Visitors entering Holy Trinity Kendal Parish Church now encounter a life-size reconstruction of a woman who walked the town’s streets about 900 years ago. Created from a skull uncovered during a 2022 flood-management excavation beside the churchyard wall, the model rests inside the medieval building, and a ballot box invites the public to choose her name from ten options: Agnes, Amice, Annora, Bodil, Clemence, Frieda, Hilda, Jord, Kara, and Tove. Clergy said the poll would remain open until the end of summer.
Archaeologists found the remains of 14 people when earthworks for the Environment Agency project began; most skeletons were damaged, but the woman’s skull stayed intact. Specialists at Liverpool John Moores University combined digital bone mapping with soft-tissue depth markers to estimate her appearance, presenting her with weathered red skin that hints at long hours outdoors in the fields surrounding medieval Kendal.
“Her bones suggest she led a hard life,” said archaeologist Stephen Dean, according to Mirror. Laboratory study of her teeth and bones indicated a diet short of meat, fish, and dairy, and the grave’s location on the churchyard edge suggested low social status. Researchers believed she was buried without a coffin.
Radiocarbon analysis placed her death in the early 1200s, at about 50 years of age. “The archaeologists have looked at her DNA and where her roots might have been,” said Revd Canon Shanthi Thompson, vicar of Holy Trinity, according to Mirror, adding that evidence pointed to a lifetime spent in Kendal. Thompson emphasized that the parish wanted to honor “a worshipper here, part of our community.”
Liverpool John Moores researchers also inferred that she wore her long hair under a simple scarf, practical for fieldwork and the area’s early wool trade. Thompson noted that agriculture and wool handling likely filled her days.
The church planned to rebury her and the other 13 sets of remains in consecrated ground next year. Until then, parishioners and tourists pause before the reconstructed face, cast their votes, and await the moment a chosen name will restore identity to a woman lost beneath a stone wall for nine centuries.
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