The Vale of Evesham Talking Landscapes

I set out to understand some of the great landscapes of Britain,

to piece together the history that shaped them.

This seems amongst the most modern - the Vale of Evesham.

It's rich land, from hill-top grazing to valley fields of crops,

a landscape of gorgeous villages and farms.

It should echo with history.

But these are some of the hardest worked fields in Britain.

I'm afraid that modern farming has scoured them of their past.

Is it possible that this landscape still has roots that reach back into its history?

I've come to the Vale of Evesham.

It's part of that great swathe of lowlands that goes right up across the country.

For me, this is the absolute heart of England.

It's a landscape of beautiful villages,

still rich in hedgerows, ancient farms.

It looks timeless,

but we know it's been intensively cultivated for centuries.

My question is whether farming has smoothed out the traces of its past,

or whether in this landscape we can still discover clues to the history that shaped it.

For 250 years, agricultural revolutions have cut through these fields.

What could possibly remain of their history?

On my first morning, I called on archaeologist Julian Parsons.

He told me to meet him at the Cheltenham Art Gallery,

where there is a landscape painting completed just before the great agricultural revolution.

It's known as the Dixton Harvesters.

It's a remarkable picture.

It's actually a lovely image of the landscape you're interested in,

that little area of landscape, painted in the early 18th century,

between 1700-1730.

It's a wonderful snapshot of how this landscape would have looked then.

The first thing that strikes you is how many people there are here.

-They're all working away.

-Yeah.

It really is the countryside alive with people working in this large field.

It's the hay harvest.

-This is a countryside full of people.

-It's a lonely occupation now. Where have all the people gone?

The mechanisation of the agricultural revolution meant there wasn't the need for so many people.

There was a depopulation of these areas.

So the landscape, like the communities, was transformed by the agricultural revolution?

You would think so, but if you see this view today, it has many similarities with this painting.

That afternoon, I persuaded Julian to take me there.

The old way of life was gone, the fields turned over by machinery,

but Julian insisted we find the exact spot where the painter stood nearly 300 years before.

Would anything still be the same?

Can you orientate where we are?

-Where would the painter have been?

-He would have been just up the hill,

-looking out in that direction.

-It's becoming a bit recognisable.

-It's familiar even though you haven't been here.

-That's right.

-I'll get out the map.

-This should be about it.

Now...

We need to try and line up with that row here.

-Here it is.

-You can still see it.

Yeah, that newer house sits in the corner there.

On the road there.

And the line-up of the hedges is pretty accurate.

The one in the foreground there, just behind the pylon, is there.

That's the old hedge.

So just where those sheep are, they cut the hay.

The grain of the land,

the line of the hedges, is exactly the same.

Even the new hedges fit into the older pattern.

That's quite extraordinary.

All that revolution, the depopulation,

but the land has held its pattern.

New hedges had appeared in between,

but the outlines of this landscape,

its fields and tracks, had hardly changed since the painter stood here in 1715.

But if this landscape wasn't created around modern agricultural machinery,

what was it created for?

Down in the fields themselves was a clue -

a pattern of long, curving humps and hollows.

Julian said it was ridge and furrow.

Before recent powerful ploughs, there had been much more.

This, he said, is the secret of this landscape.

That evening, we went to Gloucester to see a collection of aerial photos taken 50 years ago,

before the heavy modern ploughing had begun.

We asked archaeologist John Hoyell whether the photos showed any more of the old ridge and furrow,

and if they would reveal the landscape's origins.

This was taken in 1947, just after the Second World War.

That's Dixton Hill over there. They join on.

If you look behind the boundaries, you'll see these very faint lines,

which is the ridge and furrow of the medieval field system.

-These strange curved boundaries follow the lines that were there.

-It seems absolutely everywhere.

It is. In this area, this was the way the land was farmed from the early medieval period.

And here appears to be a modern road,

which is also curving around the edge of a field, parallel to the lines.

This illustrates the sequence quite neatly.

This modern road is following the course of the farm track,

which followed the course of the ridge and furrow.

The amazing thing is how extensive this is. It's everywhere.

Everywhere is ridge and furrow.

What the old aerial photographs tell us

is that the fields in these valleys weren't shaped by modern farming.

They are laid out on a pattern of gently curving ridge and furrow,

a medieval farming system dating back long before the agricultural revolution.

