THREAD. Here’s a story about how I went looking for the obvious in a landscape and found something much more interesting. The place was Isleham, on the NE Cambs fen-edge & the initial hook was an early 12thC chapel, almost all that remains of a Breton priory..
2. ...founded within a generation of the Conquest. Today, only the priory chapel remains. It was converted into a barn & remained in agricultural use until the mid-20thC.
british-history.ac.uk/vch/cambs/vol1…
3. The lovely chapel is said to be ‘the best example in the country of a small .. substantially unaltered.. Benedictine priory church’. Its original 12th-century walls all survive; the raised nave roof is the only major change. More interesting tho ... english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/i…
4. ... was the field behind the chapel whose earthworks preserve some of the priory’s activities. What were they? The OS described them as fishponds (also called stews), but they didn’t all look like fishponds. There were roughly rectangular depressions (marked F on the map) ...
5. ... that although now dry probably once looked something this fishpond at Baddesley Clinton. What I didn’t understand was how the long narrow feature running down the length of the field could be a fishpond.
6. It is a depression, it’s true, but I wasn’t convinced by the fishpond interpretation. So I carried on exploring the village and came across several more features that were just as puzzling. I’ll describe them in turn and come to explanations in a while.
7. Here’s the earliest map of the village, made c1800, with the locations of each of the features marked on it, alongside the IS map of about 1900, so you can follow my explorations. The priory chapel is at C.
8. My next stop was at the bottom of Pound Lane, where a row of 19thC cottages appeared to have been built into a roughly D-shaped depression (B on the old map). The cars were all parked on the downward-sloping verge.
9. Around the back, their gardens lay at least a metre below the surface of the public footpath that ran along their back boundaries. Substantial brick buttresses prevented a small barn belonging to one of the cottages from subsiding into the depression. (Not visible in photo)
9. The buttress is just visible on the back of the nearest building.
10. The next puzzle was revealed when I turned around, with my back to the public footpath sign. The footpath along the back of the houses continued eastwards across the road (Church Lane), running just to the L of the hedge. Why did follow a ditch when ..
11. .. there was a perfectly good, much wider unpaved road (Coates Drove) just to its L (ie on its northern side) which followed higher ground?
Well, I followed Coates Drove eastwards where it ended in ..
12. ..a large triangular green. You can just see Coates Drove entering it between the trees and the clipped hedge in the far distance . And the footpath still ran along the ditch. That ditch was unusual.
13. Most ditches have a symmetrical profile - a u or a v. This one sloped at a much shallower angle on one side, towards the green, than it did on the other, which followed a much steeper angle.
14. And finally, as I turned for home, this road sign caught my eye. Waterside. But the road didn’t run alongside any water. What was (or had been) going on?
15. I went home and played with maps. Here’s the modern OS map of Isleham - you can see the Priory & Waterside on it. Land that was flooded in winter is coloured in green - it lay between sea level and about 5m above see level. You can see how the village follows it.
Land that lay below sea level was, before drainage, permanently under water and is coloured in blue. Both colours refer to the period before drainage, which began on the green-coloured area in the mid-17thC. The map thus shows early modern, medieval & earlier wetland water levels
17. Colouring the map made me realise that I’d seen this before. At Burwell, for example, catchwater drains ran along the fen-edge connecting basins, hythes and cuts to the lode (the canal) connecting the fen-edge with the River Cam british-history.ac.uk/rchme/cambs/vo… (Monument 133).
18. There’s more detail on lodes, catchwaters and how they work here:
19. While these systems survive at places like Burwell, it seemed that what I’d come across at Isleham was a relic of what had once been. So let’s go across the village again, looking at each site but this time moving from east to west - from Waterside back to the Priory.
20. And I should have said earlier: E = Waterside, A = ditch with unusual profile, D = Coates Drove. As you already know, B = houses built in the depression, and C = The Priory.
21. Waterside (E) once ran alongside a canal (Isleham Lode) a major cut connecting the fen-edge with the River Lark. The section of the lode near the village has been filled in but survives in a large modern drain a little way N of the village, that eventually feeds into the Lark
22. The large triangular green (A) was, I think, once a water-filled basin in which boats could load/offload. The clues lie in (1) its uneven surface showing that it had eventuallly been filled in; (2) in the oddly shallow slope of its S ditch - as if it had been filled in ...
23. .. so that the ditch along its edge was preserved; and (3) the ditch itself - all that remains of the catchwater drain which once looked like this one at Reach. AND still a public right of way, just as the catchwater had also been too.
24. That footpath - once the catchwater - can be followed most of the way along Coates Drove to the house-filled depression (B) at the bottom of Pound & Church Lanes. It, too, was once a basin for boats, & the public footpath & the drove lie on the banks that once defined it.
25. The catchwater survives westward in property boundaries & on air photos - further than we’ll go today. Its presence explains the long hollow depression: the Priory’s (C) own private cut enabling the monks via catchwater, basins, lodes & rivers, and the sea...
26. The whole system revealed as a means of carrying agricultural produce both to home farms, and export to local, regional, national and international markets. Imports were as important - the chancel arch in the Priory is made from Caen stone, after all.
27. The thrill of landscape history is in understanding the meaning of these small, everyday, apparently insignificant features. It’s worth saying, too, that the RCHME’s work on Reach & Burwell was essential - underscoring the value of reading as widely as possible 🤗. END

