures he lanced – and whose pelts were incorporated into the boy’s tunic – are wild boar, red deer, roe deer and llewyn. In the past, scholars variously translated this word as “fox” or “wild cat”, but only because lynx were supposed to have been long gone by the time the lullaby was written. Lynx is a more plausible translation, says Welsh scholar Adrian Price of Cardiff University, not least because llew shares an origin with lug or lugh, which has been independently identified as the Old Gaelic (pre-AD 900) word for lynx. There’s also an expression in Old Gaelic, lug-leimnech, which means “lynx-like leaping”, suggesting that the Scottish Gaels were familiar with the way the animals moved, and had seen them alive and not just as imported pelts.
There’s evidence that lynx hung on even later in Scotland, says Hetherington. He reckons that a carving on a 9th-century Pictish stone could be a lynx. “It depicts a hunting scene, showing men on horseback hunting local animals, including wild boar and deer,” he says. “One figure, usually said to be a lion, has tufted ears and looks like a lynx to me.”
All this is not just ancient history. The new insights into the lynx’s relatively recent demise in Britain are now influencing conservation policies. “If humans, not climate, drove Britain’s lynx to extinction in the first place, as the evidence now indicates, there’s a strong case for bringing them back to their native land,” says Hetherington. Already, lynx have been successfully returned to their former haunts in many parts of mainland Europe.
Scotland has enough woodland, and enough deer, to support new populations, Hetherington argues. He’s calculated that the Scottish Highlands could support about 400 lynx, and the southern uplands of Scotland another 50. “So Scotland could support a substantial population of Eurasian lynx – the fourth largest in Europe by current estimates.” Even the woodlands of southern and southwest England could accommodate perhaps as many as 200. A decade ago, lynx weren’t even on the conservation agenda, so Tot Lord’s legacy might one day amount to more than a pile of old bones.