What is this ridge and furrow and how was it made?

I want to try an experiment

to discover how this medieval ridge and furrow pattern, with its lovely sweeping curves, was made.

Charles Martell is a farmer here who has an interest in medieval agriculture,

and he has a Gloucester long plough, which is the sort they used.

I've asked him to plough a strip the way they would have done it.

We've got something that looks like ridge and furrow up here.

How are we going to work this?

We go up this side and it'll throw the soil that way.

If you notice, this plough has got a very abrupt mouldboard and it tends to push the soil sideways.

It has a major impact on the landscape, ultimately,

by tipping the soil this way and that.

It pushes it to the middle, so you're going to get a build-up.

-The aim was to bunch up the soil in the middle and have drainage down the side.

-Yes.

-Rather different from the modern concept.

-Which is a big flat field.

But it's interesting, the idea of piling the soil up.

It's like nicking your neighbour's soil and keeping it in the middle.

You get the advantage of the drainage as well. That's how you get the waves in the landscape.

Each wave is someone's piece of ground.

Come on.

< We're all novices - horses, ploughgirl and the plough.

It looks as though the ridge and furrow began because medieval fields were divided into strips,

each farmed by an individual farmer.

And as each one worked with his medieval plough,

it piled the soil up into a ridge.

But could our experiment show why the ridges and furrows were never straight?

I noticed most had an S shape.

Watching them turn gave me an idea.

We're beginning to get this S-shape form, which must originally have related to the turning circle.

It seems to be that was the case.

You have the distance between the horses, the horses themselves, this plough's 15 feet long,

so if you come up straight to a hedge, there's a big area unploughed.

-So you veer off at an angle so that you're left with an S-shaped furrow.

-Right.

I felt I was getting close to the hidden blueprint of this landscape.

All we needed now was a dozen generations to finish the job.

-It seems to me you've got your hand in.

-I'm puffing like a steam train.

That's terrific.

That one furrow - there's really a mass of soil pushed into the centre. It's terrific.

-We have the beginnings of a ridge there with just a few turns.

-Yes.

And they'd be doing it year over year over year,

going over the same lines.

But medieval ploughmen worked with oxen, not horses.

Charles was putting together his own team.

He reckoned there were more clues here to the way this landscape was laid out.

Oh, these are wonderful creatures!

Now, oxen came before the great working horses, did they?

They've been with us about 3,000 years.

They're just marvellous!

-Right, old boy.

-You've got a yoke pair here now.

But in practice, you can have up to eight oxen.

The plough was handled by the ox man, or ploughman,

and his boy would drive the oxen with a very long stick.

I have one here.

-A rod pole or perch. You learnt at school...

-I remember that.

-I bet you don't remember the length.

-No.

-It's 5½ yards.

And it's just the right length for tapping them to keep them going.

You lay this on the ground four times and you get 22 yards.

-That's a cricket pitch.

-That's right. One chain.

That's that way. If you lay it 40 times that way, you get a furlong,

or furrow long, which is where the word furlong comes from.

So that 22 by 220 yards is one acre, which is the amount an eight-ox team would plough in a day.

It all goes back to this 5½ yards.

So this fundamental unit of area depends on the length of an ox?

That's a natural unit in the English landscape.

Modern machines may have ploughed out most of the ridge and furrow,

but the length and breadth of the fields and their curving shapes

still belong to the world of the medieval ploughmen, his oxen and his stick.

The secret of this landscape

is that it's been moulded and measured by the work of medieval farmers over centuries.

One can't help wondering when it all started.

As you stand here on Bredon Hill,

it's striking how the hedgerow patterns that mark out the fields run down the slopes

down towards the river, and then at right angles this way.

And then there are the villages.

There's Bredon and Kemerton and Overbury, very regularly arranged at the foot of the slopes.

Did all this happen just by chance?

Or was there some very old plan to it?

Amazingly, there's a document which describes these fields at Bredon

in the year 984.

Was it possible the present layout could date back that far?

I asked historian Michael Wood, who's a specialist on Anglo-Saxon England.

And we set out to see if we could still find any of the features recorded by the surveyors

as they marked out their land over 1,000 years ago.

The surveyors must have...

They're drawing a line from the Cheltenham Way to that hill.

That "Way" that's referred to, that must be the Cheltenham Road.

Yes, it's an Anglo-Saxon road!

