Saturday 18 August 2018

Right under your nose


As a proud member of Historic England (my client's estate manager who has to deal with planners calls them 'Hysteric England') I receive regular newsletters from them, often with lots of very interesting photos.

This hot Summer has exposed many hitherto unnoticed ancient monuments and sites which show up as different tones and colours in crop fields. As I understand it, certain types of compacted soil or subterranean masonry which has not been ploughed-out retains more moisture than the surroundings, making the crop above greener.

The top photo is of a field at Eyensham (where the large hotel is that I often stay) and the lower is at Milton Keynes (where I try never to visit, let alone stay).

The increasing use of drones to take photos makes discoveries such as these much easier now, but I believe that the director of arial photography at H.E. actually climbed into a light aircraft to take all these. What a job. I would apply for it if I was younger.

Britain is so rich in archeological terms, that this year's discoveries are probably only a fraction of what is yet to be found. I wonder if there is a square inch of land in the British Isles which has not felt the weight of a human foot.

Some time in the 1940s there was an amateur archeologist near Bath who had a keen intuition about prehistoric sites and hidden monuments, called Guy Underwood. He regularly received grudging acknowledgement from the local professionals by pointing out places of interest that had completely escaped their attention, just by staring at the landscape with an open mind. Sometimes you only find things by suspecting that they are there though, so maybe the mind has to be prejudiced.

I was only yesterday talking about the woman who intuitively discovered the penultimate resting-place of Richard the Third by going to a municipal car park in Leicester, pointing at a large, white 'R' on the tarmac and saying, "I think he's under there".


17 comments:

  1. It’s wonderful what can be found ..... slightly different but similar, I love the story yesterday about the man who was digging up his carrots and found the ring that he had bought his wife but whose daughter had lost in the garden twelve years earlier ...... the carrot had grown through the ring ..... it was as if the ring wanted to be found. XXXX

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    1. Yes - why is it always rings? There are the (probably apocryphal) tales of long-lost rings turning up in the stomachs of fishes.

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  2. Is that pronounced like Keynsham?

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  3. My village had Roman occupants, but I've studied Google Earth quite carefully, and can find no sign of them. Maybe they lived in tents.

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    1. There was probably a villa where those containers are going. You may be able to halt the project if you discover a Roman mosaic floor on the site. My advice is do a little research and if nothing turns up, buy some Roman fragments and get sprinkling...

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  4. The “R” in the car park indicated a reserved place for Leicester police. My cousin parked over Richard for several years!! The school next to the car park was a boys’ grammar school that my husband attended for 7 yrs!

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    1. Wonderful. What a thing to be able to tell others.

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  5. Eynsham in Oxfordshire? This is so interesting. I often wonder who has walked the ground where I stand.

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  6. Interesting post. The NewYorker has a good article on this too. Thanks.

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  7. Crop marks fascinate me. A hobby is tracing the course of lost Roman roads. An OS map is useful but often the continuance of such a road is made obvious by the crop mark of its course. (I have used dowsing, too, with satisfactory results)

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  8. In my next life I will be an archeologist and brush soil off building foundations. Global warming will make discoveries so much easier. And, I am so serious!

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  9. Ha ha I like the last comment.
    Those photos are amazing. I could imagine that the stone would hold not only water but minerals as well?

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