Last Monday I was coming down from Murrayfield via Newcastle along the A1(M) and realized that I was passing through Elmet, so I pulled off the motorway and detoured through Tadcaster en route to the battlesite.

The car's dashboard thermometer registered an outside air temperature of 2 Celcius (at 11 am), and there was a gale of wind blowing. The cold, wet weather that had afflicted Edinburgh during the rugby match had come south overnight and was now causing a short-lived settlement of wet snow on surrounding fields.

This was Monday, 3rd April, Towton was fought March 29th (Old Style), and so it seemed a perfect opportunity for me to have a first-hand inspection of the site in conditions approximating those on the day in which the battle was fought. I would not describe what I saw as a "blizzard" or a "snowstorm" and am inclined to think that conditions in the battle were rather more severe than those which I experienced, and it was probably a little colder on the actual day.

The most major difference though was the wind direction, which was north/ north-easterly during my visit, not southerly as it must have been during the battle (recall the reports of Yorkist archers using the wind to advantage). This has always struck me as a curious anomaly, because having lived for many years in the north of England and being interested in amateur astronomy (and therefore, of necessity, in meteorology) I can say that southerly winds are comparatively rare and when they do occur they tend to be warm. Still, cyclonic storm systems are spiral in form and therefore associated with wind swings as they pass over, and we must not overlook the possibility that the local climate may have altered significantly in 550 years, and there is little doubt that it was generally colder at that time.

At any rate, the first thing I noticed is the shape of the battlefield. It is a wholly exposed dome of land -- shield-shaped would best describe it -- so that neither of the two extreme wings of the army could have had visual contact with one another initially. The extremes of a mile-long front of men might have been visible to a mounted man in the centre, but without standing in a ploughed field and using some means of getting the required height, it is hard to tell. At any rate, as the armies approached one another they would have been largely invisible to one another due to the lie of the land. This was something I had not appreciated.

The second point I would like to notice is the steep decline which the battlefield makes into the Cock Beck. There is in places a thirty-degree slope down which any kind of pursuit would have proved quite lethal. Looking at a map, even a Pathfinder, does not bring this home.

Later, speaking with the sexton at Saxton church about Lord Dacre's tomb, I discovered that the weather had been inclement for three days and wet for two. It had rained heavily overnight. Which brings me to my third point: the Beck had risen significantly and was in spate. It was chocolate brown because it carried a lot of silt with it and where it comes closest to the road it had swelled to three or four feet in depth and was ten to twelve feet across. The nearer bank had a six foot fall to the water from the road, the water was three feet or so below the surrounding meadow on the far side, giving plenty of room for expansion to almost twice this channel before actually flowing out into shallow flooding. The centre stream flow rate was approximately 8 mph. (Making certain assumptions about the shape of the riverbed would allow a calculation from this of the force of water, tonnage per minute and the rate of rise-and-spill over surounding land given that bodies would eventually block the flow.) I conjecture that the unobstructed flow was too severe to permit anyone to wade across, (controlled tests carried out on dam spillways have shown that a depth of ONE foot of water given sufficient flow makes walking impossible on clean concrete.) A floating/swimming man would probably be able to reach the other side and get out again without too much difficulty if unimpeded. Anyone wounded, armoured or exhausted would easily be carried off and in doing so, and presumably grasping for help, would constitute a major hazard to others.

The exposed nature of the site would, in my opinion, have contributed greatly to the supposed general hypothermia. The particular combination of cold, damp and wind that I experienced would have been much more difficult to survive than the far colder but dryer conditions that one might encounter in, say, a ski resort, or equivalent. It felt, as they say locally "raw", and there was no shelter from it. In half an hour's exposure my modern Barber jacket (oiled cotton) was soaked through to the lining, and water had accumulated in the bottom of the patch pockets. I was very glad to have a warm car nearby and not be forced to run for my life and then cross a river at the point of a bill.

S.J Lean

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