So we can mark that down here.

And it's coming into Lower Farm here.

"And long Hlydan..." Hlydan's the name of a little stream that comes down this way.

-There could be a ditch here.

-Let's have a look.

This document, in basic terms, is a mortgage.

It's a land document from 984.

And the surveyors who drew up the boundary clause, saying, "These are the bounds of your property,"

would have walked along this muddy track.

It's an Anglo-Saxon track, difficult as that is to believe!

That's the track.

There's a ditch here.

-There you go.

-Well, that's a decent stream.

-That's a decent stream.

It's not stagnant water. This is the Hlydan. This must be the track the surveyors walked on 1,000 years ago.

-This was an important boundary...

-..Between two estates.

Big fields on either side. This is the divide.

And it runs on - "..Of faern hylle on fa dic at crawan forne of faerne dic on caerent....'

So somewhere down here we should reach the River Carrant.

Just look at this. That wiggly line must be the line of the river.

On the map, this wiggling hedge is the ancient boundary.

What's really great about it is that you can say that this boundary was created in the 10th century.

Anglo-Saxon kings reorganised the Midlands landscape.

-They're setting out definite boundaries.

-Creating shires -

Worcestershire, Gloucestershire are being laid out at this time.

What was the date of this reorganisation?

The end of the 800s, the early 900s.

They're fighting the Viking wars, reorganising the towns and the country to provide food for the army.

They're laying out main boundaries and the field boundaries within it?

You have this perfect pattern, Overbury, Kemerton, Bredon, the estates run to Bredon Hill.

You get a share of the different kinds of land. You have this wonderful land here for the ploughs.

-You have meadow land, woods. Each community...

-Has a bit of each.

-Has a bit of each.

A complete reorganisation of this landscape.

They created our world. We speak their language. We use their terms for the trees, flowers and fields.

It's really their creation.

The pattern of villages and fields dates back to a reorganisation of the landscape

by Anglo-Saxon kings as they fought back the Vikings.

They reordered the countryside into viable estates and gathered the farmers into villages

so they could work their fields collectively. It was an Anglo-Saxon agricultural revolution.

It is astonishing to think that the basic layout of the fields and most of the villages

dates back to those enormous changes brought about by the Anglo-Saxons.

This landscape is 1,000 years old.

But is that the end of the story?

Has nothing that went before left any traces?

I feel as if I want to look below the landscape, to look beneath the surface, X-ray it.

And the best way to see beneath the surface is to get above it.

From 1,000 feet, you can detect faint patterns left by vanished trackways, ditches or walls.

I took off with Jim Pickering. He was once a Spitfire pilot.

But for 50 years, he's been flying these valleys, hunting lost landscapes.

I think we're coming up to Bredon Hill now. Two ranges of ditches.

-That's right.

-An inner and outer. What age is that?

-It's Iron Age.

The inside one was probably used in Roman times.

I see.

The whole of the Avon Valley, which you can see here,

there's archaeological sites in virtually every field.

Although the...

last phase that is recognisable is the Roman one,

there is Iron Age and Bronze Age evidence underneath it.

Have you been able to pick out ancient field boundaries?

Here's one here. You can see it's a land division.

-I see it.

-It runs down there.

How do you tell a modern boundary from an old boundary?

They're usually out of phase with the hedges and fields of today.

It means the landscape has changed. It's evidence of an earlier landscape organised on different lines.

There's a possible Roman fort underneath.

It's a soil mark.

-There it is - on the right, in that field.

-I see it.

And that will just be patterns of wet and dry on the soil?

That's right. There's even some internal features as well.

Yes, I can see. That's right.

At least one dividing wall.

-That could be a find.

-You haven't seen that before?

-No.

-Splendid.

Even I could see that the Roman fort sat at diagonals to the fields.

Now I knew what Jim meant by older patterns "out of phase" with the modern landscapes.

But did anything of these ancient patterns survive ABOVE ground?

What about roads like that Cheltenham Road mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon charter?

I could see that it cut a diagonal clean at odds with the Anglo-Saxon fields in Bredon.

I decided to investigate.

Could the Cheltenham Road be a survivor from an earlier landscape?

There's a way to find out, because Jim Pickering and his aviators

discovered masses of archaeological sites alongside this road.

And at Kemerton, archaeologists have been investigating them for a generation.

