"Finding Things In Fields "
January 2008 Meeting Report
Speaker - Dr Peter Allen
The Keyworth & District Local History Society met on 4th January 2008 in the Centenary Lounge for a presentation by Dr Peter Allen entitled “Finding Things In Fields”. To call this talk an interim report does not do justice to what was an excellent presentation in every way. Nevertheless, that is what it was: an interim report given two years into a three-year field walking project funded by the National Lottery, covering the parish of Bingham. The project involves a hundred volunteers who are systematically covering every arable field in the parish (most of the parish farmland is arable), picking up, identifying and recording the location of every man-made, or seemingly man-made object found at the surface. Before the project began permission to carry it out was obtained from the landowner – nearly the whole parish is Crown land – and the occupying farmers. After two years, over 50,000 objects have been collected and stored. The location of each find is recorded on computer but not all are yet identified.
The fields are being surveyed by first setting out a series of parallel lines 20 metres apart and putting down ropes along these lines. Volunteers are then each allocated a two-metre wide strip within that line and walk slowly along it, collecting all objects that they find on the surface of the ground, noting how far along the line it was found, thereby giving the find a grid reference. Each separate find is bagged, recorded and at the end of the search is sent to a central location where it can later be identified. No more than six people survey at a time and each undertakes to work for three hours at a stretch at fairly regular intervals of, say, once a week or fortnight. Surveying is a winter job because the soil must be more or less bare. Identification and analysis mostly takes place in summer.
The audience were shown slides of a sample of finds ranging from a flake of flint, through examples dating from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and the Roman, Saxon, Mediaeval, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian and Victorian eras. They included flint arrows and tools, together with fragments of pottery from every period after and including the Roman. The probable “star” find to date is the flint flake, probably used as a scraper and identified by Roger Jacobi of the British Museum as being approximately 400,000 years old which places it in the Low Palaeolithic period. A few metal objects were shown including a coin and a token (a local substitute when the Royal Mint stopped producing low value coins), but they were not numerous – perhaps metal detectors had got there first.
The finds have been mapped by age, revealing clusters in different parts of the parish from different periods, together with a sparse and apparently random scattering of finds over most of the rest of the area. The clusters were interpreted as relatively permanent settlements; the random scatterings as remains left by shifting cultivators who, before the Romans arrived, practised a form of nomadic slash-and-burn agriculture.
The largest settlement identified (other than the present built-up area of Bingham which was excluded from the survey) was Roman Margidunum, centred on the present roundabout at the junction of the Fosse Way (A46) and the road leading to Gunthorpe Bridge (A6097). But this was shown to be much larger than originally thought: finds were made beside both the A46 on both sides of the roundabout and beside the A6097, suggesting ribbon development along both these roads: Margidunum, originally a military station on the frontier of the Roman Empire, had grown into a significant town, seemingly occupied mainly by civilians once the frontier moved north. Other much smaller settlements were identified before, during and after the Roman period, particularly near Bingham’s southern parish boundary near the river Smite; and in the north of the parish, around a shallow lake which once occupied part of the area east of the Margidunum roundabout.
The project still has a year to run and one area to survey which is of particular interest: Crows Close, the site of a deserted mediaeval village some 600 yards east of Bingham parish church which, with its humps and hollows is reminiscent of Thorpe-in-the-Glebe. Dr Allen only mentioned this in passing but it will be interesting to find out both how it will be surveyed (the field is unploughed) and what is discovered. Perhaps Dr Allen will come again.