Move over Crop Circles, England’s Heatwave is Revealing Ancient Sites Through Patterns in the Field
A silver lining for England’s heat wave is the appearance of new, undiscovered, archeology sites. Aerial archeologists are making some surprising discoveries by looking at the contrasting vegetation.
Surveys from the air have revealed Neolithic ceremonial monuments, Iron Age settlements, square burial mounds and a Roman farm for the first time.
Historic England said the weather “provided the perfect conditions” to see the crop marks because of the lack of moisture in the soil.
They include two Neolithic monuments discovered near Milton Keynes.
The long rectangles near Clifton Reynes are thought to be paths or processional ways dating from 3600 to 3000BC, one of the oldest of their type in the country.
Numerous features in a ceremonial landscape near Eynsham, a few miles north-west of Oxford, date from 4000BC to 700BC.
Monuments to the dead, a settlement and a circle of pits can be seen in crop marks on the field in an area that is already protected.
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