So maybe they can tell us whether they've discovered traces of an earlier landscape showing through,

and perhaps they include this road.

At Kemerton, on Bredon Hill, I found archaeologist Robin Jackson starting work on a new site.

We were right in those Anglo-Saxon fields that Cheltenham Road cuts so sharply through.

Up here we have Bredon Hill and this is the bottom half of the parish.

The boundaries are here and the Carrant is running at the bottom.

-So Kemerton parish runs from top to bottom?

-That's right.

My interest is in the prehistoric landscape.

-Is that right?

-That's right.

And if you look at these streams, they're following roughly the Saxon boundaries.

But these are the marks of prehistoric field systems.

Where we have pairs of them, they're probably droveways.

-The ancient landscape is running counter in its grain to the Anglo-Saxon...

-Yeah.

It's an incredibly ancient pattern hiding behind our modern fields.

-Is there anything left of this ancient landscape?

-At first you think there won't be,

but when you start to overlay these maps, there are intriguing lines.

We're in the corner of this field. The path runs diagonally across the field.

-It's in totally the wrong direction.

-So there are traces still.

And perhaps most interestingly of all is the Cheltenham Road.

It's actually on that alignment.

This, we know, is a saltway. They moved it from Droitwich, where they produced salt in prehistoric times.

From one of our excavations we've had Droitwich salt containers to show that they're moving it down the road.

So it's an ancient pattern hiding behind our modern system.

But Cheltenham Road is a survivor,

one of a sturdy band observing an ancient, perhaps Iron Age alignment,

obliterated by the Anglo-Saxons.

So how far back do the roots of this landscape go?

Results were coming in from field walkers on Robin's new site.

They were systematically scouring the field for ancient objects brought to the surface.

The field walkers are bringing in their stuff in the form of flint.

We have one piece which may have been used, which is this fine blade.

If I was to put a date on it, I'd say it was Neolithic.

That has a sharp cutting edge.

How long ago is Neolithic?

We're talking about 3,500-4,000 BC.

So 5-6,000 years.

On my last afternoon,

I was faced with the thought that people had been living here for 6,000 years or more.

But when did they first leave any lasting mark on the landscape?

Liz Pearson is a soil specialist.

She was working down at the Carrant Brook we'd found in the Anglo-Saxon charter,

looking for organic remains and alluvium - old river silt - now buried deep underground.

They date back thousands of years BC. But did they reveal anything changing in the landscape then?

It's nice and stiff.

So even if we don't get any organics, you have a nice alluvia sequence.

What can you tell from the alluvia sequence?

Well, you can get a lot of information on what's been going on in the environment around -

the ploughing, the woodland clearances. It's exposing the soil to the rain.

It's bringing all this silt down into the valleys.

Then you get boggy areas appearing.

What date would you think the forest clearance began?

The main big clearance in this area is the early Bronze Age.

We know that it was already cleared by 2,500 BC.

So what do you think this landscape would have looked like then?

What would we have seen?

It would have been as open as it is here today.

By that time, they had cleared most of the original wild wood.

So you have evidence that from 4,500 years ago, human beings have been changing this landscape?

-Yes.

-In a big way.

-In a very big way.

4,500 years ago, during the Bronze Age,

the felling of trees and the start of ploughing sent soil streaming down the slopes.

It eroded the hills and raised the level of the valley floor.

It was a landscape revolution as profound as that of the Anglo-Saxons'

or our agricultural revolution thousands of years later.

Before I left, I climbed up Bredon Hill to the Iron Age hill fort I'd seen from the plane.

I remembered wondering if modern farming had ploughed away every trace of history in the fields.

It was amazing to discover that this landscape is still shaped by agricultural revolutions

that stretch over 50 centuries,

and that the fields and villages were first set out perhaps to supply the men who fought the Vikings

1,000 years ago.

A week ago, I was standing on the steep slope of the Cotswolds there,

looking out across this wonderful 20th-century landscape, which I now see through different eyes,

because I realise this is in fact an Anglo-Saxon landscape.

The pattern of the land was set 1,000 years ago, when the villages were formed.

There are hedgerows running down this hill which are 1,000 years old.

There are tracks and roadways of Roman and pre-Roman times.

And even before that, people began clearing the trees, altering the land.

The making of this landscape began 5,000 years ago.

Subtitles by Graeme Dibble BBC Scotland - 2001

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