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Practical Fieldwork
Look at your landscape through fresh eyes: Find out how to analyse its features and let them tell the story of its history.
Go for a Walk
Take a
camera, a notebook and pen
and a large scale map.
If you can, find a high spot from where you can see a fair amount of your land. This will help you get a feel for the pattern of fields, the position of roads, tracks, buildings and water. See how it relates to the surrounding countryside.
Walk systematically around your land, field by field – you don’t have to do it all at once - looking for obvious features like mounds and ditches and theoretical features such as roads and tracks. Note the landscaping of arable fields, hedgerows, lime kilns, brickworks and other evidence relating to the exploitation of land.
Make sure you photograph the major features and that you mark them clearly on your map.
Useful background information
A settlement pattern is usually linked to geology i.e. near available water. Villages tend to be in valleys.
The soil dictates how that pattern develops and the pattern shows the landscape character.
The North Downs specialises in long thin parishes like West Clandon: Their geology and archaeology are all inter related.
The Downs are a mixture of woodland and ideal sheep pasture. The Tillingbourne is fed by streams sourced in the greensand hills around Leith Hill and the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty landscape includes rare lowland heath, woodland and areas of common.
The Weald comprises small farms and woodlands
Woodland can reveal evidence of ancient forestry management such as coppice and charcoal burning and pre-historic remains.
Historical Pointers
Early
medieval, 11th-12th centuries:
The Tillingbourne valley would have had small settlements operating open
field strip farming, with arable on the good soil and pasture into the
greensand hills and on the downs.
Post medieval, 15th century on: Some downland by now returning to scrub.
More farmsteads developing and the landscape becoming more like Parkland.
Landscape Pointers
Open Field – regular and straight from an open field system
Ancient Landscape – irregular shapes formed by enclosure of land from woodland clearance
Heathland & Commons – (not waste land) it was marginal land crucial for over-wintering stock and used for fuel and mineral resources
Woodland – Woods were busy places. Look for signs of ditches, banks, coppice stumps, pollarded oaks, charcoal workings and saw pits.
Industrial Landscapes – mining (chalk and sand), potteries, iron working (some hammer ponds date back to Roman times), and gunpowder at Chilworth. Investigate any depressions or dells, they are likely to have been man-made for a purpose.
Survival of features
a) Some features retain their original function ie hedgerows (many planted over 100 years ago) and boundaries; oak pollards in hedgerows gave a regular supply of timber, holly hedges were sometimes used to keep animals in.
b) Features such as ridge and furrow are ‘fossilised’ within the present landscape (ie. They are visible still but have no modern function)
c) Things are often re-used as part of other features ie parks
Features survive today as functional buildings, scattered material on the surface, earthworks (the most common evidence of archaeology) and buried archaeology such as pottery shards.
Click on Field Work Guidelines document for recording advice
Banks, Ditches and Boundaries – the clues for a good landscape detective
Humps and bumps in the ground beneath your feet could be clues. So could old trees - even those irritating clumps of nettles in a field.
Nicola Bannister says: Banks, ditches and managed trees signify old boundaries and the profile of a bank can tell you whether it bounded a field or a wood. Field boundaries have a rounded profile while woods have a steep bank. Old maps show field boundaries and these can indicate earlier patterns of use.
Aerial photographs are excellent for showing up patterns and features.
Boundaries have different roles. They can signify the edge of a hundred, a manor, a parish or a shire. Saxon administrative boundaries were substantial. Four metres wide with a ditch on either side. They were labour intensive partly because landowners needed to find work for people during the winter.
Lynchets, visible as a step or small terrace on the side of the downs and greensand hills, indicate old field patterns as the effect of cultivation up to a boundary creates soil movement and the formation of a step. The boundary then disappears but the step remains. Lynchets survive particularly well in woods, where the soil is not disturbed.
Trackways: Abandoned and existing tracks found on maps are important to find on the ground. Likewise the shadow of a forgotten holloway spotted on the farm can be researched using old maps.
Charcoal workings leave circular areas of charcoal fragments. Old photos are great to explain the visitors the rural industrial processes that used to go on in the countryside. Rectangular depressions in woodland can signify the site of an old sawpit.
Domestic clues: patches of garden flowers or self sown vegetables can indicate the site of an old cottage.
Ponds can be old surface quarries, chalk wells, lime pits, hammer ponds or marl pits.
Military clues. Surrey was used as a training ground for armies, for regimental camps and ammunition stores. Bomb depressions are not that common. They are identifiable because of their distinctive neatly circular shape with no spoil around their edges.