The Wansdyke & District Forums

WiltsMuseum_Col

<t>Sound advice from Mech in the main, and I would only soften it a little, because Sam plainly had a real fright and deserves better than being told she imagined it. These things do nearly always turn out to be money and bad manners. But it never hurts to be precise, and precision is half my trade,...

WiltsMuseum_Col

Not a bit of it Jordan, and will you look at that, off to put us all right. Send me your email and I'll walk you through the download. We made an archaeologist, board. That may be our finest hour.

WiltsMuseum_Col

<t>Another for the deserted-village file. The Environment Agency lidar tiles are free to download now and I have lost a happy winter to them. There is a beauty of a shrunken village showing up under the plough-lines out west of us, house platforms and a hollow-way clear as day, nobody had it flagged...

WiltsMuseum_Col

<t>Try the place name first, Brenda. Candle, Candel: it crops up in old spellings of one or two settlements hereabouts that have since gone or changed name. If the cottages stood at a place already dwindling in 1851, they might have been demolished before the next census and the family scattered, wh...

WiltsMuseum_Col

<t>Quite right, Trevor, and well said. Find with lidar, interpret with caution, record either way. The point is that these places are still out there to be found, hiding in plain sight under the grass. We have not run out of lost villages; we have only run out of ways of not seeing them, and lidar t...

WiltsMuseum_Col

<t>The Environment Agency lidar is a gift to this hobby and it is free, so a tip for those who have not tried it. Lidar is laser survey flown from aircraft; it strips the vegetation away digitally and shows the bare earth, every bump and hollow. I have been going over the parish maps and a field I h...

WiltsMuseum_Col

<t>Could well be, Pete. That lie of the land has a known Romano-British field system. The squares are likely enclosures, the lines old boundaries or trackways. Photograph it, note the field, and if you can get the rough grid reference it is genuinely useful. 1976 was the famous drought year for this...

WiltsMuseum_Col

For those not out on the downs much this month: the drought is doing what droughts do, and the parch-marks are extraordinary this year. Where the soil is thinner over buried ditches and walls the crop stays green longer; over buried stone it burns off faster. The result is the buried archaeology dra...

WiltsMuseum_Col

<t>Selwood is right, and for a local one you can actually walk: look for a deserted medieval village, a DMV, with good earthworks, where the documents show a fourteenth-century decline. There are several in the county on access land. I will message you a couple that are reachable and safe to visit, ...

WiltsMuseum_Col

<t>Selwood has it right. The current thinking, for your project, Jordan: likely fifth or sixth century, the troubled period after the Romans left, when British kingdoms were defending against Saxon expansion from the Thames valley. East Wansdyke, the stretch on the Marlborough downs, is the best pre...

The Wansdyke & District Forums

Search found 19 matches

Lidar keeps finding them

Shrunken-village earthworks - the lidar is showing it now

Cropmarks showing up in this drought