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More from @DrSueOosthuizen

31 Aug
Brilliant evisceration by #Stefan #Collini of consumerism in higher education & analysis of what’s needed so that #universities can properly play their part (& it’s only a part) in supporting a drive to social equity & justice
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
‘One of the most obvious is between our de facto endorsement of a bitterly class-divided society and our fantasy that universities can not only escape the consequences of this but can positively correct it. We seem, for example, to be willing to allow wealthy parents to buy...
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19 Aug
The Iron Age earthwork at Borough Fen is one of several #prehistoric enclosures built near the borders of the fen wetlands to manage large #communal herds of cattle grazing on the damp #pastures in summer, were centres for autumn roundups & seasonal assemblies for managing both. ImageImage
It lies in the same #common wetland grazed by the whole of the #medieval Soke of Peterborough; that was the early medieval common pasture of the 5th/6thC Gyrwe (‘fen people’); & which, @PryorFrancis’s work suggests, had been common through prehistory. Image
There’s another at Stonea Camp, and others at Tattershall Thorpe in Lincs. and Arbury Camp on the outskirts of Cambridge https://t.co/y0atadNEZD
Read 5 tweets
9 Aug
The atmospheric earthworks of the deserted #medieval village of Nobold, Northants., first recorded in 1284 - the main street, house plots & their back yards clearly visible. Most of the house sites & yards were ploughed up after abandonment (of which more, in a moment) ... (1/3)
2. You can tell ploughing happened after the village was abandoned as the blocks of ridges are bounded by the ditches that divided one property from the next. Is it possible to tell when it was abandoned? Well, maybe ...
3. First: when was it deserted? We don’t know. There are only some fragmentary records. In 1459 there were just 2 houses standing on 1 of the 3 manors with tenants in the village; but we don’t know the situation on the other 2 manors. By the early 18thC abandonment was complete.
Read 7 tweets
31 Jul
THREAD. This entry is typical of the Cambs. #Domesday Book (1086).
1st, it lists the major landowners after the Norman Conquest - here at Barton, Humphrey was Guy de Raimbeaucourt’s tenant in 1086.
2nd (& this is what I’m interested in) it lists the landowners *before* ... Image
2. ... 1066. As you can see, there were 24 of them & they were all free men - they could grant and sell their land without permission from anyone else. They didn’t ‘belong’ to a manor, but farmed independently.
And DB tells us a number of other interesting things about them ... Image
3. They were commended to the king for patronage and protection, & in return performed specific services for him - in this case they carted his goods, people, crops, etc.from one place to another, & they provided a mounted escort for the Sheriff when he undertook official duties. Image
Read 19 tweets
10 Jul
THREAD. The origins of English villages like Spaldwick, Hunts., so typical of the rural landscape, is a question that’s puzzled historians and archaeologists for generations. (Photo from Christopher Taylor’s masterfully annotated 1988 re-edition of Hoskins’ classic book.)
2. Most people in rural prehistoric and Roman Britain tended to live in farms and hamlets dispersed around the landscape (though for a qualification of this generalisation see Christopher Taylor’s 1983 Village & Farmstead). Take the archaeology of Doddington, Northants 👉....
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10 Jun
THREAD. I fell in love with landscape history in 1984 when I read this book: the author explained, through worked examples, how maps (on rainy days like today) & explorations on the ground can reveal the history of our familiar landscapes. For example...
2. Here’s a modern (1980’s) map of Pockley in N Yorks. which, Taylor explained, had previously been described as ‘an unplanned village of elongated form’. He took a closer look and came up with a quite different interpretation...
3. The modern map, he argues, is belied by the evidence on the ground of abandoned house sites & property boundaries. When they are added to the modern map they reveal (a) that ‘the N part of the village is a planned [medieval] settlement of typical* form’

*of which more, later
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