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Aerial Reconnaissance of the Fen Basin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Extract

Aerial reconnaissance and photography are of great importance in the study of the early history of Fenland and the surrounding country, conditions often being A very suitable for this method of investigation. A vast amount of information which can be recorded easily by air-photography, would only be obtained with the greatest difficulty, if at all, by field-work on the ground. The present paper is a brief record of observations made while flying over the fen basin during the course of duty. Unfortunately photography was not practicable, but systematic notes were kept of everything observed. Further work should reveal much more.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1945

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References

1 Luckily the late Major G. W. G. Allen made several flights to this area and took a considerable number of photographs, two of which are here reproduced by courtesy of Mr E. T. Leeds. Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, where all the Allen photographs are now preserved.

2 See P.P.S., 1936, 97 ff.

3 This site, near the Car Dyke, at Cottenham, has been known for a long time, see Fox, Archaeology of the Cambridge Region (1923), p. 223.

4 Similar stockades near Castor, Northants. and Market Deeping, Lincs, are mentioned below. Others in the Upper Thames valley are described by the present writer in Oxoniensia VIII.

5 ANTIQUITY, 1930, IV, 274.

6 ibid. 1939, XIII, 178 ff. See also I. D. Margary, ibid. 455.

7 Ant. Journ., XV, pl. XIII.

8 ibid. 113 ff.

* First seen by me July 1939 and photographed at once by Major Allen.—O.G.S.C.

9 P.P.S., 1935; pl. XIX.

10 Ant. Journ., XIV, 414 ff.

11 It is difficult to find similar groups of barrows or circles in England, but close parallels are seen in Dutch urnfields, for example those published in Oudheid. Meded., XIV (1933), 26 ff. and XVII (1936), 38 ff, where numerous small circular ditches and occasional double circles and long ovals are seen. These are of Iron Age date.