The Wansdyke & District Forums

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 had walked a dozen times and thought empty turns out, from above, to be covered in the platforms and hollow-ways of a shrunken village, house plots either side of a sunken street, as clear as a diagram. You would never see it on the ground. Search for LIDAR composite DTM and your area; it is genuinely addictive.

oh this is brilliant, been playing with it all evening. the holloway i always walk shows up as part of a whole pattern, theres a green road and house platforms id never clocked. spent two hours on it, thanks a lot Col, theres my weekend gone.

A word of caution to balance Col's enthusiasm, since I cannot help myself. Lidar shows you bumps, not dates. Ridge and furrow, drainage, wartime works, old quarrying and genuine medieval settlement can all look alike to the untrained eye. By all means find them, but log them as earthworks of uncertain date and let the county team or a geophysics survey do the interpreting. A platform is not a house until something says so.

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 took one of those away.