did indeed enter the field where we were working, it ought to show up quite clearly as a pale parch-mark. Roman roads were usually made from rammed-down gravel, and there was precious little moisture in them. As a result, in dry years, crops planted over them would grow pale and parched. Sometimes these pale cropmarks are known as negative cropmarks. As negative cropmarks went, the Fen Causeway was remarkably striking.
I got home at about six o’clock and found an air photo that clearly showed the Roman Fen Causeway as a sharply distinct negative cropmark which headed straight towards our field. On the photo it seemed to pass under the modern road that ran along our northern boundary, but strangely it didn’t appear on the other side, where we were working. I looked at the photograph through the small folding magnifying glass I usually carry in my pocket. No, there could be no doubt at all. So where had it gone? It had either stopped, which seemed most unlikely, or else it turned west and ran directly below the modern road, where it would lie hidden. On the whole I still think that is the most likely explanation. Often modern and medieval roads made use of the hard foundations left behind by Roman engineers.
I was staring at the photo in a blank sort of fashion, pondering these problems, when my eye was caught by three parallel dark cropmarks, doubtless ditches, which quite clearly ran beneath the Roman road. At this point my subconscious clicked in. The ditches ran precisely parallel to the two ditches we were currently digging. That was odd. My pulse quickened immediately.
The first thing I had to do was to check that the three ditches were indeed parallel with the two we were digging. That wasn’t quite as simple as it seemed, because the air photo that showed them best was taken at an oblique angle (i.e. the plane was not directly overhead), so I had to play around with some elementary geometry and a largescale map before I could be certain. That done, I was convinced. They were indeed parallel.
By now I was getting excited. Whatever these Bronze Age ditches were, they weren’t tracks or roads in the normal sense of the word. There were simply too many of them. Then I looked at the photos lying on the carpet around me. I remember frantically scrabbling though my desk drawer trying to locate my largest and best magnifying glass. When I had found it I stared long, close and hard at each photo in turn. It was an eerie feeling. Everywhere I looked I saw the cropmarks of parallel ditches, either singly or in pairs. I rubbed my eyes. Was I imagining them? Was I going mad? I took a quick stroll outside, then came back and took another look. No, I wasn’t – they were definitely there.
I spent the next day plotting the cropmarks onto a map as accurately as I could. As I worked methodically through each photo, I found ditches that ran at right angles to the main ones. Some of these also had smaller ditches that branched off them, but always at right angles. When I had plotted every ditch I could find, it was absolutely clear that these were not roads, but the ditches that had been dug around a large and carefully-set-out system of Bronze Age fields.
As I dropped off to sleep that night, I reflected that I had always wanted to work on a prehistoric landscape, and now I had discovered it – and it could well prove to be one of the earliest in England. I think I sensed, with just a hint of wistfulness, that I was passing through possibly the most important moment of my archaeological life.
When I look back on my years digging the successive prehistoric landscapes at Fengate, it always makes me smile to recall that the big discovery, the one that set the ball rolling, wasn’t made beneath a blazing sun. There was no trowel in my hand, no native workmen staring wide-eyed into the dark recesses of the long-lost tomb. Just a weary archaeologist surrounded by a scatter of well-thumbed photos on the carpet.
To date we have spent twenty-eight years excavating those Bronze Age field ditches, and I shall be digging some more in the coming years. It’s a huge system, and it’s important because these particular fields did not appear by accident, fully formed, as it were. They were never placed in the middle of nowhere. Farmers only lay out and maintain fields if there’s a good reason for spending so much time and effort on them.
The Fengate Bronze Age fields were carefully laid out to lie at the core of a working landscape. It was a landscape in which countless generations of human beings lived, died and were buried. I knew that it would provide an ideal setting to study people and their histories. If you know how to go about the task, the landscape can reveal an immense amount. But it takes time, some luck, and an enormous amount of patience. As the months turned to years, I became increasingly aware that I was bearing a huge responsibility – to the shades of the people who had lived in this place.
FIG 2 The Fengate Bronze Age fields
Modern development was ripping the old landscape apart. Fields were vanishing, to be replaced by factories and warehouses. Farm tracks, ancient and modern, were being upgraded to roads. Trees were being felled, hedges grubbed up and the rough wayside verges, rich in wildflowers and diverse grasses, were being carefully sculpted into yet another characterless ‘landscaped’, mown suburban streetscape. While these unsympathetic ‘improvements’ were taking place, while old Fengate was being transformed into Peterborough New Town’s Eastern Industrial Area, I could almost hear the screams of protest coming from the inhabitants of the Bronze Age landscape. It was as if the people of my quest were looking over my shoulder. I had to do their story justice, while there was still something left to tell. I could not sell them short. It’s a thought that still haunts me.
After that first season of 1971, Doug must have been impressed with what we were doing, because he set about raising large sums of money in Canada. While he worked on one side of the Atlantic, I worked on the other, and together we accumulated sufficient cash to carry out the large-scale open-area excavations that this complex landscape demanded. My main sources of funding were the British government and the New Town authorities, but I also raised a fair amount from private individuals, local landowners and industry. I now had the financial freedom to do the job properly, and there could be no excuses.
I won’t describe how we excavated every Bronze Age field boundary ditch, because many of them were extremely unexciting. Like the two ditches at the start of the project, they produced few and scrappy finds; but as time progressed the few finds slowly accumulated, until we had quite a sizeable collection. We were also able to assemble a number of radiocarbon dates, and we now have solid evidence that the system of fields was first laid out around 2500 BC, at the start of the Early Bronze Age, and went out of use in the first half of the first millennium BC – probably between 1000 and 500 BC. So, in broad terms, these long-vanished fields were in use for two millennia. That’s something to think about. Put another way, the Fengate fields had been in use for a thousand years when the young King Tutankhamun was laid in his fabulous tomb in ancient Egypt. Not only were these fields old, but they must also have worked well, for why else would they have been maintained in use for such a long time? I believe they worked well because they suited the landscape and the climate.
The eastern half of Britain is the side of the country with the driest climate and the flattest landscape. Today these conditions allow the farmers of East Anglia and Lincolnshire to grow arable crops, often on a vast scale more akin to the North American prairies than Europe. But it was not always like this. In medieval times, for example, the rich grasslands of eastern England supported huge flocks of sheep. The once-flooded Fens around the Wash have changed perhaps more than any other landscape in Britain. Today they grow huge arable crops, including more daffodils than anywhere else on earth; but again, in the remote past things were different.
In effect, the Fens are an inland extension of that huge shallow bay the Wash, which forms such a distinctive feature of the English east coast. Before their drainage in the seventeenth century, the Fens covered about a million acres of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, and parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, too. Within them, particularly around the edges, were areas of higher ground that formed dry ‘islands’ amidst the reeds and waterways. The Isle of Ely is the
